Emotional coaching for young

Simeone, the coach of Atletico Madrid, after the Champions League final lost stated that “you can win by losing if you give it your all”. It’s a key concept for the development of an athlete and should be taught from the first day a boy or girl enters a playing field. On the contrary, we see young people who, as soon as they make a mistake, become angry with themselves or depressed. We know that this happens for a variety of reasons:

• parents often don’t recognize the value of commitment and think that only winning matters, so they get angry with their children for their mistakes and would like to take the place of the coach to give him technical directions,
• coaches are more focused on teaching technique and do not train athletes emotionally,
• young people themselves are not able to express their emotions in a constructive way and lack self-control.

Therefore, we see young tennis players who slam the racket to the ground after a mistake alternating moods of anger and depression against themselves or in other sports, once a mistake is made, others follow almost quickly, because the athletes are dominated by frustration due to the first mistake. To change this way of living defeats and mistakes we need parents and coaches who are more aware that their role includes teaching self-control, working with their children and athletes to change these destructive behaviors. We certainly don’t need to impose our adult solutions to their problems.

We need to listen empathetically and not to judge, so that young people feel supported and respected in their states of mind. Only after this stage should we begin to talk about what could be done differently, giving the young people time to express their ideas and us time to stimulate their awareness of their way of acting and identify possible solutions. Acting in this way takes time and it is often for this reason that adults do not follow this path. However, we must be aware that if we often fail to intervene, young people will begin to think that their reactions do not interest their parents and coaches and, worse still, they will continue to behave negatively towards themselves. If we want our kids to develop the ability to effectively and satisfactorily manage their daily stresses, we need to spend time teaching them how to behave, feel and think in those moments.