I saw a clip where a mother of a 11 or 12 year old girl asked Gary Vanyerchuck about her daughter’s self confidence.
He told the mom that if he could advise her daughter, it would be to build her self esteem. Now , if you google Gary V self esteem, you’ll get a slew of videos and posts from years ago.
His point is that self esteem needs to be the most protected entity for our young people (especially girls). How they view themselves is absolutely EVERYTHING.
We as coaches are in powerful positions to help our kids define their self esteem, and build it alongside them.
Self esteem is NOT all rah-rah ‘you’re great’, self esteem is introspective (and that’s hard as a 30-something, let alone a teenager!). Self esteem is the conversations our players have with themselves every minute of every day.
I don’t know about you, but there are certain sentences that other people have said to me that I can still hear in their voices inside my head. One was my college’s coach’s brutal honesty with me when she told me ‘it’d be a travesty for us if you left, but there’s nothing we can do to make you stay’. Another was my former goalie coach, who has since unfortunately passed away, telling our players (when we had the chance to coach together) that I was the best goalie the program’s ever seen. (I don’t know about that, but he’d coached every single goalie in the girls soccer program, and he was always honest and never blew smoke.)
. You have the chance to be that for another person, whether that’s an athlete, a colleague, or a family member.. My challenge for you (and this is a hard one!) be the positive voice your kids hear over and over in their heads.
