How To Nurture Your Child’s Talents

Every parent believes that their child is capable of more, and can improve on their own individual talents and if they are self-motivated and have people of knowledge around them, they can achieve many great outcomes through sport when action is taken. 

For example, sports can lead to Sports / Academic Scholarships, a mindset for life success, optimal physical health, worldly experience, and most importantly the attributes the athlete develops from training, competing, communicating, and working alongside your team and having to self-develop on a daily basis is why it’s so beneficial.

The 8 Key Areas Most Parents Want For Their Child: 

1. Happy, confident kids.
2. Maximize their talents and individual potential.
3. Provide opportunities that maybe they didn’t have.
4. Know how to help their kids achieve their own dreams.
5. Find knowledgeable people they trust to enhance the process.
6. More wins, help them become their best self.
7. Provide a safe learning environment for them.
8. Develop life skills that set them up for success in sports and life

Some things to consider are: 

Sport develops 3 main personal traits:

1. Self-awareness
2. Resilience
3. Adaptability

1. Self Awareness

When interviewing Pat Rafter’s family one by one his sisters and brothers all had a common theme agreeing his greatest gift was his self-awareness. Not one of them talked about his superior net game, not unlike Wimbledon champion Pat Cash before him, his exceptional serve placement like former world number 1 Pete Sampras, or his ability to achieve things even though he wasn’t the best junior growing up. In fact, his father was told that his son wasn’t that special by some of the best well-known coaches in Australia when asked for their opinion. This leads to the next trait. 

2. Resilience

The second trait is resilience, and this today is one of the most challenging things due to everything being accessible, instant fast-track success stories on social media and attention spans are decreasing so the need for coaches to adapt their coaching or get parents on side is even more important. Imagine if Pat Rafter decided to listen to that negative bias or to what others didn’t see in him and didn’t believe he could make it to the pros. In fact, his coach in his teen years Gary Stickler mentioned to me of late that Pat was very difficult to teach so he didn’t teach him instead what he did was indirect learning so he could make up his own mind about what he wanted.

Pat wanted to be different and had determined his game was going to be a serve and volley game. What we know now is many of the most successful people have huge defunct personality types and can be what we say “ a pain in the ass to teach “ or is it just that we need to understand them best. I was watching a match with one of the players I mentored recently, and we watched a top Australian junior play a match against a difficult opponent who was giving him a very tough match and he wasn’t winning. On the change of ends, he said to his dad “ F… Off !! ”. 

I noted the whole match his father hadn’t said a word, unlike my father who was giving me hand signals still at 17 years of age and to whom I finally said “shut up“ in the crowd when I went on to win the Australian Open Juniors. I let my dad know afterward that I could do it without him disabling me but instead just supporting me. What I resonated with was that Pat Rafter, the top junior player, and I all had the determination to be more resilient and find our own way to win and at times released our tension on those close to us yet never doubted our ability and our team stayed supportive for the long road ahead until needed.

I found out later that day, that the top Aussie junior turned that match around and wore the other guy down with his ability to trust in himself, kept working at positive self-behaviour with his team on the sidelines trusting in his ability. I also got to speak with his opponent, and he was devastated as he realized, he didn’t back himself when he needed to close, and maybe if he had just slightly added some risk plays to keep the momentum going his way the loss may have been different. His coach noted that ” playing safe” was his student’s default mechanism and it was letting him down as he didn’t back himself when it counted the most.