Lessons Learned From Our Mom-Daughter Costa Rica Retreat That You Can Use with Your Own Athlete!

In this episode, Coach Bre shares the incredible experiences and lessons from the recent mom-daughter retreat in Costa Rica. Discover how getting out of your comfort zone, investing in confidence, being a role model, and finding community can transform your relationship with your athlete and her mental game.

 What's Covered

• Importance of shared experiences
• Moms and daughters participated in activities together
• Yoga sessions about mental clarity and strength
• Mental training sessions

Curious to learn more? Listen to the full podcast episode!

Apply the Lessons Today

Your daughter can have the confidence and mental strength she needs to excel in sports and life. The skills we taught at the retreat are not exclusive to the waves of Costa Rica; they are practical tools you can start using today.

Episode Highlights:

[00:01:03] Coach Bree introduces the retreat and its purpose, focusing on building mental strength and enhancing the mother-daughter bond.

[00:02:47] Lesson 1: Getting out of your comfort zone is the key to growth.

[00:06:26] Lesson 2: You will never regret investing in your daughter's confidence and mental game.

[00:08:55] Lesson 3: You are the closest and most influential example of confidence in your daughter's life.

[00:10:37] Lesson 4: Investing in tools and community to support you and your athlete is invaluable.

[00:14:00] Future plans and how to get involved with Elite Mental Game and other programs.

Next Steps:

• Join The Elite Mental Game with a $400 Discount here!
• Register here for free! *Relay available
• Visit our podcast website for more great episodes

Thank you in advance for joining us on our mission and leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to the Raising Elite Competitors podcast. I'm Coach Brie, a mental performance coach for girl athletes, and I'm so excited that you're here. Whether you are a sports parent just getting going on this sports journey with your athlete, or maybe you have a lot of seasons under your belt, this podcast is for you to help how to raise a confident, mentally strong girl athlete. That's exactly what we do here at the Elite Competitor. We build confidence, mental strength in athletes through our podcasts, through our program, the Elite Mental Game, we also coach driven, high-performing female entrepreneurs who are making an impact in this world. All to enable our mission to inspire and enable a generation of strong, confident women. I am particularly excited about today's episode because I just got back from Costa Rica hosting our mom-daughter retreat for the past nine days. I just got home yesterday hosting our mom-daughter retreat for the past nine days. I just got home yesterday and, while things are top of mind, I really wanted to come on here and share some lessons that were learned at our retreat, some observations that I made and how you can be implementing these things in yourself, with your daughter and with your relationship with your athlete. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 1:03

First of all, a little bit about this retreat. This is our third year doing our mom daughter retreat in Costa Rica. We partner with an amazing surfing yoga company down there called Bodhi Surfing Yoga, where we work with them to really create this magical experience for moms and athletes. We've got surfing yoga, mental training daily for athletes, mindset for moms and then mom daughter connection. We also do a lot of fun activities throughout the whole week to foster a couple of things really for our athletes mental strength and so that they can be implementing the tools that they're learning within the week within surfing and some other things that get them out of their comfort zone, so that they also have these skills for their sport when they go home and then also for their relationship with their mom. So there's a lot of intentional ways that we connect moms and daughters in this retreat, a lot of opportunities to share with one another, because the mom-daughter relationship is so special and it's really amazing to just watch, to be a facilitator of this, and just watch the relationships that deepen and this bond that grows. And you know, by the end of the week it's just exciting for me to see how each of these unique relationships has grown and kind of what they're going to go home, as I have about.

Speaker 1: 2:13

Let's see here four things that really stuck out to me this year when we were doing this retreat. So I'm just going to go through each of these four again while they're top of mind, and I hope that these are things that you can be thinking about. You don't actually have to go to Costa Rica with me to really have these happen in your life and your daughter's life with your relationship with her. That's really my intention here is that you can be taking some of this retreat magic home with you, just by way of some of the lessons that that I have observed, and also we have opportunities within our business right now that you can run with and start applying these things. All right. So the number one lesson is this getting out of your comfort zone is the key to growth. So I think that we're like, oh, obviously, but it's not until athletes were actually faced with this and moms too at the retreat that I was like, wow, yes, we can not go through life just maintaining our comfort and expect to grow or get better in any areas.

Speaker 1: 3:08

So surfing is a main component of this retreat and for most people, this is a brand new skill and that brings up some fears in some people, some fears of the ocean or what's in the ocean, of even just trying something new and not being good at it. And the thing about it is we need these experiences to grow and to get better. And there were some other things that we did throughout the retreat that, if it wasn't surfing, maybe it was yoga. We did an hour and a half to two hours of yoga a day as well on this retreat and some of you were like, oh my gosh, that sounds really hard, and for some it was. That was the thing that got them out of their comfort zone. For others, it was the waterfall repelling. It was jumping off the platform of a waterfall.

Speaker 1: 3:45

All of these opportunities presented a way for athletes to step out and to face their fears and also to exercise bravery, and this involves struggle and involved athletes being like gosh, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I want to do this. You know hitting up against some of the self-talk that's limiting athletes and limiting moms. It's not just happening this week in Costa Rica. It was also happening in their sport and in their life and some of these other areas. And this is, you know, sometimes hard for us as parents to watch our daughters struggle out of their comfort zone, and we have to be able to support them with the right words or the right silence in these moments, because really that's where they are growing. But here is the main thing that I really took away from this.

Speaker 1: 4:27

I think we all agree that getting out of your comfort zone is important and that's how we grow, but the thing is, athletes often don't actually have the skills to help them in these moments. They're told to get out of their comfort zone, they're told that this is where the growth happens, they're told to just be brave, but they actually don't have tangible skills to help them in those moments. Right, so they're out there, and some of the things that we taught this week were, when you're out there and you're about to try to get up on a wave and you feel the wave coming and you're feeling that sense of fear, to acknowledge the fear, to see it instead of pushing it down. And then we would have equipped them with a mantra or a word or a breathing technique that they can use in those moments A different way of thinking of things. We went through exercises where they got down to.

Speaker 1: 5:09

What are the limiting beliefs that are holding me back? What are the things that are making it hard for me to show up in these moments and be brave? Most athletes actually don't have those skills. They are just like, okay, here we go, and then typically they either you know they won't do the thing, or they'll hold back, or they'll hesitate and they'll just limit their potential, and so that's kind of like you know, one A to this or one B is like yeah, growth is found outside of the comfort zone, but we've got to give our athletes skills. We have to equip them with the self-talk and with the techniques to be able to face these moments. So that was my key takeaway there is that, yeah, she has to feel the fear, she has to step outside of her comfort zone and take calculator risks, but she also needs the skills to support her in those moments.

Speaker 1: 5:54

And your daughter is out of her comfort zone every day in her sport, right, she is learning new things, she is playing in games or she's competing in moments where it's going to feel hard, and she needs to lean on her skills in those moments and what she is saying to herself matters the skills that she has, the tools that she's using in those moments is really important. And if she doesn't have those, then she either is not going to take those risks. She's going to back down, she's going to like play below her potential and it's going to make it even harder than it already is in those moments. Okay, number two is you will never regret investing in your daughter's confidence in her mental game never.

Speaker 1: 6:31

A lot of times I hear from people who are like considering joining the elite mental game, which is our signature mental training program for girl athletes. It is a self-paced program that athletes go through to learn the skills of confidence and mental strength for their sport and for their life, and they're like well, you know, I don't know if she needs it. Yeah, like she does, but you know, there's just kind of this hesitation sometimes and because often they're thinking of it just in terms of their sport. Right, and what I heard over and over from moms at this retreat, and what I know to be true as well, is that these are not just skills that your daughter's developing for her sport. Yeah, we love her sport. I love volleyball. I played it for a long time. I played in college. I still coach it, but it's not actually the sport that I love. Yeah, it's fun, but I use that sport as a vehicle to help athletes with these skills so that they have them for their life.

Speaker 1: 7:21

Okay, because she is going to be, her sport is really the easiest way where she can apply these skills of confidence, where she can learn to advocate for herself. She can take those healthy risks. She can feel the fear, feel the pressure show up anyway, develop her belief about herself. Her sport is the easiest thing for her to actually apply these things. However, this transfers well beyond her sport. Hey, these are life skills that your daughter is developing, right? Because if she cannot advocate for herself in her sport and in that situation she likely is not going to advocate for herself with her teachers or with somebody in her life a boss, but she's not going to be able herself with her teachers or with somebody in her life a boss, but she's not going to be able to actually have that skill in those moments either. If she doesn't believe in herself and her sport, she likely is not going to believe in herself and her academics believe in herself to take that risk, to apply for that job, to speak up. All of these things are just a mirror of what she's experiencing in her life.

Speaker 1: 8:12

So you're really not just investing in something that's going to help her in her sport. You're investing in something that actually will serve her for the rest of her life, and that's what I heard over and over from moms throughout the retreat, like these are skills that, yeah, she gets to apply that right here with surfing. She gets to apply it with her sport back home, right, but these are life skills. She's in situations every single day where she needs to show up as herself. She needs to show up with confidence, right, she's got to take risks, all of those things, and this is where she develops those skills, okay. Number one was getting out of comfort zone is key to growth, and we need to support athletes with the skills to actually know how to be brave in those situations. Number two you will never regret investing in your daughter's confidence, in her mental game, because because it's not just for her sports, for her life. Number three you are the closest and most influential example of confidence in your daughter's life, and I saw this over and over.

Speaker 1: 9:01

What's really cool about the retreat is that moms are also doing the things that athletes are doing. They're surfing, they're waterfall repelling, they're jumping into the waterfall, and it was really cool for athletes to actually see an example of their moms real time struggling, learning something new, of falling down and getting back up of their self-talk when it came to learning a new skill and not being good at it, and everything from body image to, you know, like just owning their bodies in a swimsuit as simple as that. It was really amazing to see these athletes have this very tangible example of their moms struggling through something and also their self-talk and their confidence, because you are that close example. Whether you think she's watching you, whether you think she's listening to you or not, you are. She's a sponge and she's taking it all in. And we talk a lot about that in our program with the elite mental game.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Most of it is for athletes to develop their mental skills, but we also have support for parents throughout the program as well, and we talk a lot about your way of modeling confidence, and confidence Isn't just like pretending to be happy all the time. It's not pretending like you have it all together Always. It is like you can face any situation and be adaptable, and that's exactly what athletes and moms are able to do this week, but guess what? You have opportunities every single day to model this for your daughter, and I encourage you to look for ways to model confidence, to model trying new things, to model how you respond to setbacks, how you respond to stress Like you don't need to go to Costa Rica and come on this retreat, although it's fun to do this and take that lesson away.

Speaker 1: 10:34

Okay, number four, the one that we're going to wrap up with, is you will never regret investing in tools and community to help you. So we said number two you'll never regret investing in confidence and mental skills for your daughter, but you also will never regret investing in the tools that you need and the community you need as a mom to support your athlete. What was really cool is that I got to sit in on a lot of the conversations that the moms were having throughout the retreat, so they had a lot of opportunities to just chat with each other and just the connection and the fact that they were able to find common ground in this whole journey was truly amazing, and I can't tell you how life-giving it was for me to watch, but also for the moms to experience that, hey, I'm not alone or you struggle with that too, and this is what we're facing with my daughter. How did you navigate that? And just not only being seen, being heard, but also hearing like how other people have navigated things was so valuable to the moms on the retreat and so investing in tools and community, and the other part of it is that we would teach some skills to the moms themselves on. Here's how you can navigate the post-competition meltdown. Here's how you can help your athlete If she's nervous before a game or before one of these things even this week that she's feeling nervous about. Here's how you can hold space for her. All of those tools, because you're going to be in it, like it's just inevitable that her journey in her sport is going to be bumpy, if it hasn't already been right. There's going to be ups and downs. It's not necessarily a bad thing, right, because you're building skills, she's building skills. But if you don't have those skills and you don't have the community, it's a heck of a law herder, right. And that community and those skills to support you are really that connection, that lifeblood, that feeling of I'm not alone on this journey and, again, you don't have to go to Costa Rica for that. While, again, it's fun, the retreat's amazing. That's the community that we have actually created for you inside our program and inside the Elite Competitor.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Part of our mission is to not just give athletes the skills that they need. We know that athletes do best when they have parents who know how to support them, and so we build in community. We have a private community for all the moms. We also do monthly calls together. We do monthly mixers to connect so that you know you're not alone. And we know also that the journey is a lot easier and it's a lot more productive when we have people who have been there and are there with us. So those are my key takeaways and things that you can actually use right away without going to Costa Rica.

Speaker 1: 13:07

Number one getting out of your comfort zone is the key to growth. It's also the key for your daughter's growth, but she also needs the skills to know what to do in the face of risk and how she talks about herself in those moments. Her self-talk, her techniques and her tools to be able to face those moments with confidence are key, and those are also needed. Number two you will never regret investing in your daughter's confidence, in her mental game. These are skills not just for her sport, it's for life. Number three you are the closest, most influential example of confidence in her life, so be looking for areas where you can model that for her. And number four you will never regret investing in tools and community to help you as a mom.

Speaker 1: 13:42

Now the question that we have been getting this whole week is when will you do another retreat? And, like I said, this has been our third one. It's amazing. Every year, however, we're not sure. We're kind of at this point where we really have a mission to impact as many people as possible, and while the retreat is absolutely amazing, we're not sure where that fits into that mission, if I'm being totally honest. And so we have some other things in the work and, to be honest, the best way that you can give your daughter these skills and that you can learn the skills that we taught at the retreat is through our program, the Elite Mental Game.

Speaker 1: 14:15

Now, this is our self-paced program for girl athletes to develop mental strength and confidence. They access it through any device. They watch short videos, they interact with me in the portal. They get live coaching for me as well. I've had over 5,000 moms and athletes come through this program. It's truly life-changing. So we know that we can really do the most impact through that program. And to learn a little bit more, you can head to trainhergamecom. That's actually a link to our free training, where we give you a behind the scenes look on what our method is when it comes to coaching girl athletes and also an introduction to what EMG is and a discount to join. So trainhergamecom is a great way to get going with that. If you're like, yeah, I just want to know what the program is itself, I'll link to that as well below with that $400 discount as well. Itself, I'll link to that as well below with that $400 discount as well. In terms of any more in person things or any other retreats, we'll definitely keep everybody in the loop on what we've got on the radar. We have talks of potentially a conference in Pacific Northwest, where we live, where we can bring more people in, make it a little more accessible for people to come to. So that's kind of on our radar.

Speaker 1: 15:15

We're also really excited about the business coaching that we're providing for female entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1: 15:20

So we coach other business owners to run, grow, develop, scale businesses that are similar to us.

Speaker 1: 15:27

So that is also in line with our mission to impact as many people as possible. So we have all these amazing things that are in work and, while we love the retreat, we're just not quite sure when or if we're going to host another one just like that. But that does not take away from all the amazing opportunities to work with us, either through our program, through our free training. If you're a business owner and you want to grow, reach out to us as well. Work with coaches also. So we have just so many avenues to impact so many people, and whichever one applies to you, we've got you All right. I hope that this was helpful to give you a little behind the scenes of what it looked like during our Costa Rica retreat, some of the key lessons and key takeaways, and also how you can apply those to your life, to your daughter's life and to your relationship with her. All right, moms, I will see you in the next episode of the Raising Elite Competitors podcast.