Although the closing ceremonies for the Winter Olympics are behind us, the 2018 Winter Paralympics are still underway as we share our third and last story in this series about Coaching for Confidence. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as we did putting them together for you. Warm Regards, The Coaching Lens Coaches
Most athletes will tell you that at some point in their lives, they’ve felt a crippling fear of failure entwined with dwindling self-confidence. When it happens, whether you’re an athlete or an individual coping with everyday life, it can mess with perspective until goals disappear from view and performance no longer seems achievable. As parents and coaches we often ask, what should we do to help someone in that situation to regain perspective and re-establish their goals?
There is no guaranteed formula that will work for every situation. As coaches, we can only offer some thoughts and personal stories we have been told that we hope will resonate. One such story is that of Veronica, whose parents found two different ways to help her widen her perspective and ultimately to reach her potential.
Veronica recalls that high school exams would send her anxiety levels spiralling into the stratosphere. Although an A student, she admits she was a driven perfectionist and her anxiety kept her from eating, sleeping and living a normal life for months at a time. Her father, who never spoke of his troubling WW2 experiences with anyone else, sat with her at night sharing true wartime life-and-death stories, trying to help her develop perspective. He let her know that she was not alone in her experience by sharing how he had faced and overcome his own paralyzing fear. Then he would step her through the possible outcomes of the next exam: “What really happens if you get a 50%? 60%? 70%? 80%? 90%? 99.9%?” Today, Veronica still practices the technique of stepping from worst to best outcomes, to build her confidence in times of stress, and she treasures the memory of her father sharing those wartime experiences with her.
Her mother penned her thoughts in a letter, stressing that she knew Veronica was smart and caring and could achieve anything she set her mind to. At the same time, she reached out to the part of her daughter that could never hurt anyone, and asked her to think about the negative impact her anxiety was having on the family. Veronica kept that letter under her pillow throughout university, re-reading it whenever stress and anxiety threatened to spiral her confidence downward.
As coaches, we believe that perspective is one of the keys to confidence which in turn inspires performance. Parents are in a unique position to help their children develop perspective because they can share a genuine part of themselves, something about their own struggles to gain perspective. Combine that with unshakeable belief in your child’s core values, and you have powerful tools with which to help your child develop that confidence to succeed.
