#253 – This Performance Evaluation Tool Will Boost Your Teen Athlete's Confidence & Accelerate Their Improvement

In this episode, I share a game-changing performance evaluation tool that will boost your teen athlete's confidence and accelerate their improvement.

Let's Be High-Performing! 💪

Transcript

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Hey everyone, welcome to episode 253 of Mental Mastery for Teen Athletes: A Parents Guide, formerly called the Be High Performing Podcast. This is a Be High Performing Podcast, but we're niching down, focusing on you parents of teen athletes. Today, I want to give you a tool that your athlete can use to more effectively review their performance and reflect on their performance in ways that actually help them to learn more effectively and grow more effectively while at the same time building their confidence instead of tearing themselves down. So many athletes, so many athletes fall into the trap of minimizing the things that they're doing well or just completely overlooking them. The brain kind of likes to filter those things out because the brain likes to help us survive, right? But it's not necessarily designed to help us thrive. So if it's trying to help us survive, it needs to identify the areas where we're falling short, where we're not getting to our goals, which, you know, maybe back in caveman days was getting food, getting shelter, right? And it needs to tell us what's going wrong so that we can fix that and survive, right? It's it's the same in the brain today and in sports. Our brains are so good at picking apart everything that we've done wrong, everywhere that we've fallen short. And it doesn't really pay a ton of natural attention to what's going well. And the science, the research shows over and over and over again when that natural tendency is allowed to just take its course, confidence plummets and learning and improvement are actually hindered. And here's why. One is that if we don't recognize what we're doing well, then we can't trust our ability to do things well. And that's what confidence is. It's trusting in our abilities. And then two, the reason that it hinders our improvement is because if we're just focusing on tons of things that we need to improve, and we're trying to focus on all of them all at the same time, and we're always flooding our brains with this, that, and the other thing that's not right and that we need to fix, our brain isn't able to give effective attention to each thing. So when we try to improve everything at once, we end up improving nothing at all, usually, or very, very little. And another side to that too is that it just creates discouragement. If you're just seeing mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake and not seeing those positives, not seeing what's going well, you lose motivation because you feel like there's just nothing I can do right. So then you don't try as hard and you don't improve as effectively. Okay, so with that in mind, I want to give you a tool today that you can share with your athlete to help them evaluate their performance so much more effectively so that they can build strong, stable confidence and learn and grow way faster, way more effectively than they have been so far. This is called the three to one ratio exercise. It's very simple, but it's important and it's powerful. All they have to do is after each practice, after each competition, identify specifically three, sorry, I should say at least three things that they did well. Specific things that they did well and not necessarily outcomes. It's critically important to identify actions, skills that they executed effectively. And instead of just kind of generally saying, I took good shots or I made good passes, that's not effective data for the brain. The brain needs that specificity. So identify a specific shot that you executed effectively and talk through or write out what you did, what made that shot effective, right? So, what did the skill look like in application? The reason that I say talk it out or write it down is because there are various options for applying this exercise. I think a great one is for them to do it out loud with you as their parent on, you know, the drive home. Just do it, or while you're eating dinner, they can say it to you, but they can also say it to themselves, or they can do it as a personal written out exercise. That one's nice too because you can always go back and look at the things you wrote down before. Okay, so that's number one. And again, at least three things that you did well is critical here. You can go as high as you want, you can point out as many things as you did well as you want to, as long as you at least get three, but you cannot go below that number. And I promise you, no matter how rough of a game it was, even if you only got 30 seconds of playing time, even if you didn't get put in at all, you could still find things that you did well to be a good teammate, to cheer your teammates on. Whatever. You can always find things that you did well. I learned this in high school water polo when I was struggling so hard my junior season and playing so terribly, I was in a terrible mental space. But as I started to learn mental skills and sports psychology in a sports psychology program, I learned that no matter, no matter how bad I think a game was, no matter how bad I think a practice was, even if I was in for 30 seconds and made a horrible pass or whatever, I can always find three real things that I did well. Maybe it was just that in one play that we were running, I swam to the correct position in that play. Maybe it was on defense, I had one block before then my offensive play where I made that weird pass. But I got that block on defense. That was awesome. Whatever it is, the small things. So make sure, no matter what, get three. And then the one part of the three to one ratio is one adjustment that you will make next time. What's one small change, one small improvement that you will make next time? So that could be correcting a mistake, or that could be taking something you did pretty well and making it even better. But the way to say this or to write it down is next time I will. Because it's not about saying, oh, I did bad at blank or I slipped up in blank. It's not just identifying a shortcoming, it's translating into action language. So next time I will keep my eye on the basket. Next time I will make contact with the ball with my laces. Next time I will do a fake before I actually take the shot. Whatever it is. But next time I will so that it puts you in action mode. This builds confidence big time because even though you made a mistake or didn't do something perfectly, you have a solution in your mind for an adjustment you're going to take that's within your control for next time. Thank you so much for listening today. Invite your athlete to try this out with you. It'll be so cool. It'll bring you together and help your athlete build that confidence. So let me know how it goes as they try this, as you try this with them. And thank you so much. Let's be high performing today.