Here’s the keys…

Imagine if your 13-year-old child said they wanted to go for a drive. Would you say sure…here’s the keys? It sounds crazy right. Making sure someone has the right skills for the task is just common sense.  And yet we readily send children into the sports arena lacking any of the mental skills they need.

Physical literacy has rightly been central in teaching and coaching young athletes for a long time. Everyone does better with fundamental skills such as balance and the ability to catch, throw and jump.

So why isn’t mental literacy in sport central for young athletes?

The very nature of physical education and sport is mentally demanding. Coping with winning and losing, public displays of ability and mistakes being highly visible is difficult enough. Add in expectations, competition & pressure and the demands grow higher.

Why do we expect young athletes to focus effectively when we don’t teach them how to. Why do we get upset when they fail to control their emotions, when we didn’t teach them strategies of how to control them. Why do we get upset when they underperform became of anxiety; when we didn’t equip them with skills to recognise what anxiety is and how to control it. Telling them to just relax and have fun might seem useful, but if you have ever tried to use that advice when you have felt anxious you would quickly realise how ineffective it is.

Not developing fundamental mental skills with athletes from a young age comes with consequences. Many of the struggles young athletes have in sport could be lessened and potentially eliminated if they had effective mental skills. Imagine how good sports would be if young athletes could focus effectively, had robust confidence, had excellent emotional control, set challenging goals, had great problem-solving skills, could make good decisions under pressure, could bounce back quickly from mistakes AND they enjoyed learning, challenging themselves and competing. That world should be our normal and will be when we start developing mental literacy in sport from a young age. It’s what every kid deserves.