Supporting The Return To Sport

We often find ourselves yearning and pleading for behavior change and adaptation from the people we care about and love. Yet when we or they are faced with challenges or situations difficult to overcome, it can be hard to know how to correctly support them. Coaches and parents of athletes know first-hand some of the steps needed to increase resilience and perseverance—yet their words often fall on deaf ears. In fact, pushing too hard can decrease athletes' joy for sport and lead to burnout. 
 
However, when someone else comes along and shares the same advice, using the same words, it can be dumbfounding to observe such messages being heard in completely different ways—and ultimately toward necessary behavior change to work through the adversities. 
 
We want to challenge them. We want them to achieve their dreams. Yet, the path is unique and challenging for everyone in their own way, especially amid a pandemic!
 
We are faced with difficult situations every day. There is no one right formula to work through them. One person's difficult situation is influenced by the perception that person brings to it and the experience level that shapes that person's internal narrative. Everyone in a support network shares lessons and insights learned through experiences which help frame their internal narratives. The beauty of experiences and narratives is that they're shaped by the climates and environments around them—and then they can be transformed into motivation. Coaches and parents can promote a higher quality motivational climate by following four guidelines as part of their interactions with the athletes they support:
 
#1 Take a person first, athlete second approach

• The balance here is about meeting people where they are in their development related to the situations, tasks, and skills they're encountering. Trying to impose your experiences on theirs with an exact formulaic approach doesn't always work. Also, identity balance in the education of core values and morals—regardless of sport participation—is a life lesson everyone can take with them into anything they decide they want to do. The people we help develop are more important than the championships. The reality is that one day all highly competitive sport ends—but we take with us the people we've become and the lessons we've learned.

#2 Practice empathy as they struggle

• Through empathic understanding, we challenge our own assumptions and seek to understand what others are going through—even if they are our own children. At the Greater Good Science center at UC Berkeley, empathy is described as stepping into the shoes of others, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives. Then you use that understanding to guide your actions. The best way to practice empathy is through active listening skills and asking quality,  open-ended questions without applying judgment. Often the best listeners are mindfully present with others and wait to impart their ideas until they've understood what others are experiencing.

#3 Find a supportive tone and way of communicating

• Tone of voice communicates emotion. It happens all the time when coaches or parents become frustrated: their vocal tone elicits a defensive, threatened reaction in the athletes. And there's no way they hear you now. It's more likely that they're in a fight, flight, or freeze state of mind. So instead try to share curious observations with phrases such as, "It looks like…" or "It sounds like…" or "It seems like…" These sentence stems will help you check to see if the behavior they're demonstrating aligns with what they're intending. Again, the tone should be one of curiosity and exploration of what you observe rather than an interrogation.

#4 Help set realistic expectations and understand the process for returning to athletic form

• Finally, we need to remind ourselves that all those who put themselves through physical and mental training that creates discomfort will be their own biggest critics. With progress comes greater expectations of what you should and shouldn't be able to do. Therefore, when returning to sport, it's expected that form and conditioning will limit what we can do as athletes comparted to what we could previously do amid  the flow of normally structured training and competition. Setting a plan using realistic expectations guided by a process to improve current baselines is the right way to go. For your support, you can help set simple, process-oriented goals that produce small gains on a daily or weekly basis. Asking about the process helps with accountability and potentially expands the understanding of how they can improve as well. The path to mastering anything is long and arduous—often without noticeable progress—but through the right support, we can all persevere.

 
 
Brian Alexander is a certified mental performance consultant through AASP and the mental skills coach for ODP and the Men's Senior National Team. His mental training mobile app WellU Mental Training is an engaging mental training platform that helps athletes develop peak performance. 
 
Contact Brian through his website: www.athletementalskillscoach.com
Download the WellU Mental Training app and listen to the podcast: www.wellumentaltraining.com