#252 – Use These Questions to Learn How to Best Support Your Teen Athlete

In this episode, I share 3 questions you can ask your teen athlete to learn how to best support them in their sport journey.

Let's Be High-Performing!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome to Mental Mastery for Teen Athletes, a Parents Guide. This is the new name of the podcast. It's so far, it's been called the Be High Performing Podcast. And this is still a Be High Performing Podcast. It's under my umbrella. And I plan to likely create other podcasts that are aiming toward other niches, but I decided to kind of niche down this specific podcast to uh mental mastery for teen athletes and talking to parents, helping you as parents to understand how to support your athletes in building mental mastery. I know it's it's something that so many parents feel stuck in. Your athlete is struggling with confidence, they're facing self-doubt, they're not handling performance anxiety well, they beat themselves up when they make mistakes, they get discouraged and they spiral, they do well in practice and then they struggle to actually perform when it counts. And so now in this podcast, I'm going to be talking to you and helping you to overcome those challenges and help your athlete to truly build mental resilience, mental mastery, and unlock new levels of their potential. So, with that in mind, let's hop into today's topic. Today, I want to give you three questions that you can ask your athlete that will help you to understand how to best support them in their sport journey. Um, so often, parents just don't know what to do to support their athlete. They feel lost, they feel confused. Every athlete is different, and so this can be such a puzzle. And so these questions can be applied to every athlete to help you figure out kind of how to customize your support for your specific athlete. So, with that in mind, number one is just to get to know what their goals are, what they're wanting to get out of their sport. So the question is, what are the main reasons why you play your sport? What are you hoping to get out of it? And what are you hoping to achieve? Start there because so often, as parents, you know, sometimes you just don't know what uh why your athlete is playing their sport. You don't know if they're just doing it because they've been doing it for a while, or if they've they're doing it just because it's fun, they enjoy it, or because their friends are doing it, or maybe they're wanting to actually pursue things with it. Maybe they're really hoping to go play in college or play D1 in college or go pro, have a pro career. You know, we have to start with understanding what their goals are so that we know how to best support them toward their goals. We can't support them effectively without knowing, well, what are they even trying to get out of this in the first place? What are they aiming for? So start there. And also, if they give you kind of really surface level answers at first, try to dig a little bit more. Ask them why questions. Oh, cool. What why is that important to you? Why do you want that? Just so that both you and they can start to better understand them and their desires and their wants and the reasons behind them. Because the more understanding that we have, the more effective support we can give, and the more effectively they can pursue their goals. Okay, question number two is what would ideal support from me look like to you? And what would it not look like? This is a really important question because again, so often parents just kind of start doing things to try to support their athlete. They give them a bunch of advice after games or before games, or maybe they kind of try to just coddle them and pad their egos, and they they just don't know, you know, what their athlete wants, what their athlete needs. Um, coddling them and padding padding their egos in uh unrealistic ways is is never a great approach to go, I would say. But we have to start with, you know, how does your athlete want to be supported? Because often, you know, some athletes want their coach to be the coach, and they just want their parent just to be there and and cheer and and support as a parent, but not as a coach. And other athletes want their parents to coach them and they they want that feedback, they want that performance feedback. Uh, some athletes want their parents to cheer at them on loud in the games, some want their parents to be quiet because it's kind of distracting when their parents go super loud and crazy in games. Whatever. There's all sorts of things that your athlete might reveal to you just by asking those simple questions. Okay. And then number three is what has been helpful and what has not been helpful in the ways that I've been trying to support you so far. This is such a good one because you've probably already been doing, as I said, plenty of things so far to try to support them. And you don't know exactly how those things affect your athlete, whether they're helpful, unhelpful, whether they could be better, whatever, until your athlete tells you. And so often we don't have those conversations. So if you can understand how the ways that you've been trying to support them affect them, you'll be so much more equipped to now gear your support in more effective ways toward them. And they will appreciate that so much. Just by asking them these questions, I promise you, it will mean so much to them. They will feel so supported just by you asking how you can effectively support them. Because they will see that not only do you want to support them, which is already amazing, but you're trying to figure out how they, as a unique individual, need your support. So, anyway, I give you these questions, ask your athlete this week. Just give it a shot and see how it goes. I'm excited to hear how it goes. So, by the way, shoot me an email at Brennan at behighperforming.com to tell me how it goes or to ask me any questions about this. Um, just anything that you have. I'm here for you. Thank you so much. I'm excited to hear how it goes. Let's be high performing today.