132: Build Her Confidence: 3 Easy Challenges To Try This Week (that have nothing to do with softball)

Why does my daughter crush it in practice and completely fall apart in the game?
Coach AB and Coach Kara are giving you 3 Easy Challenges To Try This Week (that have nothing to do with softball)


Episode Highlights:

• Challenge 1: The Solo Mission — how giving her real responsibility and real consequences builds real confidence
• Challenge 2: Compliment a Stranger — why this challenge is one of the most powerful confidence builders
• Challenge 3: Try Something She’s “Not Good At” YET — and why being a beginner again is exactly what her softball game needs
• Why praising effort over outcome is the secret ingredient that makes all three challenges actually work
  
  

This week, pick one challenge, set aside time to do it together! Find us on socials and let us know how it went!

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Transcript

AB 0:38

Hey, it's Coach Ab

Kara 0:40

and it's Coach Kara,

AB 0:42

and today we are recording a podcast episode because as mental performance coaches, we're starting to see themes emerge with the athletes that we work with one-on-one. And because I feel awkward doing solo episodes, I have roped coach Kara into this because we've been talking about what can we do to help our warriors. Outside of their sport, outside of, you know, on and off the field. And we've just had some really cool conversations that we wanted to share with you guys.

Kara 1:10

Yeah, I'm so happy to be roped into this because honestly, this is a huge question that we meet with a lot of parents and a lot of players, and we address this one big burning question that they all come to us with and, and a lot of people, that's how they originally find us, is because they want to help their athlete build their confidence, both on and off the field. And the big scenario that we get all the time is parents coming to us and saying, my daughter is great in practice. She can. Get all the grounders, she can pitch all the pitches. She in the cage, you get her in the cage and she's rocketing that ball left and right. And then you put her on the field in a high pressure situation or so things start to go wrong, things start to fall off the rails and all of a sudden she falls apart. And that confidence that we see displayed so easily in practice and maybe in other arenas of her life just kind of dissipates. And parents wanna address that because they see that as an issue that gets in the way of their daughter's. Performing at their highest level. Who cares if you can practice well? You need to be able to play well in the game, and you need to have the confidence in those instances where it matters most.

AB 2:10

So we came up with this idea. We put three easy challenges and we're gonna share those with you. We thought, okay, what are some of the things that we've done inside our one-to-one sessions that we could then put on the podcast in some fun ideas to start to show you guys how to show your daughter that pressure isn't something to be afraid of, um, that you can unlock the ability to manage these challenges and see what she's capable of. In a low pressure situation, that's not her favorite sport. That's not the sport that she needs to get recruited in. And I think sometimes we're gonna talk about this today. Some of these realizations that she can have outside of her sport are immediately going to translate for her.

Kara 2:53

Yeah. And imagine if she can. Master some of these challenges or she can attempt some of these challenges to build some confidence off the field. Imagine how much that's going to then help her when she steps into those pressure situations. When she steps into those situations where she's unsure or awkward or feeling weird, that she can then say, I've been here before off the softball field, and she can know how to cope and work through that. Um, so that she can be at her best. And that's the whole point of any mental performance training is to help them be their best, even when it's. The hardest or the, the most pressure filled. So are you, and, and the cool thing about this is, like you said, none of this has to do with softball. None of these have to do with going to practice or anything like that, taking reps, none of that. Um, but there's stuff that they can, you guys can do with your daughters outside of softball that are gonna help a lot on the softball field. So are you ready for number one?

AB 3:42

Well, hang on. But before we tell you the top three, we want you all to know that all three of these have been done and vetted by our one-to-one clients, so we're not sending you on a wild goose chase. And if you guys have been around for a while, you know that every year we host an event called Mental Skills Challenge Week. Hint, hint. We have not done that yet this year, but it's coming. And so these have all been tested. We know that they work. And so these take what? Five to 10 minutes, depending on the activity. So we're not just sending you into the abyss of these challenges. Let's do

Kara 4:17

it. Yeah. They tried and true.

AB 4:18

Yeah.

Kara 4:18

All right. So here's number one. The first thing that you can do off the softball field to help your daughter increase confidence is to give her a solo mission. So based on your daughter's age, these would be age appropriate, of course, but give her something to do that she maybe wouldn't normally do on her own. So these could be things like send her to the checkout on her own to check out at the store. Call to order food or pizza, man. As a, as a kid, you asked me to order pizza over the phone. Whew. That got my heart re our heartbeat going. Calling anybody on the phone was hard back then, it's even that much harder for this newer generation that's not used to it. So calling someone on the phone, um, giving them a small budget for an item that they need to purchase, allowing them to do that research. To look at the different options for that and then allowing them to make that purchase on their own and that this confidence that she's going to develop is confidence that grows when she's able to entrusted to do things on her own, that she's not being shielded from real life responsibilities, that she's being allowed to step out into the world and face the world on her own, and she's going to learn that she can interact with people and adults and other. You know, even teenagers that are around her, and that will help increase her confidence. Um, a big part of this. And I think I see this when I've seen this, uh, as advice for parents with my own children, is that a big part of this whole process is with, along with the solo mission, you need to also allow her to have the solo consequences once again, obviously age appropriate and protect her from anything bodily harm wise. But, um, for example, if you allow her to choose what she's gonna wear to practice, whereas you might be the one that says You have to have a sweatshirt, you have to have a coat, you have to wear gloves, you have to wear a hat, whatever. If you allow her to make the decision to leave the sweatshirt at home, and then she gets to practice and she's cold, don't be the one that's rushing them home to go get the sweatshirt or going to the car to make to see if there's an extra one left. Allow her to then deal with the consequences of her choices. Allow her to deal with. How are you gonna solve this problem? We got to practice now you're cold. What are you gonna do about it? That's gonna be able to, to solve that in a way that I'm not interfering as your parent, but I'm allowing you to realize when you make choices, you also have to deal with the consequences. And that can help. Had to

AB 6:30

do that one time with my sister, not just with cold gear, but this immediately brings back flashbacks. I forgot my glove and I had to spend the entire practice borrowing my sister's second catching mit I, I had to practice as a pitcher. A catching mit because my dad was like, figure it out. Right? Like, I'm not driving 30 minutes home to get you your glove, figure it out. Or borrow a teammates or, you know, share a helmet.

Kara 6:55

Right?

AB 6:56

Which, again, going back to the bodily harm within reason or if she forgot her water. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had pitching lessons where they've forgotten their water and I'm, I'm looking at'em like, I'm your pitching coach. I'm not here to, there's a, there's a water. We had one of those, um, what are the blue jugs called? Like it's like a pure water filter, whatever.

Kara 7:18

Yeah. Like a water jug. Yeah.

AB 7:19

I have no doubt. Some of those girls went back to that water jug and did one of these and put their mouth under the spigot.

Kara 7:26

Yeah.

AB 7:26

Prop seed.

Kara 7:29

Yeah. And then, and then the way that this then would translate onto a softball field is what happens next time when she leaves the ball over their plate and they crank it out to the outfield or hit a home, run off her, right. Something now has gone off the rails. Something that she did has caused the consequence. And now what is she gonna do? She doesn't need to look to her parents or to her coach to be able to solve this problem for her. She then can look inside and say, I can do this. I can handle this, I can, I can. Address this issue on my own and I don't need that outside input.

AB 7:59

And what is, what is the worst case scenario? So I talk about this a lot with my one-to-one clients, is if you leave a ball over the plate and you get a home run jacked off of you, what immediately happens? I don't think that's a question that's actually asked often enough. So you could use this as a parent, did your parents not feed you dinner? Did you get kicked off the team? Did the umpire call time and eject you? No. Like did the earth open up and swallow you? Hold? Does it feel like

Kara 8:28

it? Or even did you lose the game in that moment? Did you lose the game? Right? Like probably not. There's walk off scenarios, but probably you didn't even lose the game.

AB 8:37

And I think if we can show them, and to your point of step number one is to give her a mission that's not softball related. What was the worst that happened? Oh, you got the wrong pizza order. Is your family gonna be mad at you? No. Are we gonna give you a little bit of crap for it? Sure. But like, dang girl, you're 10 years old and you ordered pizza for pizza night, or whatever the, the mission is. So, um, the important part of this is, and I think you mentioned this a little bit, is praising the effort. We have to praise the effort, not the fact that she was successful. That's outcome based. You wanna praise. Hey, you know, I noticed when you picked up the phone, or I noticed when you walked into the store to go buy that thing, you were really nervous, but you came out so excited you did that. You should be proud of yourself. Uh, heck, I'm your mom. I'm proud of you, but are you proud of yourself? You did this hard thing. Was it hard? And then when we start to encourage this in a conversation, the other side of that coin is we can't criticize. We have to, yeah. So

Kara 9:41

be nitpicking how they

9:42

did

Kara 9:43

it.

AB 9:43

You cannot, and I'm already imagining I'm in a season of motherhood where I have, my oldest is eight and I even noticed that I have a hard time shutting up. Like just, it's so hard. Yeah. But if you're mindful of it, and these challenges are just as much for you as parents, as it is for the athletes of like, can you be quiet about her mistakes? Can you let her come to her inferences? Can you let her say, you know what, I'm proud of myself.

Kara 10:10

Well, and, and the, you know, getting rid of the, I told you right. I could see a scenario in which I told my kid to take a sweatshirt and they didn't. And then I'm like, I told you. But instead being like, you know. What can we do differently next time or, or what are you gonna do to solve this problem? Go straight to that. Go straight to the solve. And you, you model this, the problem solving mode of addressing an issue. So I, I remember when I was a kid, for some reason, if we spilled a drink at dinner, I always felt like. And my parents are wonderful, but I always felt like my parents like blamed me. Were like, why would you do that? Why would you spill milk? And my, my feeling inside as a child was always, I never meant to spill any milk, right? That was never my intent. Now, granted, did I leave my milk next to my elbow or too close to the edge, or, you know. Whatever or was I, you know, playing with my siblings and knocked over. There are absolutely things that I could have done differently. And so I've made it a, a overt effort as a parent that when my kids make mistakes that I don't say, why did you do that? I jumped to, what are we gonna do to solve it? Yeah, my kid spills. That's something that at dinner, I'm go grab, let's go grab a towel, let's clean it up, and then we can talk about, all right, why did it spill and what can we do differently to prevent spills? And so allowing her to make age appropriate mistakes and helping her walk through how do we deal with your consequences of your, of your decisions is a much better. Way to develop that confidence then to, why did you do that? Or I told you so, or why didn't you ever listen to me? Um, so giving her that space will allow her to, to feel like, you know what? I can fix my own problems and mistakes are part of being human and that's okay.

AB 11:49

Love it. So, to recap this, what I'm hearing you say and wanna make sure that we put it into action this week is challenge your daughter. To go on a solo mission, we're gonna call this the Solo Mission Challenge. She's gonna pick something that she's never done before. You're gonna empower her to do it on her own, and you're gonna give her the autonomy to do it. And so again, setting the frame, prepping her for it, knowing that you kind of have the stage set. If you're listening to this with your daughter, great. But. The other part of this is, this is also a parent challenge. It's not just a daughter challenge. It's how are we responding as a parent, which I love that we brought that into it. So that's one. Put a bow on it. You ready for number two?

Kara 12:33

Yep.

AB 12:34

Okay. This is my favorite one as a I'm, I'm a true extrovert, and so I love this challenge. This challenge actually came up with one of my longtime clients, and it's challenging her to compliment a stranger. Or start a conversation. And so this actually happened where, um, one of my clients, she does a lot of lifting and so she was at the gym and she noticed another woman who was impressively benching quite a large amount of weight. And she was inspired. And her dad said, why don't you go up and tell her, like, compliment her? Which in my mind. In my mid, you know, thirties and a gym goer, I would have no problem but to a 16-year-old complimenting someone else in the gym, a stranger, someone who's older, someone who's kicking butt that you're impressed by. I love this because what she realized is she was so nervous to go up to this person because we have our own fears of what are they gonna think. I don't wanna be awkward. This is weird. But what ended up happening is it was received so well and we're all human, and she loved this experience because her dad gave her crap about it. But once she did it, she started to realize how often she was holding back because she was worried about. Being awkward or the worst case scenario happening. And so if you can try this with your daughter, encourage her that if she sees somebody doing something awesome or even something that somebody's wearing, encourage her to go up and start a conversation with a stranger. And we're just as guilty of social media, um, Snapchat, texting. This is also gonna help her beyond softball of life skills of like, can you talk to a stranger? Can you introduce yourself to a stranger? Can you articulate yourself? And again, going back to, we talked about this for the first challenge, what happened? Did the, did the person glare at you? You okay? You might get a glare, but what's the worst thing that happens if somebody rejects your compliment?

Kara 14:43

Yeah. Or if you just feel awkward about it, you know? Yeah. There's worse things in the world and there is so much junk in the world today that at the very least we're putting more good out into the world. And that's, that's a big thing to be able to do because what we put out into the world is what comes back to us as well. And so if we can just, you know, brighten one person's day by giving them a sincere compliment. We've done something good with our time and some, something good on this earth. And so. That is, we cannot underestimate the, the value that we put into the world when we, when we participate in that way. And then, like you said, when it comes to time to have a job interview or time to network, right? Networking is huge these days and, and being able to not only get a job but advance in your career, you need to know how to interact with people and you need to know how to. Connect with people. And one of the best ways to connect with somebody is by giving a CRE compliment and being able to talk to that person, um, in a way that, that makes'em feel good. And

AB 15:42

as we planned this episode, you had a great idea for competitors.

Kara 15:46

Yeah. Yeah, competitors. I mean, I think so often and, and women tend to do this too, we some for some reason feel like we are in competition with just about everybody that we meet. Like I think kind of there's this natural little seed in women that we look at a girl who, you know, maybe has a body shape that we wish that we had, and we think, oh, her body shape is so much better than mine. Or that it's stronger than us or better than us. And we just immediately feel that competition with, with the world around us. One way that we can start to lessen that competition is by celebrating other women or other people's wins. And so just like she did at the gym where she complimented another woman who was just killing it, um, that is, that is awesome. But we can do this. How often are we at softball tournaments where we play against teams that someone has? It makes a great play. Or is it pitches really well or has a huge hit or whatever, and regardless of the outcome of the game, whether we won or we lost that game, if we can give sincere compliments to our competitors, then it helps for us to see them in a light that's not just you're my evil competitor that I must crush. Right? We, we look at'em more as like. Look at you, look at you out there diving after that ball and picking it up and, and, and putting your team on your back, like nice work out there. And once again, it helps to create this larger sense of community that we would like to have in the softball community. You know, see that girl after you get run ruled by a team and you see the pitcher that shut you out and go, go up to her and say, Hey, amazing pitching, nice work. Um, like how far does that go? I think it does two things. I think the first thing it does is, like I said, puts that good out into the world. And the second thing is it reminds us that like it's a game. Just because someone outplayed us on the day doesn't mean that we're somehow lesser than or, or not as good as, or don't have as much potential. And so it helps kind of bring down that temperature. And so that picture is no longer that evil girl that we couldn't hit off of, but instead a girl that just killed it and like, let's celebrate her for her really successful day. I'm gonna get you next time, but today you had us, right?

AB 17:48

Yeah. Even something as simple as if you got beat on a changeup. And this is a conversation I have, I would bet money on it. I have this conversation every single week when we recap, wins, mistakes and betters from the previous week's competitions and games is if you got beat on a change up or a rise ball and you executed everything correctly, your process, you barreled the ball, your timing was great and you just happened to pop up a changeup. It doesn't mean that you suck at hitting. It just means she had a really wicked changeup. And then if we switch those roles, I have a lot of pitching clients. If you hit your spot, it had amazing movement. The velocity was there. And a girl jacks a home run off of you. Tip the cap babe.

Kara 18:33

Yeah.

AB 18:34

Like tip the cap. Yeah. It doesn't mean you suck, it just means this is, that's what makes our game great.

Kara 18:39

Right. And when and when we see our opponents in that way, as opposed to people that we're supposed to crush or that we want to crush, and instead see them as fellow athletes who are doing their best and having, you know, their best and worst moments in front of us. It just humanizes everybody and yeah, and it, and. Talk about that ability to recover from failure. If you can learn to tip your cap. I, my, my high school volleyball coach would say that all the time, like, you can put up the best block, you can have the best defense around your block. You can have everything going the right way. And sometimes you just have to say, nice hit, right? Like,

AB 19:12

yeah.

Kara 19:13

It just, it, it doesn't have to be. Either I'm good or they're good and no in between it can be I'm showing up at my best and they're showing up at their best. And their best happens to be better than me in this instance. And so once again, it takes down that temperature, it takes down that, oh, because she hit a home run off me. Now I'm a terrible pitcher. It's good work. Nice. Hit next batter and it helps us kind of flip that script of, okay, let's turn, turn it over to now. What am I gonna do next?

AB 19:41

Love it. So good.

Kara 19:42

Yeah. So how are we gonna put this into action? How are we gonna, what are we gonna do this week? Um, so with your daughter, come up with a situation and it's really helpful if parents can observe this as well from a distance. Don't get involved, but, you know, be able to stand back and watch it happen. Find a, find a situation where you know you're gonna be around strangers. So this could be, um, at a game, could be at a tournament, could be in the grocery store, could be, you know, at church or somewhere else where you, there's people that, that your daughter maybe doesn't normally converse with on a regular basis and push her towards, Hey, go pick somebody out that you can give a sincere compliment to or start a conversation with. Introduce yourself and have at it and watch her be able to develop that confidence to be able to walk up to somebody and to. To sincerely compliment or to start a conversation. Um, and you'll, you'll be able to see the, the confidence that will grow in her as a result of being able to do that.

AB 20:38

So good. And you could do this every week. These challenges don't just have to live within the span of, oh, we did it. Thanks ab Thanks Kara. We got this. Like,

Kara 20:48

okay,

AB 20:48

I'm down, but I'm also an extrovert so I won't push it. Alright, hit us with three.

Kara 20:56

Oh, the last one, number three. Uh, and this one, I, I love this one. put her in a situation or have her try something that she's not good at. So, most of the people listening to this, most parents and and athletes listening to this are specialized in a sport. They spend hours and hours and. Thousands of thousands of dollars on one single sport that hopefully she's gotten very good at, right by this point. Hopefully she's progressed and this is it for her and this is what she wants to do, you know, through college and and beyond. Um, so as a result, if, if she's spending so much time doing the one thing that she's really, really good at. She probably is missing out on some experiences of being able to try and to fail and to understand what it's like to learn something new. So if you can push her into trying a class or an activity or just like, it doesn't even have to be anything super organized, something pick up that she's a beginner at something that she's not good at, something she's not practiced or spent thousands of dollars developing, um, then. It helps her normalize being bad at something and really focusing instead of, I'm good because I've worked on this forever and turning it into like, I'm bad now, but I can grow and I can get better. Um, so some ideas for this are if she could take a dance class or hop in on a dance class doing some sort of art project together. Uh. Try to learn coding. I have no idea how to do any sort of coding on a computer. That would be something I'd be super bad at that I could try. Um, or do like a pickup sport. Go in the back and throw a Frisbee. If you've never really thrown a Frisbee before, that's hard and you gotta work at it to get better at it. Go shoot hoops at a local park. Go do something that's not softball, that's not her one sport that she's really good at, and allow her to be bad at something at the beginning, and to be a beginner again,

AB 22:50

I would add cooking a meal. Yeah. Or like baking cookies. I, and if, if you, if you're a warrior, this is my one analogy that I love using at every single camp. Kara and I have talked about this. You know, even at our Michigan camp is the recipe. If you were to bake cookies and you just. Threw ingredients in and you didn't major anything, and these cookies turn out amazing. You pull'em out of the oven, you have no idea. You know, mom already had the oven on. You just, you threw it all together and these cookies were amazing. bomb.com, most delicious cookies ever. How confident would you be making those cookies again? The likelihood of that is low. But when you know what goes into making those cookies, we can learn so much just by observing what process. You know, I, maybe these cookies didn't turn out, but why didn't they turn out? Well, I, you know, followed the recipe and I forgot the sugar. And so if part of this is like trying a new recipe, even if the recipe fails. If she follows a recipe, she's gonna know exactly what led to her success. So if she's trying something new and she stinks at it, and then you say, okay, I really wanna do pickleball every single week, she can start to see how her recipe gets a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. And then instead of stigmatizing the outcome of the recipe or the, you know, the meal or the pickle ball, they can start to see the process that went into it. Whereas I think sometimes with. Softball as our primary example is because they've been doing it for so long and they're successful at it. If you ask them, Hey, what's your recipe? Hopefully our warriors know,'cause we talk about this, like what's your why? What's your self-talk? They're aware of those things, but if your athlete has never done mental training with us, and you ask them this question, what's your recipe? What makes you successful with softball? Nine times outta 10. They can't, they can't name it.

Kara 24:49

Yeah. So getting, getting out of that and going back to being a beginner and realizing what does it take to get better at something, helps them then kind of reverse engineer that process and to start over with that process with something that they're not good at. And the the things that you can pull from, from what you learn about being bad at something, they directly will impact the thing that you're good at. And I, I noticed this most clearly with, I have a couple of one-on-one clients that both played basketball this winter. Um, at their schools, and neither of them, obviously, both softball athletes, neither one of them would consider basketball their main sport. But as I would talk to them about, you know, you know, me being a basketball lover, a multi-sport athlete, lover, like I, I loved talking to'em about basketball and asking them about. Some of these mental skills we've been talking about for softball and how they have helped them in basketball as well. And it was really interesting to me. Both of them would share experiences that they were having from basketball where they would struggle. They, they wasn't, they weren't very good'cause it's not their main sport. Or they would, you know, they would make mistakes or whatever. And both of them were pretty nonchalant. They were like. I made a mistake, but I was trying really hard and I was doing, trying to do the right things and doing what my coach asked me to, and you know, I just, I just messed up. And they weren't having the same, like, I would ask'em like, well, did you fall apart? Did you make more mistakes? Did you, are you like super down on yourself? Are you blaming yourself and are you taking responsibility for the loss and all this stuff? And they'd be like, no, why would I do that? Then I would say, well then why do you do that in softball? Like, like what? And they would be like, oh, oh,

AB 26:20

no,

Kara 26:21

reverse. I dunno. Right? Like, why? Why would you be so harsh on yourself? Because in softball you're not trying any less hard, you're not doing any less what the coaches are asking you to like, that's a whole other question. If that's what's happening, if what you're, it's what's, if the problem is you're not doing what your coach is telling you to and you're not trying very hard. That's a whole other conversation to have. But these girls are working super hard. They're trying to implement everything their coaches are saying, but turns out, even if in the sport that they're best at, they're still human. So why are we not allowing ourselves that grace and that space to fail even in the stuff that we're good at? And for them, that was a really enlightening thing to think about of like. I can give myself grace in my main sport, and I, I practiced it in my not main sport. And so that, that conversion from taking stuff from things we're not good at, that we can then apply over into the things that we are good at, really, really helps our confidence to grow.

AB 27:14

Love it. So putting this into action. Pick an activity. Kara and I gave you guys lots of, um, examples. If you are pressed for time and you don't have time to do another sport, an even simpler option for this is in our challenges. One of the things that we do is at night have your daughter brush her teeth with her non-dominant hand, and you know when you do that again as a reminder. She's gonna be uncomfortable. Let her be in the discomfort, but praise how she did and that she was willing to try something new and recap it with her.

Kara 27:51

Yeah. You know, this really makes me think about the experience that we had a couple summers ago when we were at the retreat and had the opportunity for the girls to go rock climbing, or even last year when we did the ropes course. Mm-hmm. And had the opportunity to do some of these like really scary challenges up high. And how many girls at the end of the retreat said that was their favorite part, was getting to go rock, rock climbing every, yeah. That, that was their favorite part. It rock. And something most of them had never done before. Yeah. They had never gone rock climbing. They had never done these things, and most of'em weren't necessarily very good, but they said that that was their very favorite part of the retreat was getting to do those things that, that they had never done before, like that.

AB 28:28

Well, and I would love to talk about that because we're in the middle of it. And selfishly, the whole point of the retreat is this theme that we talked about today of we wanted to come up with an event that pushed them outta their comfort zone that gave them an opportunity to do things. I'll never forget this, the very first retreat we brought in, um, one of Omaha's top female, um, police officers, and she taught our girls self-defense. You wanna talk about? Really uncomfortable. She was like holding up her hand and the girls got to punch a cop. So that we wanna talk about awkward, but it's this idea of like trying self-defense, trying rock climbing. Last year we did archery and we had no expectation that they had to be perfect or good at it. I mean, archery was way harder than I expected, and I have,

Kara 29:20

mm-hmm.

AB 29:20

So much inflated confidence when it comes to things, but trying to get it, you know, I snapped my arm or trying to get it and the girls are experiencing this. And so I think for us, the reason that I wanted to talk about this today, and I'm so glad you brought it up, is this summer is our fifth annual, and we have learned so much about what the girls have loved most. And you know, we always say it's the only camp where you leave your gear at home, and I think sometimes that's a little nerve wracking, but it's intentional because by the time the end of July rolls around, they've played club and travel softball all summer long. Hopefully by then they have played their nationals. They're done with their tournament. We want them to come to Nebraska, spend a week with us, unplug from your sport, but make no mistake in it. You can hear it in our conversation today. It has nothing to do with softball, nothing to do with their sports, and in the same breath, it's everything.

Kara 30:22

Right. Everything will translate.

AB 30:24

Yeah.

Kara 30:24

Just like all of these, all of these different challenges technically had nothing to do softball, but are gonna directly impact her confidence when she steps on the field. It's the same way with the retreat. We don't ever pull out a Batten ball and start hitting grounders at these girls, but you will see an impact when they go to face a grounder in a tight situation because that confidence that they've worked on building and growing at the retreat, and then these other activities will show up in those moments when they most need it.

AB 30:50

So good. Well, if you want early access by the time this episode airs, you can get early access. We're opening up spots this year. We are actually doing day tickets. So we have a new location. We have not unveiled the location yet, so I can't give that away. But we're gonna be playing, um, we might be playing some, uh, softball related games at a really prestigious, well-known softball field. Hint, hint. Um, and so if you want all that information, like location, the dorms that we're gonna be staying in. The activities that we'll be doing. Um, we will, by the time this episode airs, we have confirmed some of our guest speakers. And what I love most about the guest speakers that we bring in is they share their stories too, from softball and outside softball and all the things. So we'll link that below in the show notes. Um, it is fearless warriors.org is our new website and I believe it's slash retreat waitlist. And so you'll get immediate access to that information. All you have to do is put your name, your email, and then we need your age as well, um, so we can start planning.

Kara 31:59

It's gonna be the best four days of your athlete summer. I'm excited. Can say that. Can we just guarantee it right now?

AB 32:06

It is, it, it is one of my favorite weeks of the summer because the takeaways and the tears I cry on the last day, almost every day. Um, and parents, when they pick up too, I think it's really cool. The conversations and the dms that we get after they've picked up their daughter of just the transformation and the lessons and the friendships. We have some girls that,

Kara 32:28

right. So the connections, yeah,

AB 32:30

they still, if even if they didn't come to last year's retreat, they've made friends in previous retreats and they're Snapchat buddies and Instagram buddies and they just, they've kept it up, so.

Kara 32:39

Mm-hmm.

AB 32:40

Awesome. Well, that's a wrap. Um, we'll make sure that we also recap this for you guys in the show notes, and then if you do one of these challenges. With your daughter, send us a dm, let us know how it went. If you have a hilarious story to tell us. We also wanna hear that we don't wanna embarrass your daughter, but tell us like, how did it go? Um, and if you loved this style of episode, we wanna do more of these. So if there's a question or a topic that you want Coach Kara and I to, to riff on, we will we'll record more of these.

Kara 33:14

Happy to talk.

AB 33:15

Yeah, thanks for, thanks for saving me and not making me do a solo episode. This is great.

Kara 33:20

Yeah,

AB 33:21

no.