The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible
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Achieving Results: Seven Insights
Insight 1: Establish an outcome goal but then let it go because it isn’t in your athlete’s immediate control. What is? The process. The plan is everything.
The process starts and ends with the constant development of character. Daily focus on character building will shape your child’s life – on and off the playing fields. Character building develops your athlete’s inner voice through optimistic self-coaching. One of the most important jobs of a parent is to focus on character building through life skills.
Insight 2: Assist your athlete in developing calm, positive, proactive “self-talk.” This inner belief in themselves is the basis of the exact mental toughness they need at crunch time.
Your athlete’s inner voice is nurtured to either build them up to think clearly under duress or to tear them down and hinder their efforts at the most inopportune times. Often when things go south in competition, junior athletes allow their mind to drift away from the present process at hand (performance goals) and into past or future thoughts (outcome oriented thoughts). This is commonly followed by negative inner-chatter. Character building provides the optimistic scripts used to turn a possible disaster into another win.
Insight 3: Character building starts with the parents and coaches leading the way by letting go of the outcome results and reinforcing the process. How can we expect an adolescent to be performance oriented when their “guiding lights” are obsessed with only winning?
Great parents and coached educate the process of maintained discipline through chaos. Think about the last time your athlete was in competition. Remember feeling stressed for your athlete? Why? What were your thoughts that caused your pressure and anxiety? Was it past, present or future scenarios? Most likely the actual stress was caused by the long list of “What if’s?” What if they lose to this toad … What if they beat this top seed? What will they’re ranking move to? What will the coaches say? Will they get a Nike deal?
Insight 4: Focus on controlling the controllables versus focusing on the uncontrollables. In the competitive moment, is your athlete able to change past issues or forecast future issues? No, during competition, your athlete is only able to control the controllable – which is the present task at hand.
Parental focus should be on the effort and let go of results. Excellent physical, mental and emotional effort for the duration should be the entourage’s mission.
“Remember, there is a significant difference between excellence and perfection. Excellent effort is controllable. Perfection is a lie.”
Insight 5: Seek to educate your children to strive for excellence not perfection. The effort is in the process which will obtain winning results -not perfect results.
Your child’s success begins with preparing their character for the process of improvement. Only by achieving continuous improvement will your athlete be prepared when opportunity knocks. Unfortunately, many juniors get great opportunities but fail to capitalize, not because their lucky shorts were in the wash, but because they simply weren’t prepared.
Insight 6: Ask your athlete to complete a daily focus journal to assist them in self-coaching. Which of their components are weakest? Why? What would they suggest they could do differently to improve this weaknesses? The process of improvement needs a plan.
What drives your athlete to actually document their successes in their daily focus journal? What motivates them to wake up and put in the hard work? The answer is their moral compass, also known as their character. It’s their honest relationship and dialog with themselves that allows them to achieve their goals.
Insight 7: Character skills are life skills that parents can focus on daily. They include personal performance enhancers such as effort, dedication, time management, perseverance, resilience and optimism. They also include personal ethics such as honesty, appreciation, loyalty, trustworthiness, kindness, unselfishness and respect. Parental coaching starts here.
Let’s review. The formula for parents to assist in skyrocketing their athlete’s chances of achieving championship results is to begin with the character skills needed to implement their deliberate, customized developmental plan. An organized plan will be the foundation of the athletes accelerated growth. This is how you maximize your child’s potential as the quickest rate.
