A few months back, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Lafavor of 712 Baseball as a part of his podcast series and talk about youth athletics, yoga and mindfulness, and mental performance in sports. We talked about the good, bad, and ugly of youth sports in America today and the making and unmaking of American boys. I’m still reflecting on it all these months now later—about being a parent, being a coach, about what we do at Lumin Therapy, and more broadly, about how I show up and connect with the young people in my life and the world. The questions were about sports. But like I’ve learned from Ted Lasso, “sports is life” (paraphrasing here).
He asked how we can help our kids perform at a higher level when the pressure is ratcheted up the most. About over-thinking in the moment, and at the same time, about not preparing enough mentally through practice making perfect. About how, instead, we play in tournaments and then wonder why our kids don’t perform, and then we yell and holler at the moments when they need us the most. It makes me ask myself, How do I show up for kids when they are struggling, scared, and nervous? When I watch the movie of my life, I don’t like all the scenes. The film doesn’t lie. I’m the coaching lovechild of Bobby Knight throwing a chair, Billy Martin kicking dirt, and Gene Hackman giving a pep talk from Hoosiers. Coaching, like parenting, can reveal all. It shows your strengths, weaknesses; it can force some hard looks in the mirror to really see what leads to better results: negative or positive reinforcement, love or fear, tearing down or building up?
What we know for certain is that there is power in thinking, that when we can feel it we can find it, and that by visualizing the distant reward anything and everything is possible. We know that intention is the pathway to manifestation. But we also recognize that the brain in pain struggles to learn and that if we want to change the results in performance, we are best served to change our beliefs, because beliefs (the thoughts we think repeatedly) shape our habits (repeated behaviors). Easier said than done, right? This is why we practice mindfulness—because Experience, Emotion, Behavior, and Performance are all connected. We can do something about this—we can coach.
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The best coach I ever had was Bryan Pohlman, my 7th grade basketball coach at St. Albert the Great in Louisville, Kentucky. We went undefeated and won a city championship, but what I remember most about that year were the practices, the lessons, the sweat and blood and tears. I remember me and some friends quitting because it was too hard and the grace of my Coach for letting us return, but only after we ran nonstop for two practices straight and lost our starting spots and had to earn our places back. Coach Pohlman passed away last year. I talked with some of my friends who were on that team about the man he was and the men he helped us become. I’m 46 years old and still learning the lessons that man taught us when we were 13.
Coaches matter. The best ones might tear us down, but they also build us back up—better, stronger, faster, more focused, and ready to face the challenges and opportunities of the moment. They help show us what’s possible and help us believe in something we can’t yet see.
Sports can become all-consuming. In coaching, we witness growth and teamwork, bonding and fun, but emotions can get high, and when the focus is so much on winning from parents, coaches, and kids, the pressure can be too much. Kids fear failure and too often equate losing with failing. They are not the same. Way too often, our kids are playing sports in a dysregulated state hyper-focused on score and missing the fun of playing a great sport (or of even just making the next play in front of them). Our work is to help balance the nervous system—ours first, then through us, them.
Co-regulation at its finest. When we’re cool on the mound visit to the pitcher, they’ll be cooler when the next pitch comes. Calm and steady in the huddle, during the timeout, it all translates to what goes on the court, field, or pitch. Our work is helping the young people we support and care for get out of the fight or flight of the Sympathetic Nervous System and attuned to the calm and focus of the Parasympathetic. Fear and anxiety create tension and strain, in the mind and in the muscles. This tension impacts feelings and thoughts as much as the mechanics of a throw or swing. We can’t play the games for them, but we can be their coaches, in all these fields of sports and life. We can show them—by how we teach and talk and preach and pray.
We can—create positive energy…and stay positive even in the struggles. We can love independent of the outcome. We can reframe for confident resilience with mantras and positive affirmations to retake control of the thoughts, get out of the head, and back into the moment. We can…breathe between pitches or whistles, after an inning, or before the next play begins again. Repeating often, again and again and again. We can train the body, train the mind. We can coach to help those we serve connect to those parts of themselves that weights and sprints and drills can’t touch—that part deep within where real power and strength resides. We are emotion coaches if we are nothing else.
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This summer, my daughter, Sawyer, got the chance to play a game on the Field of Dreams site in Dyersville, Iowa, as part of the Miracle League. It was everything sports can and should be—so much joy.
Feel it to find it. Fear may be a good motivator, but inspiration is greater.
What we water is what will grow. What we build will come.
By Ryan Allen & Meghan Nelson
