Bold Mindset Mission
Parent & Coach Edition
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. The goal of these posts is to increase confidence and skill-sets in both parents and coaches. I believe that the best ways we can help our athletes is by educating ourselves. You can learn more about me and my education HERE
Bold Mindset Mission: Parent & Coach Edition
Please note that these posts are addressed to both Parent and Coaches of athletes. However, each post aims to increase confidence in all three members of the athlete triangle (Athlete, Parent & Coach), through the following three steps. . .
Encourage self-awareness and personal reflection (without judgement of self or others).
Explore alternative ways of thinking, feeling and doing in order to shift non-serving habits.
Offer tools that empower athletes to do the above two steps.
There are three things that will most definitely thwart the above goals. You can find them HERE
(1) Self-awareness without judgment.
Take a minute to explore some of the things your brain may compare on the regular. Really get curious. Remember we’re doing important work in this post . . . identifying if our comparison thoughts are fueling clean motivation or are they generating more of what we DON’T want? And in learning how to do this as parents and coaches, we gain tools to teach our athletes how to do the same. And to be most effective, we can’t rush the process. We must start with step 1 . . . self awareness.
Remember, the point is inventory NOT judgement. In fact judging your thoughts will make them less-available to you. We ALL have comparison thoughts and the goal in step one is to determine, ‘What comparison thoughts is MY brain is offering me?’. We’ll find out how our individual thoughts are effecting us in Step 2. Right now, awareness only.
You can learn more about self-awareness without judgment here.
(2) Explore alternative ways of thinking, feeling and doing in order to shift non-serving habits.
Learn the equation I find most helpful for this step HERE. This is where the answers to our above questions are offered. It may be lengthy, but I challenge you to commit to the next few paragraphs. I promise it will be worth it.
Let’s jump in by identifying a few components that are part of the comparison equation.
First, circumstances. CIRCUMSTANCES are things that exist outside of us. They are the bare-bone facts of a situation. The skill-level our athlete competes is a circumstance. Whether she fell off the beam or stayed on the beam between her mount and dismount is also a circumstance. The score flashed on the scoreboard? Circumstance. What your child’s teammate scored or an athlete from another team placed are both circumstances. We’ll discuss the power in identifying circumstances later on, but first one final truth about circumstances and perhaps the most important one . . . they are neutral (stay with me on this).
All circumstances are inherently neutral until we have a thought about that circumstance. It is our THOUGHT about what is happening that makes an event or situation have meaning. Rain can bring about two totally different emotions based on the thoughts one is having about the rain. If this concept is new to your brain, it may reject it. That’s okay. Put it on a shelf to ponder and explore later.
If your brain already accepts the notion that circumstances are neutral, it’s important to remember that just because circumstances are neutral, doesn’t mean we want to MAINTAIN neutrality about everything happening around us. That would be a very robotic, non-human way to experience life.
In fact, the ability to think and feel are our human-super power. The point is to be INTENTIONAL with what you believe and determine if your thoughts are driving you to show up as your best or desired self.
So the next component in our equation, following circumstances, is THOUGHT. Thoughts are how the sentences in our brain in response to our circumstances. In this post, the thoughts we are examining our those thoughts in which we compare. Thoughts about two or more circumstances in our life and our perceived relationship between the two. You’re ready for the most important fact about thoughts? They’re optional! Just because our brain offers us a thought, doesn’t make it true and doesn’t mean we have to keep it.
This is great news, because it empowers us to shift and change our thoughts in order to generate more serving emotions; the next component in our equation. Emotions, I’ll call them FEELINGS, are vibrations in our body; A chemical response to our THOUGHTS. You read that right. Our thoughts (the ones that we believe) determine how we feel. This less-known fact clarifies two important things: It is NOT the things that we are comparing that determine if we feel motivated or defeated. Rather it is the way we THINK about those things that determine how we feel. Sit with that.
So if thoughts
