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Another Crucial Way That You Can Help Your Child Develop Self-Belief...
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article for you encouraging you to practice focusing attention on your child's competence (rather than weaknesses) after practice/competition to develop his/her self-belief. Self-belief is a personal quality that is largely developed via parent/coach-child/player communications to do with performance experiences. And it's been revealed in much research across various domains to be one of the most powerful determinants of long-term mental toughness and high performance...So in this article I want to introduce you to 1 more vital way that you can boost your child's development of self-belief...Communicating High Expectations.
Communicating High Expectations...
My master’s degree psychology thesis, which compared developmental factors between those tennis players who were considered to have overachieved in their career (some becoming Grand Slam champions) with those who were considered underachievers,’ revealed a...
Why Parent-Child Tennis Interactions Are the 'Perfect Storm'
How we interact with our children around tennis has incredible power in influencing his/her mental toughness development, even more so than coaches. This is due to the 'perfect storm' of factors that make tennis parenting interactions the most powerful determinant of children's mental toughness development, both on and off the court...
Our Brains Remember Important Experiences Better...
The genius of the human brain is evident in the way it has evolved ways of deciding which life experiences need to be remembered and learned from and which can be forgotten.
Recent research has shown us that the brain figures out what is likely to be important to remember based on a number of factors, making it more easily rewired as a result of these factors.
And as it happens, there are two factors crucial to sport that encourage our ability to remember sport experiences: exercise and high levels of emotion.
High Levels of Emotion
When an experience is unemotional our brain does not...
How Parents Can Help Players Develop Self-Belief...
In my work as a psychologist I've been in the privileged position of seeing up close the common parental tendencies that support the development of both children's tennis mental toughness and well-being. One such tendency is a consistent bias towards focusing on children’s competence rather than faults or weaknesses.
Among the most powerful times I learned this lesson was when I was lucky enough to interview some of the world's best coaches, players, and also parents of champion players (including Grand Slam champions), as part of my Psychology Masters thesis in which I explored the development of mental toughness in tennis several years ago.
Although I had seen this pattern many times before, I was still amazed at how often coaches and players spoke of the power of parental influence on children's self-belief development based on the frequency of what I would call competence reinforcement...
And not surprisingly, when I concluded my study, the #1 predictor...