Every new season starts with new expectations. Like a restart button, you've had a little break from driving to practice, waiting for training sessions to finish, talking to other parents about who is doing what, and spending your weekends driving, parking, and assessing your player and team's progress.
As the parent of a player on the elite pathway in club soccer, I completely understand. Reflecting on these years, I've discovered two opposing forces in competitive sports: fear and love. The elite pathway is a journey of fear of missing out, fear of failure, and the fear that leads your player to self-protect.
The other force, love, is more commonly called passion in sports. The work required to take your game to the next level is complex and challenging, but your passion will take you through these valleys.
But don't confuse passion with desire. Passion is what your player has now. It's limitless yet requires attention for it to grow. Ignore it, and it will wilt away.
You can nurture and feed passion because it is like the bird in your hand. Desire is always just out of reach, like the bird in the air.
This season, aim to cultivate passion and manage your desires by:
Putting the desire to win aside. Passion is a better indicator of future success than winning.
Embracing humility and struggling over the desire for your player to be recognized as the best on the field. Passion grows through challenge, and complacency sets in when you're not challenged.
Understanding that the desire to control the officials and coaches comes from fear of failure and missing out rather than the opportunity from bad calls and coaching decisions to strengthen passion in the competitive environment.
Write down on a piece of paper a row of zeros. Keep adding zeros until you have filled a whole line on the page. These zeros don't add up to anything. But put a positive number in front of them, and immediately, they have value. Passion is the positive number that multiplies your players' skills.
Call to schedule a training session, either online or in person. Don't have enough time? One session to get you out of your head and into your heart.
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