#254 – Does Your Teen Athlete Struggle Under Pressure? Try This.

In this episode, I talk about how to help your teen athlete perform at their best under pressure.

Reach out to me! brennen@behighperforming.com

Transcript

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Hey everyone, welcome to episode 254 of Mental Mastery for Teen Athletes, a Parents Guide. Today I want to talk to you all about a really common trap that teen athletes fall into when it comes to managing pregame anxiety or nerves, and that parents often fall into as well when trying to support their teen athletes in that time or their teen athletes in that time. So so often when teenage athletes are going into competition time and they feel that pressure rising, that this is when it counts, this isn't just practice, this is, you know, things are on the line right now. They immediately start to go into telling themselves to relax or to calm down. Or even if they're not consciously telling themselves that, they're actively trying to relax and to calm down. Or maybe you, as the parent, tell them, you know, calm down, take a deep breath, things like that. And those things are fine. It's not like that's a bad thing to do, but the vast majority of the time, that approach tends to be more counterproductive than productive. And your athlete, I'm sure, can relate with that so often when athletes try to just calm themselves down and focus on getting rid of that nervous energy, it just kind of makes them feel more and more nervous. It makes them kind of demonize that energy, which makes them feel nervous about feeling nervous, and then it fuels itself. On the flip side, instead of just trying to calm themselves down, what the research and the real world application shows over and over again, and what I've seen with myself and with so many teen athletes that I've worked with to work so much better is instead of trying to calm down, just honing in. So instead of trying to bring the body down into a lower state of energy, what if you use that energy that's fueling your body and is there to fuel high performance and you just channel it in a productive direction? How do you do that? Well, I think a great way to do it, and that I've seen work so many times, is first telling yourself this is high performance energy. So just stop seeing it as a bad thing, stop seeing it as, oh, if I'm nervous, that means I'm not going to play well. No, recognize that in your energy, that heart beating, the hands tingling, the sweating, any of those symptoms, and tell yourself this is high performance energy. So you as the parent, you can say with your athlete, hey, remember, this is high performance energy. And then what I would advise is to think about what they're excited to do. So ask your athlete, what are you excited to do out there today? And then they're honing that energy on productive action, on what they're actually going to use that energy for. And then when they go into the competition, they can use that energy to go from imagining what they were excited to do to now doing what they were excited to do. So it's just funneling that energy in a productive direction. And one of the best ways is through excitement. Thank you so much for listening today. I truly appreciate it. Give a shot at this with your athlete and just see how it goes. And let me know at Brennan at Behighperforming.com, either how it goes, or if you have any questions or face any challenges along the way, I'd love to know. So thanks again. Let's be high performing today.