The Fearless Warrior Podcast

107: 5 Things That are Wrecking Your Athlete's Ability to Perform

• Amanda Schaefer

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In today's episode, I dive into five essential, recurring issues that are wrecking youth athletes' performance and potential. This episode is a must-listen for both parents and athletes struggling with that "invisible block" between practice excellence and game-day performance. 

Episode Highlights:

• Negative effects of not getting enough sleep
• Athletes are underfueling their bodies
• Free Macro Counter: bicepsafterbabies.com/setmymacros 
• Your calendar shows your priorities
• Lack of mental skills
• The parent-athlete relationship

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Fearless Warrior Podcast, a place for athletes, coaches, and parents who know the value of a strong mindset. I'm your host, Coach AB, a mental performance coach, autumn and performer softball coach, white people, and mama three. Each episode we will dive deep into all things mental performance, mindset tools, and how to rewire the brain into tech. So if your goal is to gain the mental edge and learn the secrets of mental performance, you're in the right place. Let's tune in to today's episode. Five things that are wrecking your athlete's ability to perform. Hey, today's a solo episode. I've got my notes open. This is an essential one, so much so that I had to record. These five things have reoccurred in so many of my coaching client sessions with my one-on-one clients. It became apparent that these themes kept repeating themselves so many times with my college athletes, my high-level athletes. They're struggling with these five things. And chances are your daughter is probably struggling with them too. So we'll get into it today. I wanted to do a new quick intro. We have a lot of new listeners that might be wondering who the heck is Coach A B? Amanda Schaefer, that's me. I'm a mental performance coach who helps high-level youth athletes improve their performance and play to their full potential. Proven sports psychology techniques, also known as mental skills, can combat the negative effects of pressure, perfectionism, self-doubt, all of the things that your athlete might be struggling with. So let's dive into today's episode. As a parent, do you find yourself saying things like, I know she's better than this? If she would just trust her training, I know she could kill it out there. She does amazing in practice, but something's stopping her on game day. If she can get past this, I know she would be unstoppable out there. Any of those sound familiar? And if your daughter is listening and you're having a moment like, yeah, my mom said all those things, but maybe as an athlete you find it annoying because you want to fix these things. And it's almost like this invisible block that you wish you could fix, but you just don't know how. This is your episode. And I'm gonna record this for you, both the parents and the athletes. So if you're not with your athlete right now and you're listening to this, it might be a good idea to hit pause and re-listen to this episode when you're together. Now, you could listen to it more than once, but this would be a great episode to do together as parents and athletes. I'm gonna go through these five things that are wrecking your ability to perform. The first one is by far the easiest and quickest to fix, which means that number five is by far the hardest to fix. And I'll explain why. So just because it's hard to fix doesn't mean that it's bad or impossible. It just means it's gonna take progressively more work the deeper I get into this list. And the good news is that if you listen tonight, you can change number one and see immediate impact, the immediate effects. You're gonna see it right away on her performance. So let's dive in. Number one, not enough sleep is wrecking your athlete's performance. This is the number one impact on performance. This past summer, I had the privilege of having my eyes opened after attending a mastermind event in Connecticut with some really amazing top performers and experts. Todd Anderson, who is the founder of Dream Recovery and a sleep expert, opened my eyes to some of this amazing research. Now, I won't share everything because we'd love to have him on the pod, but why is sleep so important for performance? They use sleep deprivation as a war tactic. It's considered a form of psychological torture and violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions. You can Google it. This practice is condemned by human rights groups and is known to cause severe mental and physical harm. So there's a quick little blurb for you. If you want somebody to lose their cognitive function fast, even just one sleepless night is enough to make anyone irritable. You do that for a week, you do that for a month, you do that for years. And then we wonder why someone is not mentally able to withstand the pressures of life. And so anyone who has a lack of sleep, here are some factors. They're more likely to exhibit risk-taking behaviors. Sound familiar, teen parents? Misjudge threats, cause accidents, decreased motivation, poor mood, irritability, anxiety, depression. Over the long term, it's linked to serious mental health conditions, including PTSD. It's linked to chronic health problems, heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, depression, lower immunity. Sleep deficiency is also linked to a higher chance of injury. They've done studies on this. I can go on and on and on, but I think I've made my point. And we wonder why is my teen irritable? Well, they're teenagers. And if you're listening to this and you're a teenager, hang with me. Okay. You can impact this immediately by setting yourself up with the proper sleep. If we don't, it's like waking up every day with an empty bank account, and then we're asking you to spend energy that you don't have to spend. And so I can speak from experience because I have a three and four year old. And if they're in a sleep deficit or they skip their nap from the previous day, they're gonna wake up in a different mood than if they had the correct sleep amount. Whether it's the time they go to bed, the amount of sleep that they get, all of those things are factors that impact it. And so when we have a 13 and a 14-year-old, they still need us to parent them and safeguard them. And these are the things we have control over. So here's why I have to give you a little bit of tough love to both parents and athletes. Listen up. Put the dang phone down. Now, I'm just as guilty. I'm working on this habit too. Sleep goals can be impacted by electronics. They've done studies on the blue light, the effects of blue light, but not only that, it's this addiction to the scroll, is that we're trying to satisfy what the brain is seeking. And that's an endless loop. There's no end to the scroll. The scroll is infinite scrolling. And so we have to put the phone down. Here's two things that you can do immediately to start prioritizing your athlete's sleep goal. So here's number one calculate their optimal sleep amount. This might surprise you because our society says, oh, well, we just need eight hours of sleep. It's actually false for the age groups that we're coaching. So I copy and pasted these here. Six age, six to 12 years, nine to 12 hours per 24 hours. So if your athlete is 12 or younger, you have an eight you, a 10 U, a 12U athlete, she could very well be needing more than that eight hours, at minimum a nine. Some of them, and you're gonna know your child best, some of them need more. If, especially if they're having a growth spurt or they're just more exhausted, you might want to play around with getting them 10 to 11 to 12 hours of sleep. Now, hang tight, it's gonna get even more tricky. But once you figure this out, I want you to calculate what is their optimal sleep amount. So six to 12 needs nine to 12. Age 13 to 18 needs eight to 10 hours for 24 hours. So if you have a little bit older athlete, again, you're gonna know are they better functioning with eight hours? Is eight hours enough? Or do they really need 10 hours? And then adults, we can function on seven or more hours a night. And so we're fully formed, we have fully formed brains. Our teens need more sleep than us. And so this is going to require you, step two is to figure out what is their wake window. And there's more sleep research on wake windows and REM sleep and all of that. And we'll go into that deeper when we air that episode. But if you figure out what time your athlete needs to wake up and then work backwards. So if they have to get up at 6 a.m. for lifting, at minimum, they need to be asleep by 9 or 10 p.m. We did a little poll in our Facebook group, and a majority of you voted that your athlete goes to bed between 9 and 10 p.m. Ooh, which is awesome. But here's where this gets tricky. A lot of my college athletes are having, they're going off to college and they have to wake up even earlier. Some of my athletes are waking up as early as 5 a.m., 5:30 a.m. to get to early lifting. And then on the back end of that, they're spending until midnight or later studying, doing their homework. And so you can see when we start, as my mom would say, burning the candle at both ends, we're we're lacking the sleep that we need to perform optimally. So here's what you can actually do about it. One is to calculate that optimal sleep amount, work backwards from your wake up time. And then my next tip is all of my one-on-one clients, or a majority of them, set a sleep alarm. What does this mean? This alarm reoccurs every single night. You can set recurring alarms on your phone. I have them set an alarm 15 to 30 minutes before they need to be asleep. So if you need to be asleep at 10, you can't just shut your phone off, close your eyes, and you're asleep. It takes us a couple of minutes to wind down, brush our teeth, get into bed, and then actually fall asleep. So 15 to 30 minutes. This habit is once that alarm goes off on their device, they're going to stop scrolling and they're going to put their phone down to unplug and wind down because the eyeballs and the brain also need time to adjust off of that light and off of the scroll. And this requires step three, which is have a power down location for your phone, not within reach of the bed. This is by far the hardest because it's very easy, especially if your athlete needs an alarm. It's easy to put it on their nightstand. But also, how easy is it if they get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night or they're having a hard time falling asleep? If that phone was is within reach, they're going to be grabbing it. So, parents, have a charging station or a power down station, like in the kitchen. Their phones should absolutely not be in the bedroom, especially if they're younger. We need to be able to monitor that, but that's a whole nother conversation. But if they're a teenager, one of the things that I do with a lot of my one-on-one clients is have them pick a dresser or a desk that is steps away from their bed. And then also the double benefit of that is when their alarm goes off in the morning, it requires them to get out of bed and go turn off their alarm and then they're up for the day. So my goal is for you to have more tips and research on this topic when we interview Todd. But for now, let's get started with these three things and you'll be shocked at the changes in your teen. And hey, try them for yourself as a parent. The nights that I do scroll for hours, I have a hard time falling asleep and I feel like crap the next day. Try this for yourself as well. Even if you need less, even if you only need seven or eight hours, calculate what time you need to be in bed. You can set these alarms. Monkey see, monkey do. If you want your athlete to do this, I would also encourage you to do it yourself as a parent. So again, you could do this literally tonight after listening to this episode and start to see effects immediately. Not enough protein. We've had lots of nutritionists on the podcast. So if you want to go back, we've interviewed a lot of really cool professionals and experts. And so I'm going to really touch lightly on this. But the reason I'm talking about this is I can't tell you how many times as a coach I've seen this, especially as a pitching coach, where they're trying to exert themselves physically and they got nothing in the tank. I still give a few pitching lessons, and it breaks my heart when a kid shows up for a 6 or a 7 p.m. lesson and they have not eaten dinner yet. They go from school and they have activities and then they rush to practice and they haul out of the car and there's no game plan and they have an empty belly. And then we wonder by the time it's seven, eight, if you're the type of family that you're running constantly and we have siblings that are also in sports, it's okay if you have a later dinner time. But what's not okay is if you're an eight or nine p.m. dinner time family, there's got to be a plan in place that will get them from after school through their activities. We have to help our preteens and our teens plan with snacks and intentionality so they aren't burning on empty. This could be, you know, again, go back to some of our other episodes to get more specifics on what type of snacks, all of those things. But I want to bust a myth for you. An average calorie intake, we've been told, is around 2,000 calories. It's going to be different for different bodies. On average, a sedentary, meaning someone who doesn't exercise, someone who doesn't really move their body, needs about 2,000 calories. A moderately active body needs 2,400 calories. Again, this is very average. So again, if you have a 10-year-old versus an 18-year-old, or if we're talking about ourselves, I'm just trying to bust the myth here. I'm trying to prove a point. Someone who is very active needs upwards of 3,200 calories. So an athlete training three to four hours daily, think about they're going to lifting, they're going to practice. And maybe some nights they even have a pitching or hitting lesson on top of that. If we're expecting our athletes to work out three to four hours a day, they need significantly almost double what a sedentary person would be eating. And school lunches or the school breakfasts, they're not cutting it because they're not made for an athlete. They're made for a sedentary person. And so again, I'm no expert on this, but think about when your activity level is burning up their entire caloric needs, there isn't enough left over to sustain them. And if the goal is to build muscle and supply the body with enough nutrients, if this is happening on a daily basis, just like the sleep goal, they're working from zero. They're waking up with an empty bank account. They're going to practice with an empty bank account. Not only that, is their physical activity and they're tired and then they're not replenishing with their sleep. Macronutrients is kind of a really great baseline instead of just looking at calories, macronutrients or macros. We've had Amber Burizikki on the podcast. She teaches macro counting. I like this versus calorie counting because you can get all your calories with Oreos and French fries versus looking at your macronutrients. And so the three macros are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And as athletes, we need all three of these. And so proteins are the building blocks of muscle tissue. Eating protein improves muscle growth, recovery after exercise. The muscles are damaged, they need to be repaired so they can come back stronger. This is building muscle. And without the protein, that can't happen. So if you're spending money on strength and agility or lifting, it's literally getting flushed down the toilet if you're not giving her the adequate amount of protein. Second one is carbs. So this is the body's primary fuel source for high intensity and endurance activities. Running, um, all of all of the agility type stuff, games especially, are going to be higher intensity. And so carbs replenish and replenish our glycan glycogen stores. Can you guys tell? I'm struggling to say these words. These are critical for repeated workouts and sustained effort. So when we think about a softball game, a basketball game, volleyball, soccer, she's out there for almost two hours. And then we include warm up, it might be closer to three hours. And so we need those carbohydrates. And then last, athletes need fats, energy, endurance exercise, overall health. Fats are so good for cognitive function function and brain function, um, cellular integrity and nutrient absorption. So healthy fats, um, avocados, nuts, seeds, fatty fish, all of those are extremely vital, especially as they're maturing and growing. So, again, I don't claim to be an expert. My example for you is that if we can focus on protein, that is often the one that gets underestimated. I want to talk about two myths that have kind of opened my eyes. Oftentimes we look at protein of like, hey, I had meat or I had eggs or I had peanut butter. I just want to show you an example of my own life where I am aiming for at least 30 grams of protein in a meal. How many eggs do you think it takes to hit 30 grams of protein? Five to six. So if your athlete is eating a hard-boiled egg, it's probably not cutting it. How many teaspoons, or no, it's not even teaspoon, it's tablespoons. How much peanut butter do you think an athlete would have to eat to hit the 30 gram goal? Eight tablespoons, which is the same as half a cup of peanut butter. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be eating a peanut butter sandwich with a half a cup of peanut butter just to hit my protein goals. A single hamburger patty has eight to 12 grams of protein. And all of these things are myths that it's just I'm just trying to show you that if we are fueling property properly, it's actually going to be a larger volume of food. Or what we can do is we can do more protein-dense things like chicken, tuna, salmon, uh, hamburger, pork, all of those sources of meats or potentially like chickpeas or beans are gonna produce a lot more bang for your buck versus trying to eat a bunch of peanut butter, if that makes sense. So I'm just trying to bust some myths for you guys. A lot of my college girls right now are eating avocado toast or they're eating a peanut butter sandwich or they're eating a hard-boiled egg or a protein bar. Even a protein bar is only gonna give you 10 to 20 grams of protein. It's simply not enough, especially if we are exerting our bodies three to four hours a day, seven days a week. It's abundantly clear you are likely underfueling your athlete. Now, if you're a parent, we have control over this because we can feed our athletes. And so here's a little bit of tough love. If you're running multiple kids to sports and activities, I need to hear you laugh, hear me loud and clear. Nothing on what you're spending your money on, hitting lessons, pitching lessons, speed and agility, none of that matters if you're not adequately fueling your athlete. We're exhausting the muscles. We're literally breaking down those muscle fibers. And so if she's not gaining muscle or speed and she's not getting better, we have to look at nutrition. The other thing is mentally. So tell me how you feel at work when all you can think about is what you're gonna have for lunch. About 11:30, you start getting hungry, or maybe right before you clock out of work and you're heading to dinner. We have a hard time focusing when we're hungry. And so, how do we prioritize this? Step one is to calculate your athletes' macros. What do they need for their body size and their exercise level? So, some of you might be at that three to four hours a day. That's going to be different than an athlete that is maybe on a tenue team that practices once or twice a week. Um, we can link a macro counter. Amber Brizicki has a great one. Um, you can Google macro counter. And so the cool thing is you really only have to do this once. I don't want your athlete to be counting calories every day or every week. I just want you to see where do we need to be feeling a little bit better. Step two is once you know those goals, schedulizing, scheduling and prioritizing those meals with the correct protein and overall macros. This means you might have to meal prep. Breakfast burritos and freezing them are a great option. Um, I call it my Steve Jobs breakfast. I eat the same Greek yogurt bowl every single morning. I know exactly what my macros are. And so that's my top tip is start with breakfast. Come up with options that your athlete can take accountability for. And then for lunch and dinner, this could look like choosing places to eat if you have to go out to eat as a family. Choosing places like Chick-fil-A or Chipotle over, you know, a McDonald's or a Burger King. Again, I won't go deep into that, but if you feel good on the meal category, I would research some good protein snacks or some in-between snacks for in-between activities. All right, so we've covered sleep, we've covered nutrition, and number three, the thing that is wrecking your athlete's performance is lack of time blocking. Where we could also call this weekly routines. This affects your sleep and your nutrition above. So we're kind of progressively building all of these puzzle pieces together. I love this saying, and a good friend of mine often reminds me, Charlie Smith, always says to me, show me your calendar and I'll show you your priorities. It's that simple. If I look at how you spend your time, I can immediately tell you what you value. So if I'm over here binge watching movies every night and I'm scrolling on social media till 1 a.m., I will literally tell you that you're valuing movies and social media or Snapchat or TikTok. Where you spend your time is what you are actively choosing to value. It's a slippery slope because often it becomes subconscious. We get into these routines and then we just follow these routines because that's what our brain is comfortable with. And I get it, society and part of your teen's life. I'm not saying she can't have TikTok, I'm not saying she can't have Snapchat, I'm not saying she can't have a phone, and I'm really not even saying that she can't watch TV or movies or shows. I want you to have those things. But when those things that are social are conflicting with some of these other priorities, there has to be a balance. So if you're fighting with her over the homework she still has to do at 10 p.m. And now you're panicking because you have to get her to bed, but she has to do the homework. Now we are prioritizing homework over her sleep. So do you see how this is kind of a shifting? Um, this is a really great example. Hopefully, you've seen this analogy. There's a video where someone pulls out a jar and there are big rocks, there are pebbles, and there are sand. And if you put the sand in the jar first, and the sand fills up half the jar, and then we put the pebbles in, then there's really no room for these big rocks. But if we empty the contents of that jar and we put the big rocks in first, then the pebbles kind of fill in, and then we dump the sand in, we can shake that jar around and get all of those things to fit. But what changed? The order in which you prioritize them. So three time blocks that I recommend that you need to start time blocking or that she can start time blocking is a homework time block, a practice time block. This also includes work outside of lessons. So if you're begging her to get her reps in, if you haven't time blocked it, then you're also setting her up for failure. And then a family and social time block. So it sounds simple, but it's much harder to actually stick with it and change it. So a really good example is I started time blocking my workouts in the morning. And that means that I can't take meetings with clients in the morning, but I've chosen to make one of my big rocks a workout the first thing in the morning. Now, a lot of you go to work as a parent and your athlete goes to school. So I get that you can't do my specific time block, but what I'm saying is if we look at the after school time block, if there's a window where you're not home, but your athlete is home after school, or maybe before practice, I would look at creating those conversations around having an expectation that this is your homework time block. And we're going to prioritize that so that we can prioritize other time blocks, which are the other two, which are practice time blocks, and then still having time for her to scroll on her phone or talk with friends or hang out with friends. So I get that this might be a hard conversation to have, but I want to go back to if you have a plan, it's much easier to follow a plan versus complaining about a plan that doesn't exist. That is wrecking her performance when we think about it from a standpoint of she's got to get the extra reps outside of her lessons, and she's got to have all of these things filled in the right order, or it's constantly going to be giving her a feeling of anxiety. I've had a lot of my athletes describe the pressures. These kids, they have so much more pressure, and then we have to squeeze in things like recruiting and camps and all the other social activities that they want to do. If it feels overwhelming for you as a parent, imagine what it feels like for her. So sometimes time blocking, you can do this with family whiteboards, those family calendars. I would just have a conversation about it and find those three time blocks: homework, practice, and family social. All right, number four. We can't, we can't not talk about it. The fourth thing that is wrecking your athlete's performance is a lack of mental skills. Hey, and there it is. You would probably be surprised if I if I left this one out. We have to talk about it. It's the foundation of everything we teach here at Fearless. And here's where you might be surprised. Remember when I said what number one was? Number one is her sleep. And I don't want you to spend a single penny on our programs or services unless you have number one under control. Why? Because no amount of mental training can overcome a sleep deficit. It's going to affect her cognitive function. And so sometimes where I hop on a call with an athlete, sometimes they're just on E. They're just on empty and they need a reset and they're emotionally dysregulated. And so if we come back to the table and we reset that sleep, I think you'll be surprised at how much it affects her mood, her confidence, how she shows up in her friendships and on the softball field. But I do have to talk about mental skills, is just like physical. And so when you work on hitting or you work on pitching or a backhand or a crow hop or hitting with better extension, all of these physical skills, we can identify these skills that we need to have. We can come up with a plan to learn these skills, like if she's learning how to throw a curveball or she's learning how to be a slapper. And then once you learn those things, then we have drills to practice those things. And mental skills are identical. We can give her the right tools that she needs for her situation. She can practice those mental skills with drills, and that's what we do inside our coaching calls and our program. And then once she's practiced those skills, that's where she can use them on game day. So the elephant in the room is no amount of physical training can overcome a negative mindset. But here's the research: our brains are wired with a negativity bias. So it's not that that something is wrong with her because she's a negative thinker. News flash, we're all negative thinkers. You can look at your parent. If you're listening to this with your parents, we all have negative thoughts. The goal is not to get rid of the negative thoughts, it's your ability to handle them. Okay. So here's the research. Specific research varies. They've done lots of different studies and statistics, but approximately 80% of our human thoughts are negative. 80%. And a significant portion of those thoughts that we have are repetitive, meaning that they're automatic, they live in the subconscious. We have these thoughts all the time of I'm not good enough. I don't want to let my team down. I suck at this, right? You are human. If you followed our Instagram for any amount of time or anything on social, we're constantly helping parents and athletes understand. Emotions are normal. Negative thoughts are normal. The reason we teach mental skills is so that we can handle them better. And so we can train our self-talk. Self-talk is by far my favorite module to teach inside the Fearless Warrior program. Your self-talk is constant. And so it could be this endless stream of negative thoughts. We can interrupt those with reframes. I teach the pop method. We can have keywords. I don't teach this a whole lot, but you can have identity statements or affirmations. And so all of these things, just like I gave the example of learning how to throw a curveball or learning how to slap, I can teach your athlete or any mental performance coach can teach your athlete how to use self-talk to her advantage. We also have failure recovery. We have routines, we have visualization, we have um they say failure recovery. Um man, I'm on the spot. I should have listed these, but we teach 12 inside of our program. Goal setting, the difference between motivation and discipline, her support system. All of these mental skills can be taught and practiced. And so when you start to think about these things, if you didn't have these tools, how cool would it be if you could give your daughter this secret advantage? We kind of call it the secret weapon. And so she's working her butt off physically. If you're not also providing her with some tools mentally, again, she might be showing up on game day in no amount of all this hard work and muscle memory, if she can't trust that muscle memory and have confidence, then it might all be coming up empty on game day. So, and by the way, if you're an athlete listening to this, if mental training to you sounds like, oh, mom and dad are just signing me up for this because they think there's something wrong with me, it is growing. The athletes inside our program realize they're not alone. And it's actually a really cool community. So if this feels intimidating to you, please know that we try to make it fun, we make it quick, and it's just like learning any other skill. Okay, ready for number five? The most heartbreaking and honestly hardest thing to change before I tell you what it is. Deep breath, parents especially. I am by no means telling you what I'm about to tell you because I want to make you feel bad as a parent. I'm doing it because I love you and I want what's best for your relationship with your daughter. Ready? The number five thing that is wrecking her ability to perform is the parent relationship. This is her communication with her support system. So if you're a guardian, a parent, how you create that relationship with her could be helping or hurting how she's performing. And I know it sounds counterintuitive because we would do anything to see our athletes succeed. But some of the things that you might be doing might actually be sabotaging all of her hard work. She's afraid to let down the most important people in her life. And this is a hidden pressure because you might be thinking, well, Coach A B, we give her everything. We buy the gear, we try out for the best teams, we hire the best coaches, we travel the country. None of that matters if she's attaching your love to how she performs in her sport. I have a couple of reflection questions, and I just want you to reflect for a second. There's three of them, I believe. Number one is as a parent, how do I respond when she has a bad game? Does it put you in a bad mood? Do you nitpick what she does wrong? Do you try to fix it immediately? Or maybe you book more lessons? Maybe your body language, maybe your self-talk. How do you respond when she has a bad game? Just reflect for a second. What is my response? Number two, how do I foster our relationship outside of sports? Do I spend quality time with her outside of softball? Do we have conversations that involve other things besides what she's expected to do, like sports and grades? What hobbies or activities does our family do outside of sports? Again, I'm just asking you to reflect. And some of you I can tell it's gonna bubble up, but like we love softball. This is what we do. But if that's the only thing that your relationship hinges on, what happens if softball has a bad day or softball's not enjoyable for her? Number three, as a parent, how do I communicate my praise? Do you praise her at all? Do you point out the things that she's doing right or just the things that she's doing wrong? Do you put high expectations on her? Are you praising the outcomes like stats, wins, losses? Or are you finding ways to praise the process like her attitude and effort? Do you communicate that your love is not contingent on her performance? You must say these things out loud. You cannot assume that she knows. Again, the brain is wired for negativity. So, in the absence of communication, even as a parent, when you're not communicating, she's going to assume negative that I let my parents down, that I'm not good enough, that I'm not trying hard enough, that I didn't do good enough. We have to speak life into our relationship. So I want you to repeat after me. You could pause this. You could pause this podcast and literally have this conversation right now with your daughter. Repeat after me. I love you no matter what. No matter whether you have a bad game or a great game, nothing you could ever do could take away how much I love you. And the very best one, I am so proud of you. I love to watch you play. All of these things, all of these statements, if we're not reminding them of this, and again, if you're like, yes, Coach A B, we do this, you might get an eye roll. Don't stop saying that. Even if your teen says, Oh, mom, you're just saying that because you're mom, or oh, this is too mushy, don't stop. You love them, you praise them, and you tell them how proud you are, and watch how your relationship changes. So if you winced a bit, or you were tempted to end this episode when I started talking about number five, this one right here, or maybe you do do a good job of this, but maybe your spouse isn't on the same page. This one, number five, is by far the one that is going to require the most amount of time, effort, and intentionality. Chances are, if you have a teenager or, you know, middle of the road, 12, 13-year-old, you are deep into this whole sports journey, and you realize how quickly five years, six years, seven years just flies by. And if you have an athlete that's about to go to college and you're staring down the barrel of being an empty nester, you've spent 18 years raising her. And so if you're realizing, we got a lot of work to do on number five, I'm asking you to intentionally flip the script on 18 years. And that might be hard for some of you. So hear me loud and clear. If you're listening to this and your daughter is still young, you have time. And my advice to you on this is take the time. Let's talk about the car ride home. Let's have these conversations outside of, you know, maybe the best place for this isn't the car ride home. Maybe it's at the kitchen table, maybe it's going on a walk, maybe it's doing something other than softball. Find a hobby, find time to spend with her outside of her sport. None of the work that I do as a mental performance coach matters if she hangs up her cleats and is doubting whether or not mom and dad will love me. There it is. A little bit of fun brain research, a little bit of tactical tips and changes, and a whole lot of tough love for you on this episode. Again, these five things, if we can change these five things, we can take it from five things that are wrecking your athlete's ability to perform to the five biggest levers that when you pull on these five levers, she becomes unstoppable. And that's what I want for all of you guys. And so I just wanted to say thank you for tuning in to this week's episode. Shout out, we have been doing the Fearless Warrior podcast for two years now. We've had over 50,000 downloads, and none of that is possible without my team. So shout out to Kara, Sarah, Amara. Check out socials. We're giving away some really cool prizes this week. So if you're listening to this live, make sure you leave us a review. You can be entered to win some really cool prizes. Um, hang out on socials. We have some other really cool ways to enter the giveaway. And just thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of the Fearless Fam. My whole goal is to change the game, to grow the game, and increase awareness on the mental side. So for now, I will see you next week on the next episode.

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Amanda Schaefer

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