Archive for the ‘Confidence’ Category

Self Reliance

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Thanks for you patience the last few weeks.  We had a death in the family and after the unexpected travel it took me a while to get organized.

Team Work is important and useful, but sometimes the only person your child will have to rely on is herself.  Sometimes the best person to do the job is your child; teaching her how to get it done on her own will help her on the field, in school, and later in life.  We’ve all heard the saying, if you want something done right you have to do it yourself.  I usually think of that saying to mean that someone else messed up, but if we choose to look at it in a positive light, it really has more to do with your personal ability to do something well.

There are moments in life where your child will have to make a decision, maybe a split second one, about how to handle a situation.  She may be able to look for help from a teammate, schoolmate, or co-worker, but sometimes no one is around who can or will help.  In those moments she needs to believe that she can get the job done herself and act without hesitation. In some cases, even a moment’s hesitation or a look for help at the wrong time can be the difference between success and failure.   

Failure to rely on herself is most likely the result of lack of confidence, or possibly a little laziness.   Everyone suffers from lack of confidence now and again, but making it a habit can be costly. 

I had a costly lapse of confidence during a road race in 2004. The bike race was part of a stage race.  A stage race is a several day race.  Each day there is a new race and the total time of that day’s race is added to the previous day’s total time. The winner is the cyclist who, when the last race has been finished, has completed all of the racing in the least amount of time.  So, you can win a stage of the stage race and not win the overall race.  I was having a fantastic stage race and was sitting fairly high in the overall.  On a climb several of the other highly ranked girls attacked the group and opened up a gap between themselves and the rest of us.  I was chasing them down, gaining slowly and dragging everyone else in my group along behind me.  I was tired and had a little lap in confidence.  I realized other riders were behind me and I thought I’d turn to them for help.  I pulled off to the side and the girl behind me took her turn at front, but she was going slower and we lost momentum.  By the time I realized we were slowing down it was too late.  I surged around her and continued my chase, but by that time the women had too big of a gap and we never caught them.  At the end of the stage I moved down in the overall standings and wasn’t able to gain the time back during the rest of the stage race.

I still regret my moment of hesitation, but while it was a hard lesson, it was also a good lesson.  One that I hope will come in handy the next time I need to rely on myself.  Talk with your child about her abilities and help her have confidence in them.  Let her know that there will be times when she is best off doing something by herself and when that time comes, she’ll be ready.

Remember to check out Gracie Goat’s Big Bike Race and Shawn Sheep The Soccer Star,  if you are looking for a unique gift for a child in your life.  Visit www.erinmirabella.com to order a personalized, autographed copy.

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Responsibility

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Try This At Home……………………

Have your child make a list of everything she needs for practice.  Then make it her responsibility to pack her bag the night before and make sure it is by the door ready to go. 

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The best way to learn responsibility is to have some.  Playing sports, or being in another activity, allows your child many opportunities to practice being responsible.   From packing her bag for practice to performing her job for the team, she is showing her ability to handle responsibilities. 

Every child is different and some are ready for more responsibility than others.   Your child may be able to pack her bag for practice, while her sister might be up for washing her laundry between practices.  Like everything, learning to be responsible takes practice and your child may have to make some mistakes before she can be considered responsible.  The beauty of teaching responsibility is the natural consequences that go along with it.  If your child forgets her helmet, she may not be able to practice that day, if she isn’t ready on time, she might be late for a game, and if he doesn’t get her uniform into the hamper, she may have to wear stinky clothes to practice.    

Moving away from home to the Olympic Training Center was a lot like going away to college, and I found myself suddenly with a lot more responsibilities and freedoms.  Learning to juggle them was important if I wanted to succeed as a professional cyclist and make the Olympic Team.  It was interesting to watch how different athletes handled the freedom and responsibility that went along with living away from home.  Unlike most colleges, there were both sixteen year old and twenty four year old athletes living in the same dorm building.   In most cases there was a stark difference between their maturity and life experiences, however age wasn’t the only factor that determined if an athlete was responsible or not.  The foundation of trust, confidence and responsibility that an athlete had when they arrived at the center, made a huge difference in their ability to be successful there.  You wont’ always be there to help your child with every little thing, but the lessons you teach her when she’s young will stay with her.

Here are a few places to start giving your child some responsibility

  • Have her get their things ready for practice the night before and put them by the door, or in the car.
  • Have her pack a healthy snack to eat between school and practice.
  • Have her put their uniform in the hamper or teach her to wash her own clothes.
  • Have her set an alarm that warns her it’s time to go to practice or a game.
  • Require her to get her homework done each night if she want to go to practice the next day. 
  • Have her follow through with her commitments to the team.  Don’t let her quit in the middle of a season.

Learning to be responsible is an important lesson long after your child leaves the field of play.  It will prepare her for the real world.  As much as it is sometimes easier to do something for your child, try to be patient and allow her the opportunity to do it herself.  She has no reason to learn to be responsible if you are always doing everything for her. Slowly increase her responsibilities and before long her activities will be less stressful for you and she will gain confidence.  Giving her responsibilities also tells her you trust her; this is a good relationship to foster as she gets older. 

For more information about me and my children’s books, please visit www.erinmirabella.com.

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Curing cockiness

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Try This At Home……………..

Cut decent size holes in the top of two identical, empty boxes.  (Tissue boxes would work well.) Leave the first box as is, and on the second, tape plastic wrap over the hole from the inside.  Have your child sit with the first box about an arms length in front of him.  Have him close his eyes.  When you say go, he should open his eyes and drop a ball into the box as fast as he can.  Make sure it’s something he can easily do.  Each time he gets a ball into the box he gets a skittle, or some other kind of treat. (Don’t let him eat it yet.) After he’s done it successfully 3 times, raise the stakes. Tell him that you are going to make it more exciting.  This time he has a choice.  Before he drops the ball again, he can chose to receive one skittle as before or go for all or nothing.  Make sure that if he chooses the later, he understands that if he misses getting the ball into the hole he loses all of his skittles, and if he makes it you’ll double his total number of skittles.  Most kids will chose to take the gamble, but if not that is ok.  You can still finish the game. After he closes his eyes, switch the boxes out.  When you say go, he will open his eyes and drop the ball in as before, but the plastic wrap will prevent the ball from falling in.  If he took the gamble take all of his skittles away and tell him that this exercise showed the potential danger of being over confident.  Explain that there is a fine line between having a healthy self-confidence and being cocky, and that the game was designed to show him what can happen if he’s too confident in his abilities.  If he took the gamble, ask him what he was thinking when he decided to go for all or nothing.  Address his answer and if he needs help articulating it, suggest the following as the reason. Maybe he was having a lot of success dropping the ball into the box and thought that the gamble was a sure thing.  Explain that at some point in life he will find that he is really good at something and he may start to feel that he can’t lose, just like he felt after successfully dropping the ball in the hole three times. Explain that failure often happens when one starts to be too confident in his own abilities. Oftentimes cockiness leads to carelessness or causes him to underestimate a task or opponent.  Explain that the last time he played the game, when the ball didn’t fall in the hole, was a simulation of that failure.  Then, since you tricked him, let him enjoy his skittles.

If he didn’t take the gamble, then he only missed out on one skittle, but you can still explain the games lesson to him as above.

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Take the opportunity to discuss the following definitions with your child

Dictionary.com defines the following:

Humble:  not proud or arrogant; modest: to be humble although successful.

Self confident: realistic confidence in one’s own judgment, ability, power, etc.

Cocky: arrogant; pertly self-assertive; conceited: He walked in with a cocky air.

Having a realistic expectation and positive outlook of your abilities is a good thing.  Being confident in your abilities can make you very successful.  Everyone loves the successful, yet humble victor.  No one, on the other hand, is very fond of the cocky, obnoxious one. 
 
As I said, there is a very fine and sometimes gray line between a healthy self-confidence and over-confidence.

I like to think of it like this.  Self-confidence is just that, for self.  Understanding and being confident in your abilities will allow you to perform at your very best and accomplish peak performances in whatever you are doing.  To me, self-confidence has nothing to do with anyone else.  It shouldn’t mean you think your better than others, it should just be a realistic measure of what you are capable of. 

Here’s something that may help your child put things in perspective. In the end, no one really cares besides him and the people who love him. Ask him who won their specific event last year? Ask him who won it in the Olympics 8 years ago, or equivalent event? There is a good chance that he doesn’t know. People may remember successes for a short time, but in the end they forget, and the only one who still remembers is the actual winner.
 
Being over confident means you have lost sight of reality and have an inflated opinion of yourself.  It’s when you have started to think you are better than other’s because of your success.  One thing I’ve learned is that no matter how good you think you are, there is always someone better.  You just may not have met them yet.  You will get beat; it’s just a matter of time.  From my experience, the cockier someone is, the harder they fall. 

If your child is struggling with too much confidence/cockiness, the best medicine is losing.  If your child is in a league that is way below his level and his success is starting to go to his head, then maybe it’s time to move him up to the next level.  Winning is a good thing and a great self-confidence booster, but as I’ve said in previous blogs, no one learns nearly as much from winning as they do from losing.  Ironically, the way to make your child better, is for them to occasionally lose.  It keeps their ego in check and helps them raise their game.

Here are some other things to think about.

Do you want your child to receive a trophy regardless of whether on not they win or lose?

Do you gush over everything your child does, even if it isn’t worthy of it?

Are you setting a good example when it comes to being humble?  Are the coaches?

Is your child’s assessment of his ability realistic?  Is yours?

In an attempt to be humble, do you forget to praise your child for his accomplishments?

Having a humble spirit and heart is not an easy thing, especially following success.  While I am far from perfect at it, it is something I strive for. You will hopefully find your own solution; I find mine in my faith.  I believe that all of my talents are God given.  Therefore all of my success is God given and all I’m doing is attempting to maximize what God gave me.  I’ve found that for me, there is nothing more humbling than thinking about the sacrifice Jesus made for me on the cross and God’s grace for me when I fall on my face. 

My children’s book, Shawn Sheep The Soccer Star, is great for starting a conversation with your child about cockiness.  For more information or to purchase a book, please visit www.erinmirabella.com.

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Raising Confident Kids

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Try This At Home………………

Take a glass jar and at least thirty colored strips of paper.  On each strip of paper have your child write down one thing that he or she likes about his or herself or does well.  Fill the jar with the strips and have them put the jar someplace they will see it everyday.  The next time your child is feeling down or is lacking confidence, have he or she read through all of the papers in the jar and remember how blessed and loved he or she is.  You can always have your child add five or ten more strips to the jar for good measure.

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I recently spoke to a group of moms with children ages 0-5, about how sports can facilitate teaching their children the fundamentals for success.  One of the discussion questions afterward asked if there was a related issue that their child was struggling with.  Two of the moms said their child lacked self-confidence and one said her son was over confident.  This caught me off guard; I hadn’t expected children to be struggling with confidence at such a young age.  It reaffirmed for me what an important topic confidence was and how vital a healthy self-confidence is to a child’s happiness and well-being. 

This post is going to focus on lack of self-confidence and I’ll tackle the issue of being over-confident next week. 

Sports, or any activity that your child loves, are a great opportunity to increase confidence.  The most important thing, is to help your child find a sport, or activity, that he or she loves and can excel at.  Your child’s success will help them gain confidence in his or herself and abilities.

In addition, being in sports, especially team sports, makes it easier for kids to meet people and make friends.  Two of the biggest concerns for children and adults alike are being accepted and worrying what people think of them. In sports your child already shares something in common with his or her teammates and that makes developing a friendship that much easier.  Furthermore, sports offer the opportunity to develop social skills such as teamwork, tact, cooperation and compassion.  

We all worry about what we look like. For tweens and teens their changing bodies can be a confusing and sensitive subject.  An added bonus of sports is that they make kids more aware of, and in tune with, their bodies.  Athletes tend to be very comfortable with their bodies and have a more realistic expectation of what their bodies should look like.  They can compare themselves to other athletes instead of the models they see in magazines, and they’ll understand that bodies can be used for more than just looking good. 

Another added benefit is that self-confident kids are less likely to fold to peer pressure, more willing to try new things and probably more successful, because they believe they will succeed.

There are two steps to gaining confidence, building it up and maintaining it.  Sometimes an incident can get in your head and mess with your confidence forever.  It’s happened to all of us and years later we are still haunted by it.  That’s why it is so important for your child to get back up on the horse after a fall, so to speak.  While my husband Chris and I were discussing this week’s post, he pointed out that in the NFL, teams often give the ball back to a player immediately after they fumble or miss a catch, in order to rebuild their confidence right away.  The longer your child has to think about a mistake before he or she performs again, the more it can shake his or her confidence. It is better to address it as soon as possible.

Lastly, whether it is in sports, school, or in daily chores around the house, celebrate your child’s accomplishments big and small.  You don’t have to compliment him or her for the sake of it, but when they have earned it, go ahead and give it.  A compliment coming from you will mean so much to your child and will build his or her confidence immensely. Sometimes it’s easy to take accomplishments for granted, or to brag to your friends but forget to tell your child how proud of him or her you are.  Your child wants to please and impress you, and you can use that to help build his or her self-confidence by praising them.

I won my first senior national points race championship when I was 20 years old.  I had one of the greatest races of my life.  I raced hard and finished the race absolutely exhausted.  By the time I recovered, I was whisked away to awards, drug testing, etc., etc.  Afterward, my very proud boyfriend, the one I married, commented that I hadn’t even seemed to enjoy it, and I didn’t even take a moment to celebrate with him.  I realized he was right.  I was so busy doing what I was supposed to, what was expected of me and focusing on what was next, that I forgot to enjoy it.  If the person winning can forget to celebrate, then it has to be even easier for parents and others to forget to share how proud they are of their child.

Confidence is a fragile thing.  Help your child build it and nourish it, so that he or she can enjoy success of all kinds. 

In my children’s book, Gracie Goat’s Big Bike Race, Gracie struggles with confidence and fears.  the book is a great way to start a conversation with your kiddo about these important things.

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