Tag: mental toughness

Fear of failure looks and feels differently for every athlete. For some athletes, worrying about messing up can translate into playing timid and holding back from their ultimate potential. For…

February 3, 2021, is the 35th annual National Girls & Women in Sports Day. This day calls on girls and women to own their inner and outer strength while recognizing…

The tiny blue star of The Little Engine That Could was onto something: She used a mantra to fill herself with confidence and conquered an ‘impossible’ hill. Stanford researchers and others have…

Finding the right teams, coaches, private training, and equipment are important tasks for sports parents as they strive to help their kids reach their potential in sports. But as parents…

One of the hardest things for me as a sports mom was watching my kids get discouraged. It would happen after they’d worked hard to win a starting spot, a…

This is the first of a three-part book excerpt from The Playmaker’s Advantage, available wherever books are sold. By Daniel Peterson and Leonard Zaichkowsky, Ph.D. How hard could it be?…

There is nothing more frustrating than standing on the sidelines or sitting in the bleachers, helplessly watching your child make mistakes and play half-heartedly. The desire that many sports parents…

Every now and then we all need reminders of what youth sports is really all about. Use these core values as that reminder and never forget that youth sports are really about…

Which is more important for a young athlete: The body, or the mind? Whenever I ask this question to coaches and athletes, most tell me that the mental side of…

Thousands of times a day, worldwide, a child or teenage athlete wakes up on game day with a huge knot in his or her stomach. As they go through their…

How do you introduce and describe your kids?  A study in 2002 from the Journal of Attitudes and Social Cognition examined people’s names and the impact on careers they chose….

Like it or not, sports come with pressure. There will come a time when your young athlete gets the ball with the clock winding down or steps up with the…

Will had been taking batting lessons from me for about a year. He was a really nice 11-year-old kid with average athletic ability, and very respectable. We got along great!…

Has your young athlete ever gone into a game competing against him or herself? You might be thinking, Of course not! Why would anyone do that? Well, no one goes…

“I had a bad practice.” This is a common complaint I hear from athletes I work with. A bad practice can make some young athletes feel frustrated and angry. At…

Many parents have told me that their child does well in the batting cage, but when playing in a game, it looks like they’ve never swung a bat before. Pressure…

One day at my hitting school, during a class with nine-year-old boys, we were working on the technique of hitting the ball using a pitching machine. One boy, Jake, was…

People have frequently asked me the question “what happens when an athlete gets faster?” There are a lot of benefits, from constantly beating your opponent to improving your vertical jump….