Help Your Children With The Mental Game

The key for parents and coaches is to play two games with kids

Play The Unrealistic Game

Have your child play with less skilled opponents so they win many matches.

I can remember a famous tennis example of this very principle. Andre Agassi played Challenger tournaments to  regain his confidence. Nothing changed in his stroke technique or knowledge of tennis strategy, and he was fit enough to play 3-set matches, but he needed confirmation that he is a winner, WHATEVER winning it was.

The mind will eventually remember only the win and not the circumstances. Just as the unrealistic mind can destroy one's confidence, it can build confidence through unrealistic wins.

Encourage your child, and become master of NOTICING WHEN HE/SHE IS SUCCESSFUL instead of noticing when they make a mistake. It takes good awareness and practicing for a while to change this automatic pattern we have in our minds.

If I sometimes see that my players are not in a good mood, I stop instructing them or (God forbid ;)) correcting them. Instead, I WAIT UNTIL they make a good shot, and then I comment on it.

That's how I shift their awareness from mistakes to good shots. Their mood and energy improves.

The other game that you need to play is the realistic game.

The Realistic Game

Young children (up to 14 or 16 years old) often don't get it. Their emotional mind tells them that they missed ALL the easy shots, and you are telling them that they missed 2 and hit 5 shots well.

I've had good success by showing examples and statistics from top players.

I've shown kids tournament stats proving that you cannot ALWAYS beat lower ranked players.

I've shown top players missing 10 greens to help kids realize that you cannot always be perfect. And so on. Showing them proof (through videos, statistics, and other documentation) is much better than trying to persuade them.

Because eventually you need to get kids aligned with reality, so they don't create limiting beliefs!

This is what I call "acceptance." It means that you accept reality as it is and don't fight it. It means accepting that your wants and wishes may not come true soon (not today, tomorrow, or whenever) but you keep trying.

Eventually you need to shut down your thinking and just play. A player needs to enter the zone for best performance, where there is no thinking and no mental skills. In the zone you don't control your arousal, you don't monitor your thoughts, you don't need to take time to breathe and let go of the tension, you just play.

So, eventually, a player must learn not to think but to play automatically. It's quite a journey to this stage, but it happens now and then even when a player is young.

For the end, I would like to add some of my thoughts on this matter.

Since I've been working as mental coach for golf players for some years now, I've often been approached by parents who said that their child needs help in the mental game.

And I agree, since the mental game is a challenging one, and children need guidance and support to master it.

But not many parents realize that it is THEIR behavior that is the cause of major mental weaknesses of their child.

It is the parents who need to work on their mental game in order to help their children.

They need to be confident, to trust in their child, to control their emotions, to think positively and to accept reality even when it's not to their liking.

Children are very strongly influenced by their parent's behavior and emotional responses, much more influenced than by their parent's talk, especially if they detect a difference (insincerity) between the parent's talk and real feelings.

It's a journey for both a golf parent and a junior player.

It's not about fixing your child's faults or weaknesses, it's about accepting and loving children as they are. They will improve by themselves.