Summer Confidence Series (Part 2 of 4): The ONE Skill Your Daughter Needs So She Can Shake Off Mistakes Faster

Ever seen your daughter struggle after a mistake in a game, her confidence shaken? Or heard her replaying errors long after the match ends? It’s tough to watch her face these challenges.

In this episode, we focus on a vital skill every young athlete needs: the Snapback Routine. Discover how this powerful practice helps athletes bounce back quickly and confidently from setbacks, both in sports and in life.

We cover:

• Understanding the psychology behind overcoming mistakes.
• Practical steps to implement the Snapback Routine effectively.
• Real-life success stories showcasing its impact on young athletes.

Join me to learn how to equip your daughter with the resilience she needs to thrive. Click play now and empower her journey towards mental strength and success!

Episode Highlights: 

[00:00] Mental skills training for girl athletes to overcome mistakes and setbacks. The importance of one specific skill for athletes to shake off mistakes faster.

[01:53] Teaching athletes to overcome mistakes quickly and confidently.

[05:54] How athletes can overcome mistakes and regain confidence through preloading, awareness of triggers, and a personalized "snapback" routine.

[10:45] Helping young gymnasts overcome mistakes and build confidence.

Next Steps:

• Join our FREE Training for Sports Moms - How to Strengthen Your Athlete Daughter's Mental Game so She Believes in Herself as Much as You Do
• Enroll in The Elite Mental Game - our self-paced training program proven to strengthen your athlete’s mental game and confidence with a $400 discount here!
• 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 am thrilled that you are here with us. Whether you are getting going for the first time on the sports journey with your athlete maybe she's on the younger end, or maybe you have a lot of seasons under your belt and you're ready to launch your athlete into the next level of her sport this podcast is for you to ensure that you are raising a mentally strong, confident girl athlete. Now we are in part two of our summer confidence series. If you haven't already listened to part one, head on back, it is just labeled summer confidence series, part one, and we talked about in that episode the unintentional ways that we, as sports parents, accidentally lower our athletes confidence. So today we are diving into part two. We are chatting the one skill that your daughter needs so that she can shake off mistakes faster, because this is a thing that is not going away in her sport. She is going to make mistakes, she's going to have setbacks, she's going to have challenges. Honestly, it's going to happen in her life too. So let's talk about the skill that she needs. It really is this one specific skill that we teach. That will help her and make it a little bit easier for her to navigate all of that in her sport and in her life.

Speaker 1: 1:08

Now, before we do, I have a couple of things. First of all, if you are not already subscribed to the podcast, go ahead and click that little plus button wherever you're listening, or the subscribe button so that you are always notified of when a new episode drops. That helps us out, helps you out so that you never miss an episode. Also, while you're there, if you have time to rate and review the podcast, that also helps us out as well. So rating and reviewing, that'd be awesome, thank you. Thank you. I also want to give a shout out to a mom in our community, a mom whose athletes are currently inside the elite mental game. This is our self-paced training program for girl athletes to strengthen their mental game and confidence, and what's really cool about this is that some of you who are maybe in the volleyball world are in nationals. Right now. You're just wrapping up nationals, and so this mom texted me from national. She goes hello from Orlando.

Speaker 1: 1:55

I could tell you how my kid has played the best she has been, or that her coach again talked with me about what a tremendous change he's seen in her mindset this season, or that she spoke up in a team huddle when asked what everyone had to work on and said simply mindset. But here's an even bigger win, if that's somehow possible. Multiple parents have approached me and asked me to thank her for what she does on the court and the sidelines. When her teammates get down, she lifts them back up, just like she does with herself when she needs it. What a gift it is to see her become the very best version of herself and to see that version carry out to uplifting others. Okay, this is amazing. I can only imagine what this would feel like from a mom perspective, because as I read it and I'm imagining like my daughter doing something like that, I'm like, oh my gosh, how proud.

Speaker 1: 2:40

So I think this perfectly leads into what we're talking about in this episode, which is the skills that your athlete needs to overcome mistakes. Because when they do that, when they're able to pick themselves back up after a setback or a mistake and they're able to play with confidence afterwards, that actually transfers over into how they interact with their teammates. Right, which is pretty cool. That's what this parent was saying. She was like parents are coming up to me and thanking me for my daughter's ability to help them through mistakes. All right, but it started with her daughter. It started with her daughter having the skill to do this with herself. All right, so congratulations. Thank you so much for sending that in Big shout out to this mom and this athlete in our community.

Speaker 1: 3:19

So let's get into how you can give this skill to your athlete. This is the number one, but also the very first skill that athletes inside our program, the Elite Mental Game, learn. It's called the Bounce Back and Snap Challenge. As soon as they get in, they log in from any device. They have their own training portal that they go into. They watch very short, like three to five minute videos and they interact with me in the training portal. And the first skill that they learn is something called a snapback routine. So those of you that are in EMG, you're like oh, snapback routine? Yes, my daughter has hers.

Speaker 1: 3:48

But I want to talk first about this whole idea of overcoming mistakes. Okay, because we know that the athlete that can move through mistakes fastest has the greatest competitive advantage and, honestly, has the most fun, and I want you to think about your daughter's sport and consider how long does it take her, or how long actually does her sport allow her, to get over a mistake? That's the first question. All right, if she plays a sport like volleyball, she has 15 to 20 seconds before the next serve is coming. If she plays golf, maybe she has a little longer. But for a lot of you you're like she actually has no time. She's in gymnastics, she's in dance, she's doing things that are like fluid, so she doesn't really have a lot of time to stop and dwell on her mistake. The second piece of that is how long? How long does it typically take your daughter to get over a mistake? And for most athletes who haven't learned this skill, it's longer than that. It's longer than her sport allows.

Speaker 1: 4:41

So she's, you know maybe you're seeing her from the stands like her body language changes, she starts to hesitate, she starts to tense up and you're like, oh, she's still like beating yourself up about that. Or she's like, you know, not taking risks anymore. Or maybe even after a game, she's still talking about it. Some athletes, like days later, are still talking about it. They're still impacted by it.

Speaker 1: 4:58

So if it's not taking your athlete or you know a second or less to get over a mistake, then she's getting passed up by other athletes. She's really not in the zone, she's not playing as good as she could, okay, and unfortunately, what we think helps in these situations actually doesn't. So meaning what we think as a parent helps, right, we're telling her shake off your mistakes, or like everyone makes mistakes, we're trying to tell her all these things and one of the reasons and yeah, of course, like that is logical advice, but here's what we need to know the brain's number one job is to protect us, and what does this mean for your athlete? The brain's number one job in your athlete is to protect us, and what does this mean for your athlete? The race number one job in your athlete is to protect her, keep her physically safe, keep her breathing and all of those good things, but also psychologically safe, and that means she's always scanning the environment for threat and for risk of her psychological safety. Meaning do I fit in here? What do people think of me? Am I accepted here?

Speaker 1: 5:52

And so you see her out there like maybe you're seeing her kind of do that nervous thing with her hair that she has done before. Maybe you're seeing her shoulder slump a little bit and now you're noticing that she's holding back and then she's afraid to try again, and then one mistake turns into two and three and four and she just like can't step out of it. Well, here's the thing Her brain is sensing threat in her environment. Her amygdala, this very small part of her brain that is responsible for knowing what threats are in our environment, picks up on that right, because she has. When she makes a mistake, she is triggered to these fears of maybe not being liked, of letting teammates down, parents down, coaches down, maybe getting afraid of getting pulled or benched or looking dumb. So obviously the amygdala is wow, this is a situation where we are having some threat, okay. And so when it does, when the amygdala picks up on that, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in. This is the part of her nervous system that's responsible for her fight or flight response or freeze or fawn. So if you have an athlete that like freezes, then her sympathetic nervous system is kicking in. It's really designed to help her in that situation.

Speaker 1: 6:57

But what's happening is that her body is flooded with adrenaline, she has scattered thoughts and behaviors, she has shallow breathing, and when she is in this dysregulated state, more mistakes often follow, right, and so that's where she gets into the spiral and she beats herself up. Okay, but imagine if she could bounce back and play with confidence. Imagine if, even if her brain picks up on a threat, she is able to regulate her nervous system and then get back into flow state right away. That's like where she's playing her best, Okay. And then also, you could likely avoid those car rides home where she's just like beating herself up and you're like can't say anything, right, okay, those are frustrating. But here's the thing when she's dysregulated, nothing you or her coach or her teammates say really is going to help her snap out of it when she is in that state. But here's the good news this is a skill and she can actually develop this. It does take a little bit of preloading, right. That's why we teach this as like the first thing inside our program, okay, but I'm going to walk you through our bounce back in a snap process and this is how your daughter can overcome these mistakes, and really the end result of this is that she can shake off mistakes in seconds.

Speaker 1: 8:04

Okay, number one in this is a mindset shift. Okay, average athletes think that mistakes are to be avoided. All right, they just like practice really hard and hope they don't make a mistake, whereas confident athletes, who know how to shake off mistakes, know that mistakes are actually necessary for growth. They're not actually a bad thing. So right out the gate, they don't fear growth. The mistake, okay. Number two know her triggers. This is really important. Average athletes just practice and hope they don't make a mistake and then, as a result, they're hijacked by their fight or flight response.

Speaker 1: 8:34

If we're looking like a traffic light, example of this, green is she's in flow state. She's playing really well. Yellow is maybe she's triggered a little bit. She made a mistake. A ref made a bad call. Coach yelled you know, something happened. And then red is she's dysregulated and she's making a ton of mistakes or she's hesitating. She's like looking like a shell of herself out there. Okay, and average athletes go from green to red really fast, right, they don't really know what's triggering them and they don't have skills to bring them back to flow state, whereas confident athletes actually know what typically triggers them and then they have a pre-visualized response to it. So you're like I know, when the ref makes a bad call, that I'm typically getting like spiral a little bit. So instead I'm going to write a new narrative. I'm going to write a new story and then I'm going to visualize this. I'm going to see myself in that situation, I'm going to see how I respond. Okay, I'm going to decide, rather, how I respond Okay. And so they then are able to notice that sensation when it happens and then respond Okay. So that awareness is there.

Speaker 1: 9:27

Number three snapback routine. It's all leading to the snapback routines. Number one mindset shift around mistakes in general. Number two, awareness of their triggers. And number three, the snapback routine. Average athlete. Athletes, like I said, just spiral. They don't have a routine.

Speaker 1: 9:40

Okay, confident athletes have a specific practice routine to regulate the nervous system and then snap back quickly after mistakes. So ours is called the snap back routine. It's a combination of a breath to engage the parasympathetic nervous system. So that's the rest and digest. It's the opposite of sympathetic reset word at the top. So this is a word that is custom to them, that is actually based on how they want to feel in that moment. All right, it's designed to recall back past success, success. So there's a custom word that they have and then on their exhale they're doing some sort of reset signal to ground them. So for some of our athletes it's like a snap. It's literally a snap. You know adjusting a sock, a hair tie, things like that, and they have practiced this ahead of time. They know what their snapback routine is. They practice it in lower stakes environments so that they can actually use it in higher stakes environments okay, and the result is they can shake off mistakes in seconds. Okay, because we know confidence actually doesn't come from never making a mistake. It's impossible to never make mistakes. Okay, it comes from having a personalized custom process for recovering from mistakes.

Speaker 1: 10:40

When this happened, okay, what was really cool is another one of our moms of our gymnast actually messaged me recently. She said this so Coco, her daughter, had a fall at our last event. This is very similar to the situation that I was describing at the beginning of this episode. She goes Coco had a fall. Not only did she get back up and finish the rest of the routine, she went on to the next event and rotation and crushed it. Okay, so Coco's a gymnast. Imagine her like on the beam. You're the parent, you're watching she falls. You're like, oh, imagine her like on the beam. You're the parent, you're watching she falls. You're like, oh gosh, here we go. Okay, it's hard to watch as a parent, by the way, I'm like, oh, are there people watching this? You know there's all sorts of things that come up for us, but instead of her like kind of melting down, she just confidently gets back up on the bar. She finished her, she finishes her routine, okay, and then the rest of the day. So some of you are like, well, okay, so she did, okay, she finished, but then the rest of the day is just going to be shot. She's going to be beating herself up, she's going to be wanting to go home. No, because Coco was able to come back, finish. She went on the rest of the day and crushed it. It didn't impact her the rest of the day.

Speaker 1: 11:38

Okay. That is the key to your daughter excelling in her sport. Having fun Okay. When I say having fun, I don't mean that she's never going to make mistakes, she's never going to be challenged. That's not the goal here. Okay. The goal is she can enjoy her sport because she has ways, she has skills, she has tools, very tangible things to help her through these things in her sport. But also these things are applicable to her life. We get messages from athletes all the time that are like I use my snapback routine before a test. You know, in these other situations or like this social situation where I was feeling a little bit anxious, a little bit nervous, or like I slipped up on something that I said and I was able to do my snapback routine and it actually helped in those moments. So having them have a tool that they can lean on and helps them really will facilitate their success in their sport but also in their life.

Speaker 1: 12:25

Okay, so we are wrapping up part two of our series to kind of recap where we have been. If you didn't already listen to part one, that was all about the unintentional ways that we lower our athletes' confidence and actually keep them stuck, really by relying on some of these things in their lives that we hope will just build their confidence. As a little preview, like her coach is not going to do it, just waiting it out, isn't going to do it, just hoping that the next team isn't going to do it, so the kind of these mistakes that we end up making that unintentionally lower her confidence. And then today we were talking all about this skill that she can use to help her overcome mistakes. So we covered that mindset shift right at the gate around mistakes in general, knowing her triggers right, so knowing what situations kind of throw her out of whack, and also a snapback routine of failure recovery systems when she is aware that she's a little bit outside the flow. So I hope this was helpful.

Speaker 1: 13:17

In our next episode, our next series of our Summer Confidence series, we're talking about how to help your athlete flip her negative mindset. Now, this is really important because If you're like she is so negative and we get in the car after a game like I can't even compliment her correctly, I can't even say anything before she turns it negative and that's just all she can focus on, and some of you are worried because you're like this is how you're talking about herself right now. I can't imagine what it is like inside her head and this is going to impact how she plays, how she believes about herself. I don't want her going down this rabbit hole and you have very good reason to worry about that. There is correlation between negative, self-deprecating talk and how she feels about herself and her self-confidence. Okay, now we can't stop negative thoughts that come into our head or daughter's head, but we can allow her to shift that talk to be more productive. So we're gonna be talking about that in our next series.

Speaker 1: 14:10

A couple of other resources I want to leave you with If you want to go deeper into this. We actually cover all of this inside our free training for sports wellness. That's at trainhergamecom, so if you head there, you can register. We go into our full method on how you can strengthen your athlete daughter's mental game. So that is a resource, a free resource for you as well. And you've heard me talk about our signature mental training program, the Elite Mental Game.

Speaker 1: 14:31

This is our self-paced online program for girl athletes to strengthen their mental game and confidence. I have a $400 discount link for you as a part of the Summer Confidence Series that I am linking in the show notes. So if you're like, I'm super interested in just having her jump in and start this. This program really is like none other. We've had over 5,000 families come through. Summer's a great time for her to work on this. It's a self-paced program. She has lifetime access to it and then you have the option also to add on live support for her, also for you, for free. So you can grab that link inside our show notes. All right, moms, I'm Coach Brie, a mental performance coach for girl athletes. I'm so excited that you are here for a Summer Confidence Series and I will see you in the next episode.