Doing our best by our kids-Topic 4: Part 2

Greetings VARA Community,

As part of VARA’s young athlete development programming, Kids Today and What They Need From Us, this email is Topic 4, Part 2 - Talking to Teens.

This is the final email of the series. Elle's series has supplied applicable, helpful, and important information for those working with young athletes. It is also great for all of us when dealing with people in general, on a daily basis. A PDF booklet for members to share with parents, teachers, and coaching staff is inked at the end of the email.

MANY, MANY THANKS to Elle Gilbert for her time and for her commitment to the Vara Community.

Introducing Elle Gilbert

Elle is a former VARA competitor; she grew up in VT and raced in the MVC council system. Elle competed for Suicide Six and Woodstock Ski Runners. A 2012 SMS graduate, Elle went on to compete for Middlebury College. Following a successful alpine racing and academic career at Middlebury, Elle coached for MMSCA. She later earned her Master of Arts in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Denver.

As a fully integrated Mental Performance Specialist at SMS, Elle is currently working with all five of the athletic programs on campus.

This topic is at the forefront of athletics and sports performance at all levels. I am super excited for Elle to share her work and experience in youth and sports psychology with the VARA community.

Please enjoy the series, take notes, and save them and discuss with your coaching team. We are planning a zoom follow-up at the end of the series and will include the date and time in one of the next email blasts.

Thank you!

Julie Woodworth

VARA Executive Director

Doing Our Best By Our Kids

Topic 4 Part 2, of the Series

By: Elle Gilbert

The button below is the full educational series in booklet form to share with staff, parents, or teachers. This is an amazing resource for anyone working with young people. The content has applications beyond sport.

I can not THANK Elle enough for the effort put into creating this series for our VARA members!

SERIES PDF BOOKLET

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Talking with Teens: Part 2

It’s time to break down specifics related to coach and parent communication to wrap up our final topic. For coaches, we are going to skim across the surface of a broad body of literature and look at the ways we communicate specifically in training and competition environments.

Your Role in the Feedback Process

How would you describe the nature of your communication and feedback to athletes during a training session? We have likely been taught somewhere along the line that our job as coaches is to provide lots of feedback so our athletes learn. While sharing our knowledge and observations and providing information to athletes about how they can improve is vital to the process, the more feedback = more learning equation does not add up. Feedback that comes from us coaches, an external source, is called augmented feedback or extrinsic feedback, and is typically delivered in the form of verbal instruction. This is the type of feedback most athletes are familiar with and comfortable receiving, but it comes with some potential hang-ups that may actually be counterproductive to the learning process. The type of feedback we too often overlook and undercut is the feedback that arises internally through the athlete’s own body. This intrinsic feedback is the most meaningful for athletes because it involves them engaging their own brains and processing movement or sport-related information on their own.

We need to shift our perspective from our feedback being the key to athlete learning, to our feedback being a supplement – something that enriches the athlete’s naturally occurring intrinsic feedback. To do this, we have to actively provide the space and opportunity to allow our athletes to process what just occurred for them before we jump in with our own feedback. Below are four strategies or feedback schedules to experiment with based on the developmental stage of your athletes and the structure of your training environment:

Subjective-Feedback Delay: Ask questions to encourage critical thinking, body awareness, mental engagement, and athlete responsibility over their own learning process. This reduces athlete dependence on coach feedback and allows them to become their own teachers.
Faded Feedback: The frequency of coach feedback is high in the beginning stages of skill acquisition, and is gradually reduced as proficiency is developed.
Summary Feedback: Feedback is offered at the completion of a series of trials.
Learner-Determined Feedback: The delivery of feedback is determined by the athlete.

Returning to the potential problems lurking in the shadows of our verbal, augmented feedback, is the matter of cognitive load and the amount of information that is helpful for learning. As humans, we experience detriments in learning when information processing becomes overly complex. Often, the quantity/timing/nature of instruction imposes unnecessary demands on an athlete as it is being combined with a high level of intrinsic feedback from performing the activity itself. The athlete has to sift through everything they just experienced in their body as well as find a way to integrate your feedback.

Whatever training activity you are engaging in, think about the intrinsic cognitive load your athlete is receiving. We tend to underestimate the amount of feedback athletes are getting from their own bodies during drills, games, normal training, etc., so it is our tendency to provide feedback that is too frequent, immediate, or unfocused. All we are doing in these moments is detracting from the athlete’s attunement to the information that’s already available to them through their body. We are also inhibiting their ability to process relevant stimuli in their environment that’s necessary for them to produce the desired movement. It is our job to understand their intrinsic cognitive load, find ways to help them process their internal feedback, and be intentional with the nature and aim of our feedback. Creating a dialogue with our athletes through the use of questions and the space for reflection is an effective way to overcome high cognitive loads that hinder learning. If you’re looking for general, very broad guidelines around the moments you do give direct feedback, we want:

- Not too frequent – we don’t want to create dependence on external feedback.

- Not too immediate – give them a chance to process their body’s feedback first.

- Very focused on the specific skill the athlete is working on – if they are working on pole plants and you start talking about rolling the knees and ankles, you are likely creating unhelpful excess cognitive load.

Experiential Learning Process

We can also look at this matter of feedback and communication in a way that provides some structure around understanding the learning process. Learning through experience is often defined as “learning through doing,” but a more nuanced, helpful definition includes another step: learning through reflection on doing. Athletes have the ability to engage in this without us coaches by tuning in to their own internal feedback, but intentional reflection is often not a well-developed skill amongst our young people. If we can shift from seeing ourselves as feedback providers to facilitators of this reflective process, we can allow inward reflection to become a reflexive response for our athletes instead of the habitual looking outwards for answers.

Feedforward

Up until this point, we’ve been discussing feedback. When to give it, how to give it, when and why not to give it in certain moments, etc. Now we’re going to flip the general notion of feedback upside down and inside out to try to understand the impact of how we historically and culturally understand this concept. Merriam-Webster’s definition of feedback is as follows: the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process to the original or controlling source.

It is clear that feedback is backwards facing – we are looking at what just happened, and providing information to the athlete about how to fix it or make it better. This seems so natural, but it doesn’t take into account how most humans actually respond in the face of traditional feedback. The rating, judging, critiquing, and evaluating focused on something in the past that cannot be changed is effective at perpetuating negative attitudes and creating feelings of learned helplessness. Brain imagining studies have shown when we receive feedback focused in the past on things we can’t change, vast parts of our frontal cortex go dark. If you remember all the way back to our first topic, this is the part of the brain heavily involved in executive functions including creativity and decision making. In essence, this means we enter a state of mental paralysis, and acting upon the information we’ve been given becomes difficult if not impossible. When the goal is learning, this is not where we want to be.

Instead of focusing on the problems, feedforward focuses on solutions. It offers constructive guidance on how to improve in the future – it’s action oriented! It’s accepting of whatever just happened and supportive of the idea that the athlete can change. It empowers us to learn and develop, and it reinforces a growth mindset. I’m sure much of your current communication with athletes in training and competition already falls into the bucket of feedforward, but having this framework front and center in our minds will help us make the shift more often. It can even help us help our athletes shift the critical voice that often accompanies their intrinsic feedback. Our athletes have so much to gain from shifting their default mode of perseveration on mistakes in the past to immediate identification of what they can do to improve.

Feedback

Focuses on the past, on what people can’t change [past tense language]

Rates, judges, critiques, evaluates. Creates feelings of learned helplessness

Feedforward

Focuses on the future, on what people have the power to change [future tense language]

Accepts, supports, develops, encourages. Commits us to improvement

Parents, It’s Your Turn

We could go down a rabbit hole of the nitty-gritty in regards to how we communicate with our kids, but we are going to temporarily set aside our personal relationships and the specific context we are operating within in order to discuss a broader perspective. Eventually, we will get to some of the big Dos.

Goal Alignment

The root of many conflicts between athletes and parents lies in a lack of goal alignment. Athletes have goals for themselves within their sport and parents have their own set of goals and beliefs about their kid as an athlete. Because the two parties are coming at it from different angles and their involvement is completely different (obviously), more likely than not, these goals and beliefs aren’t going to run completely parallel. Regardless of whether your goals line up with your kid’s goals, the mistake we make is in not talking about it. If there is no explicit acknowledgement and open communication about what the goals and purpose are between kid and parent, you are setting yourself up for small things to really rock the boat.

The open communication only works here if you are honest with the goals you are laying out on the table. If you are telling your young athlete your goals for them in sport are to learn a lot, work hard, develop close relationships, and have as much fun as possible, but in your heart, you truly care about their results and you have your eyes on a college scholarship, the latter is the message they will most likely receive through your words and actions. If it is the case that you are more outcome and success oriented, it will be beneficial to take a look inside to see where that’s coming from – look at your upbringing, perhaps at your past experience as an athlete, and at the values you hold. There is nothing wrong with the place you are coming from, but it is your responsibility to ask the question, Is it helpful. Based on all of the influences in my life, is the way I’m showing up as a sport parent helpful for my kid?

Impact Wins Over Intent

In doing the remarkable job of parenting, we all have the purest intentions of setting our kids up for success. We all do it in our own way, and we’re all actively experimenting to figure out what works and what doesn’t with our unique child. Despite all of our efforts to do best by our kids, sometimes things go sideways. This is normal and to be expected. On top of the natural process of self-differentiation our teens are going through which may leave us with a kid that doesn’t want to communicate with us at all, research emphatically tells us that kids perceive parent communication differently and often more negatively than the parents themselves do. For example, parent instruction on the sidelines that is meant to be productive and helpful is often received as negative and degrading. The overarching message here is that our intent often does not match the impact on our kids. The quicker we can come to terms with this frequently frustrating reality, the better we’ll be able to navigate the murky waters of how to be the parents our kids need us to be.

Take a moment to think about your parenting philosophy and the values you hold as a human being that you want to pass along to your kids. Gather your ideas and come up with a theme or overarching idea that will guide the way you show up as a sport parent. Take a large step back and ask yourself the question; When my child is an adult, how do I want them to describe the impact I had on them as a developing human and as an athlete? Use your simple, personalized framework as your map and as the basis on which to evaluate your words and actions. If you find something you have done or said doesn’t feel right or doesn’t fit within the sport parenting theme you’ve laid out, ask yourself; What was my motivation there? And what was the impact that just had on my child? Whether it was action or inaction; words, silence, or body language… What was the motivation behind it and what was the impact? Don’t feel like you have to beat yourself up over it or that you have the responsibility of knowing the impact. Put it out in the open, own it, and ask your kid!

Role Confusion

Right on the heels of discussing goal alignment and impact vs. intent, we need to shine a spotlight on the sticky dilemma of understanding our role. Through the what and the how of our communication, we can create confusion and frustration when we informally dip our toes into the coaching waters from our parent seat, or when we actually fill the role of both coach and parent.

It won’t come as a surprise here, that no matter the nature of the dual role you are filling, they key to success lies in open communication with your kid. If you are a parent who coaches, both you and your young athlete stand to benefit tremendously when the situation is discussed, opinions and desires are considered, and boundaries are set. If you have the luxury of considering the impact of this dual role on your child, you may find your kid’s needs compete with your own. If it is a role you have to take on, start by clarifying when you are Coach and when you are Mom or Dad. Clarify what the expectations are at training and competitions, how you plan to treat them just like any other athlete on the team, and how outside of the sport, it’s up to them whether they want to talk about sport or not. This is not a one-and-done type of conversation – let your kid know the lines of communication will stay open all season. Anticipate challenges so together, you can navigate in a way that works best for both of you.

Many of you likely have experience in ski racing or whatever sport your child is doing. Even if you don’t, you have likely learned a lot watching them progress through their young careers. The temptation to throw on a coaching hat and step into that role from time to time (or all of the time) is strong. We want to help our kid be better, so why not?

The answer here lies in honestly examining the impact of our words. The messaging we intend is most likely that we know they can be better if only they did “X.” We believe we are being encouraging and empowering them with our feedback. Studies exploring parental involvement in sport, however, tell us direct instruction is linked to athlete anxiety, perceived pressure, and withdrawal from sport. Hidden in our words is a message about the importance of performance, there is likely the unintended message of whatever they just did not being good enough, and there is a message about your level of trust and belief in the coaching staff to do their job. You also run the high risk of providing conflicting messages with the ones your athlete is getting from their coaches. All of a sudden, our well-intended constructive feedback or instruction has created confusion and an extra cognitive load for our athlete that will make it harder for them to learn and progress. The best thing we can do for our kids is temper our own egos and return to the question of what is helpful for them. Again, don’t try to guess on what the answer is, ask them!

If you have a kid that wants your instructional feedback, it is still worth considering everything laid out in the above paragraph. Our kids look up to us and want to know what we think – perhaps they are even desperately seeking our approval. We can push back on the temptation to give instructional feedback with the broader desire to make our kids feel unconditionally loved and supported. We can give them more general feedback on aspects of their performance such as the effort we saw, the courage it took to try that new skill (sport dependent), or the amount of fun we saw them having. We can engage them in a conversation where they are the ones looking at their own performance and we adopt the role of curious questioners asking all about what went well and what they are working on with their coaches. We can empower them by letting them be the expert on their own experience.

When We Make Mistakes

This process of questioning, self-reflection, and engagement with our kids will not only set the foundation for a more productive relationship, it will also allow us to sit more comfortably within our imperfection. Perfection in the role of parenting, coaching, and being a human does not exist. So, let’s wrap up this entire series by embracing the fact that as hard as we try to do all of the “right” things and communicate in the “right” ways, we will make mistakes. Tons of them all the time. The silent shame that seems to swallow us whole and the fear we carry when we place the expectation on ourselves to be perfect (sports) parents is not helpful to anyone. It’s holding us back from being the very messy, imperfect, empathic, deeply human role models our kids need us to be. If we can talk about our missteps with our kids, we become the people we want them looking up to, and we free ourselves from the shame that keeps us from being the parents we want to be.

The Big Dos

- Praise effort. Praise progress. Praise the fun and joy that the process of sport provides. Praise the resilience, bravery, and commitment it takes to bounce back from failure. Praise the wonderful qualities that make them an awesome human outside of athletics.

- Orient towards the positive. It’s always there - be on the lookout and call it out! Our athletes aren’t always naturally oriented this way, so model the mindset.

- Listen. With the intent to hear and understand, not with the intent to respond. Resist the advice trap. Always ask if they would like advice before you give it. Your job is not always to solve the problem. Just hearing them out can be the most powerful way to show love and support.

- Teach and explore the reality of the world. Being realistic about the world can be empowering. Things aren’t always fair. You won’t always win. People will do things you don’t understand or agree with. What do we do when the world does what it does?

- Teach perspective. Helping them expand their perspective on the world and what truly matters will reduce the feelings of importance attached to any one competition. Winning is great, but does it really change who we are or the values we hold at the end of the day? All it is is another experience to learn from.

- Teach ownership. This involves taking a step back. Let them captain the ship, have the difficult conversation with the coach, take care of their own equipment, deal with the consequences of their decisions, etc. They are capable – we just need to give them the space to prove their own capability to themselves.

- Prepare for the hard stuff. We can get ahead of a lot of our kids’ difficult experiences related to sport by initiating conversations around what we see happening on the elite stage. Look at athletes losing, falling, failing, not making the team, not qualifying for the event, rehabbing from injury, choking under pressure, etc. If our kids have been prompted to think about what to do when adversity hits and they have a model to look to, they won’t be left guessing and grasping at straws when adversity strikes them.

- Make your love and support unconditional. For most of us, we know that it is. Our job is to be intentional with how we communicate this so there is no opportunity for intent and impact to diverge.

- Communicate about Communication. Ask for feedback. Your kids will appreciate the opportunity to be heard, and you will learn about your impact straight from the source.

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References (and Resources You Should Also Check Out!)

· Glennon Doyle (check out her full body of work – she’s about as authentic as they come and funny as hell)

o Book: Untamed

o Podcast: We Can Do Hard Things (there are some great episodes geared towards parenting)

· Joe Hirsch: The Feedback Fix: Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change

· Free Range Kids – a movement and project reimagining the way we parent

o https://www.freerangekids.com/

· Articles

o Kolb (1984): Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development

o Grimm et al. (2017): Parent-child communication in sport: Integrating theory into research

§ https://familiesinsportlab.usu.edu/files/grimm_dorrance_hall_dunn___dorsch__2017_.pdf

o Sigl & Ansel: The Ten Commandments for a Great Sports Parent

§ https://sportsmentaltoughness.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/10_Commandments-By-Ken-Ansell-.pdf#:~:text=Show%20and%20communicate%20unconditional%20love%2C%20regardless%20of%20performance.,her%20life%20in%20ways%20you%20never%20had%20before

o Sweller (1988): Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning

o Teques et al (2018): Parental involvement in sport: Psychometric development and empirical test of a theoretical model

§ https://rke.abertay.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/8592257/Calmeiro_ParentalInvolvementInSport_Accepted_2016.pdf

o Van Duijvenvoorde (2008): Evaluating the negative or valuing the positive? Neural mechanisms supporting feedback-based learning across development

Elle Gilbert, M.A., CMPC

M.A., Sport & Performance Psychology

Certified Mental Performance Consultant

Stratton Mountain School Mental Performance Specialist

Equipped to Excel: Sport & Performance Psychology Consulting

VARA | www.vara.org

Ph: 802.236.4695