Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is, in this episode, at least, the handbook we never got when we became parents. In this, episode 49, we're going to look at how to be that parent of an athlete. So as an elite athlete, then an elite coach, and now as a performance as my coach, I've spent a couple of those different categories as also a parent. And the role between the athlete and the parent and the coach and the parent is a very unique and very volatile one, and one that, if it's done right, can be the most awesome connexion between an athlete and their parent on their journey to become an elite professional or extreme athlete.
However, if it's done wrong, it can be the catalyst that makes everything go belly up, can ruin a career, can ruin relationships. These are things I've seen along the way frequently, where a parent has been heavily involved in the early days of an athlete's career, and then at some point has lost that connexion or has overstepped a boundary or has not known what they need to do in order to get what the athlete wants, and have ended up being extradited from the group or from the team. And they get to sit on the outside and watch and feel like that they've lost that connexion between them and their child at some point. It doesn't have to be that way. There's a lot of things we can do early on in the piece to make sure that doesn't happen, to build a strategy and a structure around the way that we interact so that the coach and the athlete have a very unique dynamic, and the coach and the parent have a very unique dynamic, so that the parent feels that they're connected to the athlete's career through the coach and through their relationship, obviously, with their child, who they need to understand it when they're being a parent is always going to be their child.
Irrespective of their sporting aspirations, the role initially for the parent is always to remember, you're always going to be the parent before you're the parent of an athlete. Now, my son is into taekwondo, and he's going for his third Dan Black Belt in taekwondo. And I've been very conscious over the years to make sure that I try not to interact too much. Even though I've got some background in some martial arts, I wait for him to tell me what he wants in order for me to interact with him and help with him and his training. And over the years, there's been different times and different strategies in his life where he's gone, Hey, dad, can you help? And other times where he's just gone and done it on his own. And as he's getting older now, he's 16, he does a lot more on his own and then comes back for very key information. The other end of the scale is my youngest child, and she's six, and she's into gymnastics. So obviously, that's my area of expertise. That's where I came from and I spent most of my childhood, and where I was been an elite coach and an elite athlete myself.
So that dynamic is a little bit different. Not because, one, she's of her age, but two, obviously because of my knowledge of the sport and the fact that I still work in that sphere sometimes. However, these days as a mind coach, but I still lecture and coach athletes or gymnasts. What I've consciously done with her programme, and she's been selected for in a development group, is I've purposely stayed on the outside. I make sure... The The coaches know who I am. The organisation know who I am. However, what I do is I stay out. I don't interact too much other than to be dad. And I've consciously made that decision that when I go to gymnastics with her, I'm just dad. She knows my background, my elite background. She knows that I was a coach, and she knows that the coaches know who I am. However, she also knows that I'm just dad sitting there with her drink bottle and her thongs waiting for her to come out. And and pick her up and take her home. There's a very unique, and people often say to me, How do you not get involved? It's very simple.
For me, I'm just dad. How do we do this smart? How do we do this in a way that it works How do we set up this process right from the start? And also, how do we pick up the pieces when things have gone awry, have not worked? Maybe there's a miscommunication at some point and the relationship is strained, either between the athlete and the parent or between the coach and the parent. Over the years, I've seen the aggressive parents, I've seen the passive-aggressive parents, I've seen the micromanagers, I've seen the disconnected, the disinterested, I've seen the clueless. Let's go through each one of those and what they have in common and what they are unique to them. I hope when you're listening to this, if you're a parent, that you can identify where you sit and maybe look at how you can do it the same, keep doing what you're doing if it works, or how you can do it a little bit differently if you're finding you do have a few issues. So the aggressive is those, Do as I say. I'm paying your wages. You make sure You get out there, you coach my child, and make sure that they're going to be the Olympic champion.
Those kinds of parents are everywhere. We see them running up and down the sidelines of football pitches. We see them as dance moms or dabs. We see them as the coach's worst nightmare. They're the ones that interact. They will jump the barrier to go and have a go at the coach or have a go at their own child or have a go at a child's competitor. I see them and I cringe, both a coaching perspective, from a mind coaching perspective, but also from a parents' perspective. I sit there and I think, What are you doing? Why are you doing that? What is your objective? What are you trying to achieve? Then you've got the passive-aggressive. Those ones will say, You know what? I do it this way. That's just me. If I was paying and that's what I was doing, and you know what? I might have wanted to do it that way myself. You might think about that. They're the parents that are a little bit smarter in the respect of their approach because they're giving over, Well, this is what I want you to do. I'm paying your fees. I'm paying your wages, without becoming overly aggressive.
However, they're no easier to manage because you know what's going on. It's just not that obvious. Those parents, again, if we think about what they're trying to achieve, both those parents are trying to gain control. And that's often where these issues stem from. Because as a parent, when you've got your child, Ultimately, you take them home from the hospital and people turn and say, Right, that's your responsibility now. Everything that happens in that child's life is down to you. How successful they are, how nourished they are, how educated they are, how interactive and socially accepted they are. All those come down to you as a parent, and it's a daunting task. With three kids of my own and all very, very different, every single time we've gone through that process, they are. They're incredibly different. It is incredibly It's going to be stressful at times trying to do the right thing by them all the time. So when you then hand your child over to a coach or to a teacher, it's, Well, I've gotten this far, and I want to make sure that what you do is the right thing. I don't want you to undo what I've already done because I'm quite proud of it.
And then you lose that sense of control. That's not necessarily true, but that might be what we think, that we lose that sense of control. And that's where the aggressive and the passive aggressive parents stem from, usually. They feel like they've lost control and they don't trust the coach or the teacher to do what they've been doing. Then we've got the micromanagers. They're the ones who turn and say, I want to know everything you are doing. Why are you doing this? How does that work? What's going on here? Well, why are you doing that, not doing this? Again, from a coach's perspective, this is incredibly frustrating because what's happening in your mind is you're thinking, You're paying me to do a job, yet you're second-guessing everything I do and wanting to know what I do. That's not only making the relationship the coach and the parent difficult, but it often makes the relationship between the coach and the athlete quite strange, too. It also gets in the mind of the coach of, Well, I'm wasting so much of my time every single session explaining to you as a parent what I'm doing that I'm not actually coaching as well as I possibly could do.
So when we lose that connexion or we lose that sense of being trusted as a coach and everything has been second-guessed, we start second-guessing what we do, too. So the micromanagers of parents, what they're trying to achieve is that same control, but done in a way of, I just want to know. You've got my child's career in your hands, and I don't want to let go of that, so I want to know everything. Again, these are admirable places to be. We all want to make sure that we're doing the right thing for our child. And if we're giving them to somebody else to grow for us, it's important that we feel in doing that. And what I mean by that is we don't just go, Oh, you're a coach. You've got accreditation. There you go. Take my child. And that's where we get the disconnected or disinterested parents from. The disconnected ones are, Do what you want. You're the coach. Off you go. Off you go. You just do what you want to do. I trust you. Off you go. And they're disconnected. They're not paying interest to what's going on. There's no investment other than the financial one and maybe even the time of dropping them off.
So there's a complete disinterest to what's going on for the athlete's progression. And that, again, can make things very, very difficult because it's more from the athlete's perspective. Why is Mum or why is Dad not interested in what I'm doing? They just drop me off and they sit in the car and they read their book or They go home and sit in the cafeteria and they talk. They don't actually watch what I do. That doesn't allow the athlete to show off what they're doing and make them feel that you're proud of them. The disinterested ones are just those, Yeah, whatever. And they're the ones that you never see. And I know when I was coaching, I went through a whole year with an athlete who I never, ever saw the parents. The only person it turned up was the grandmother every now and again to pick up and drop off. And I used to say, I need to talk to your mum and dad. And I talked to them over the phone and they were just completely disinterested. Yeah, that's what he wants to do. So you know what? Just we'll pay the fees and whatever.
That's a difficult place to be because when When I was coaching, I would try to interact with the parents to the point where we were all working as a team. If I had an issue with a child and I wanted them to get the same message getting delivered at home as it was getting delivered in the gym, then in parent was completely disinterested. It made it very dichotomy. When you're in the gym, these are the rules. When you go home, there's completely different rules. It's often the case when parents separate. You got the one household that's really disciplined and one household that may be and have no discipline. And that's, again, a very, very difficult place for the child to be stable in. Same concept. And then we got the clueless ones. And they're the parents who turn around and go, Oh, I never knew. Oh, really? Oh, I didn't know it involved that. Oh, I had no idea. Why didn't someone tell me? When I say close, I don't mean this in a really disrespectful way. What I mean is they've not taken the time to understand what the what the working environment is for this athlete.
A lot of these things can be okay. You can get through them when you've got a really amateur athlete, somebody who's doing one or two hours a week, and it's not ever going to be a competitive thing, or they're just doing it for fun. If you've got an athlete down in there, these things may not seem or appear to be a major issue, and you might be, Oh, yeah, well, whatever. As long as the parent stays away, I'll do my job. However, the higher up we go, the more closer to elite professional or extreme that we have, the more these things become integral to the way that the athlete performs, the consistency and continuity to the way that they turn up and they perform the competitions or whatever it is that they're doing. So the higher up we go, the more intense the interactions need to be, the more these things have to be right. And that stems from when they're young. Those coaches that are listening to this or parents are listening to this and their child is just in the amateur stages, now is the time to put this right, to understand your role so that when they do progress, if they progress up to elite or professional performers, you know your role and it's ingrained into your dynamic.
You have that relationship already established. You don't have to get there and go, Right now I need to change who I am and our relationship, which can cause stress and strains. It's good to be able to recognise where you sit, and it's integral to the athlete's outcome that we can establish the right dynamic from stage one, from day one. Why is it so difficult as a parent? We send them to school, and we don't necessarily have those same dilemmas inside of... Sometimes we do. I know one of my children, we've had a couple of issues where the teacher hasn't been the right teacher to bring out the in one of our children. We know that the teaching dynamic is just as important as a parent dynamic and just as important as a coach to athlete dynamic. However, on the majority of time, we go, Oh, yeah, well, off you go. And in part, that's because we know that after 12 months, they'll move on to find another one. They have to, they'll move up into a year. And so sometimes we just manage that short term disinterest or we're the one who's teachers that just don't bring out the best.
And we manage that and give it to our children as a life lesson. You're not always going to have the right people in the right place in all situations. Those things we tend to let slide a little bit more than we would do for a career. And so When we think about putting our child into a sport and we're thinking long term, we're thinking that maybe they've shown some talent in a certain sport or they have that tenacity that they want to be, that elite or that professional athlete, we're We're putting them in for an investment. We're making sure that what we do now has that return on investment, big end scale. So it's about a return on investment. We're putting them in at the beginning, knowing that at some point, that's going to pay dividends long term. What is it we need to do smarter? I've seen many parents that have gone out and become coaches, trying to help or trying to get involved. We've gone out and become judges so that they're still in part of that whole dynamic. They're there and sometimes end up judging their own kids, which is a bizarre place to be.
And some have gone out and got positions on management committees within the organisation. All of this is for a parent trying to keep their involvement. They're trying to keep that connexion with their child along the way. So what we need to do as coaches is make sure the parents do feel that. So we want to make sure we can help the athlete have that relationship as a parent and also have that relationship with their parents within the sport. There's two different dynamics there. And that, I believe, comes down to not only the parent understanding their role and setting it up correctly, but also from a coach's perspective, allowing the parent to be involved and have that. That might be having them on the committees, and that might be the way that you keep them informed about what's going on by saying, Hey, this is where we're heading as a club. This is where this sport's going, and then feel like they're having some controlled input. It might be that you have, and this is my preference, a really frequent calibration session with parents, and you do that by communicating with them. Every second Tuesday of the month, we sit down and all parents can ask questions.
Where are we going? What's happening? We want to know where the club's heading. We want to know what coaches have got, what qualifications, and where they're going, where the sport's developing, and are we on track for that? So again, as a parent, you're thinking, I'm paying my money for these people. If I know what they're doing and I know they got their finger on the pulse, I can step back and enjoy that role as a parent. If you're sitting there thinking, I have no frigging idea where this club's going or what the coaches are doing or when the next competition is or what they're preparing them for, then you do want to feel like you want to get more involved. So you, well, they're not going to tell me. I need to get involved somewhere. So they do tell me. They have to tell me. I We have to know what's going on. As a coach, one of the things that I think is vital is having those access points, making sure that it's structured to the point where coaches, we know what our obligations for communication are. We want to make sure that we are really clear, concise, and precise about this is our objective, this is where we're going.
And from a parents' perspective, again, we want to know what's going on. We're paying the fees. We've given our children to you in trust. So we want to know that, where's the objective for the club going? What's happening? And there also needs to be that personal interaction, too. Hey, my little Johnny is here having issues. Can I talk to you? And a coach needs to have that accessibility to go, Sure. Can't do it right now. I'm coaching. How about 2: 00 on Tuesday? Let's sit down and talk about where Johnny is at and what we can do together to get Johnny where he wants to be. Both of these are critical interactions to maintain stability within the dynamic, the communication and the emotion dynamic. So how do we do it smarter? I had recently had a coach contact me, and so they wanted me to work with somebody in their club. I said, Yes, sure. Absolutely. So when I turned up, I asked them, Who do you want me to work with and what's the main issue? And they said, It's the parents, and the issue is they are overbearing and always almost in the way.
Every time we turn around, they're standing there and they want to know exactly what's going on. I must be honest, it's not one of the things I get called in frequently, because when I run my trainings, I run my trainings for the athlete, the coach, and the parents, so that everybody's on the same page, everybody's singing the same song. And it's a philosophy of mine that the coach, the parent, and the athlete each have equal rights in the development. Each have roles to play in that dynamic. I turned up and I said, Okay, let me sit down with the parents and we'll have a conversation and we'll work out where the issues are and what we can do to go forward from here. So when I sat down with the parents, I said, Okay, how do you see your role with your child's development in this sport? The mum straight away turned around and go, We have no idea what's going on. So he's gone and got his coaching course done so that he can be in the gym making sure that whatever's going on, we've got some idea. And it was almost like a panic coming from this mother.
She obviously loves her child, and she obviously wants her child to succeed and get the best and most out of their sport. The kid absolutely adored the sport, was incredibly talented, was clearly going somewhere, and they felt this sense of urgency and this sense of overwhelmed that we could lose this or we could mess this up. If we could screw this up because we don't know what's going on, we need to keep a tight to hold on it. Because they were keeping such a tight hold on it because they weren't being communicated with, then it was creating an issue between the coach and the athlete. Their best intentions were actually causing the biggest issue or their biggest fears. I said, Okay, what's your objective? What's your objective as parents? Both of them looked at each other blankly and they stumbled, and they tried to make something up on the fly. They had no idea what their big end objective was. The reason I say that is because when I, and those of you who've listened to previous podcasts of mine will know when I'm working with an athlete, I start with the objective. Or when I'm working with a coach who's trying to create either a team or create a team dynamic or create a club philosophy, what's the objective?
So when I work with a parent, there is no different. What's your objective? As the parent, what do you want at the end step? When I explain this to these two parents, they tell me, Well, we want him to be happy. Okay, cool. So if that's your main objective, you want your child to be happy as this athlete who, as I said, he's got great talent, got incredible drive to achieve and loves what he does, then your role becomes very simple. And that is the support role to make sure that they are happy. They're not completely physically overwhelmed, so you give them downtime. They're not mentally or emotionally overwhelmed, so you give them a diversity in life. They're not always talking about the sport. And this is something that I see really frequently. I have a philosophy that when an athlete leaves their training venue, they should leave their training at the venue. What I mean by that is when you get in the car, last thing you want is your mum or dad saying to you, What did you just do during Why did you do that? Why is that happening? What's going on here?
You get those multiple constant barrage of questions of what, why, where, and how, and when. Because then you think, Oh, they're trying to justify. They're trying to overwhelm me. Whereas you're probably still processing your training anyway. I always say to anybody that I'm working with, When you do your training before you leave, inform your parents of what you did that night. That might be 30 seconds, Hey, we did this tonight. We did patterns tonight, or we did routine construction tonight, or whatever sport you're into, this is what we did tonight. And then have an agreement that when you walk out and you get in the car, that you're parent and child, not parent and athlete. And that's important because it allows the athlete to get in the car. If they want to bring it up, then they have control. They can ask you the question, Hey, mum, I did this tonight and I was having trouble with that. What do you think? Or, Hey, they've asked me to do this competition or this tournament in two weeks time. Can we do that? So the athlete gains control rather than feels like they're being barraged when they get in the car.
So the role of a parent is support. It's It's filling in the gaps. It's creating continuity and consistency in the athlete's life and their child's life. So the objective for these parents were to make their child happy. Now, they weren't doing that because their The whole focus was on, what are you doing? How do we maximise on this? And it was a real intense. When I stood back and I watched the interaction between the coach and the athlete, there was certainly a strain going on. But when I watched when the parents came in, that strain got even more tighter. And the athlete almost stuck the head in the sand and let this eye off between the coach and the parents go on. And it was almost like, I could see the athlete in their mind. It was almost like two divorced parents. If I don't get involved, I can just hide under here. And that's not a conducive, happy environment. And ultimately, those cracks will get worse and worse and worse. And it'll come down to who's the stronger of the two, the parent or the coach. And that's not what we want for the athlete.
That's not going to give the athlete the best outcome. So once we've established what's my objective as a parent, the next big question, and probably the even more important question is why. Why do we want that? So these parents wanted their child just to be happy. And when I told him, but why? Again, they looked blankly at each other because when he's happy, we have a great relationship. We laugh, we joke, we around the dinner table. When he's not happy, it's almost like you've got this moody teenager that won't interact. We have no idea what's going on at school. He struggles at school when he's unhappy. When he goes to training, he doesn't want to go to training. We wanted to make him happy. We know our objective, and we know the value, the purpose of that objective. It's to make him happy so that he's more interactive, he's more conducive of learning at school, conducive of learning in his training, and more chance of giving him a personal growth. Then we need to look at the role. I said to his parents, What's your role in making him happy? What do you do? How do you see your role?
If you were to write it down as a job description, what would it be? And that's what we did. I gave him a piece of paper and I said, I want you to write a job description for that role. Not for you, not what you do or what you think you should do, but what that role would entail. If you had to hand that role to somebody else, what would that job description look like? And the interesting thing was the mum wrote down hers and the dad wrote down his, and when they read them out, they were completely different. So even within the same family dynamic, the mum and the dad saw their role completely differently. In actual fact, the dad's role was far more productive than the mum's, which was far more emotional and reactive. In this dynamic, what we needed to do is get the parents on board together first to make sure that they were working as a team to do the right thing, what they saw. We took these two job descriptions and we moulded them into one to look like an ideal job description. Then I asked them, Is this something that you can do?
Both of them, like a big weight, come off their shoulders. Yes, that's exactly what we wanted to do. We didn't know how to write that down. We didn't know what to do. We were reacting. Those of you have listened to my podcast before. Now, I talk about the bumper cars. When something hits you and you react to that, you just end up somewhere you don't want to be. Then you got to try and fight and claw your way back to somewhere you have no idea. You get a sense of being lost and that frustration. When you know what the job role is and something sideswipes you, it's much easier to get back on track to know where you are. So you can do your job again. So then we looked at the strategies to implement that. So now we know what our job description is, who does not parked the best. Who does what part the best? Who does the pickup and the drop off and can keep that distance and keep that? Well, you know what? When you get in the car, you're just dad or you're just mum. Who can do that best?
And the dad goes, Well, that's me. That's clearly because when she goes, she gets too involved and too emotionally involved. Okay, cool. So that's your role from now on. As much as possible, I'd like you to do the pickups. Okay, mum, you do the drop offs. So that between you, you've both got the interaction, you've both got the connexion, you're both doing the right things, yet you're working towards your strengths. Okay, so who does the competitions? And the mum goes, Well, I can't. I can't watch the competitions. I sit there with my hands over my face the whole time. I said, Right, what message is that sending to your child when they're about to compete and they look up and you're hiding behind your hands? And she goes, I've never thought of it like that. So the dad goes, Well, I can't. I stand outside and I smoke. I said, Well, both of you, they need to work on how do you sit there with your poker face? How do you sit there and go, Yey, come on, we're behind you, we back you, we believe in you. They had to sit there together and they had to work on that together.
He made sure that she didn't hide her hands, and she made sure that he was there, he was present. That's the important... When we think about strategies and we talk about objectives, we need to have very clear, concise strategies to reach our objectives. This all sounds very clinical, doesn't it? When you think about this, we're trying to raise a child, and we're looking at it incredibly clinically. But what we're looking at is making sure we get the best outcome. Then once we've got that structure and that strategy we've built that works and gives us the outcomes that we want, then we can move and bend with the wind a little bit and have a bit of latitude to that. We don't look so robotic to it. But we've got to start with a strategy first. Otherwise, we just look wishy-washy and reactive. The next thing I asked them about was communication. How do you communicate with your child about their sport? The dad goes, Well, I'm paying for this, and so I want to know what he's doing. I want to make sure when he's at home, he's doing his extra exercises. I want to make sure that once he's finished his homework, he's got his runners on, he's gone out for a run.
Okay, cool. If that's what you expect, how do you communicate that? The mum said, Well, as soon as he walks in, he said, Have you done this? Have you done that? Have you done whatever? I said, What's the reaction from your child? He goes, Oh, he gives me attitude. I said, Then we need to make sure this works better together. As a parent, you want to make sure that your kids do their homework. If you stood there looking over their shoulders, how good would the homework be and how much time would that child put into trying to find a way to get out of that? Their focus wouldn't be on doing their homework. It'd be, How do I get out of this? How do I hide? How do I say, Yeah, done that, mum. Yeah, got no homework today. We want to create a dynamic where the athlete wants to communicate, I'm doing this. That comes down to it. I said, We need to write a roster so that the athlete knows what's expected of them, and there's the accountability of getting the athlete to tick it off. The first thing is when you walk in, it should be dad and son connexion, not dad being the coach, being the financer, turning around and saying, What have you done?
What haven't you done? Why not? You should be able to walk past the fridge and look at, Yeah, he's ticked it off. If he hasn't, then you can begin that communication. You can Start that dialogue with them. Hey, did you not get time today? What can we do to help you make that happen? There is that we can hold you account because we're paying for this. We want you to achieve it. Sometimes kids need a little bit of a poke and a prod in the right direction. But we want to do it in a way that they don't feel that they need to then go, I'll just tick it in there so they'll never know. Or I'll just hide. I'll lose that piece of paper. We'll have to do it again. I've lost it. They'll get it. We want to make sure that it's a group dynamic effort, not a domineering do as you're told effort. So the communication is important. How we communicate, are they? If you've listened to my podcast before, when I talk about internal and external referencing. So are they internally or externally referenced? If they're internally referenced, we want to be able to turn around and say, Hey, what's going on?
Anything you want to show me? If they're externally referenced, Hey, we're here to help you. What do you need us to do? So that they know that it's either down to them or there's this external group that we're working towards and with. Next part of it is accountability as a parent. We're very good as parents of making the athlete or the child accountable. However, how will we account for what we do, the way we communicate, our structure, our strategies, our objectives? The easiest way to do that is to work together as a team. If you don't have that opportunity, do the same thing. Write it down. Make sure that when you're doing your role, when you're finished doing that specific job or that task, tick it off so you can hold yourself account. The other thing, too, is to ask the athlete what they want. When I say this to parents, they look at me and go, No, we're the parents. We should know. Absolutely, you are the parents. Absolutely, no, you shouldn't know everything because no one does. Sometimes we assume. We assume we know what's right because we think we should know what's right.
Often, that leads to miscommunication, misdirection, and often deroulement. If we sat down with the athlete and said, We're the parents, and we're always going to be your parents. We're always going to make sure that we give the right environment to you. How do you want us to help you? What would you like us to do? So you open that level of communication and also that accountability process with your athlete, not your child, because when you're parents, you're parents. But when you're asking to get involved and help them, when you take on that role, They need to have some input and control with that, too. And especially as they get a bit older. Hey, dad, I'd like you to help me do this, this, and this. Hey, mum, can you help me with my stretching or with my uniform? Can we do that next Thursday? Sure. Okay, you want us to do that? Great. We'll move our things around. However, what we need you to do is this, this, and this, too, to make sure that works. Can you help your sister with her homework or whatever? So you start to have that very open and two-way communication and accountability.
And the last part of that is calibration. So when we think about what we do as athletes, and we have to have that calibration, that reassessment, that assessment, adjustment, and application, and then reassessment, readjustment, reapplication. In the last podcast, podcast 48, we talked about that. This one is exactly the same, but from a parents' perspective. We need to constantly assess, is this working? These ups and downs we're getting, can we make those more fluid? Can we make sure that it's more stable? What do I need to do? Yep, that's working. Great. I'm going to keep doing that. That's not working so well. How do I adjust that and then apply that? All of these things that we've talked about have been a dynamic between you as a parent and the athlete. The same interaction and respect and equality needs to happen between you as parents and the coach. Coach, and both the coach and you as parents have a responsibility to make sure that relationship works. If it's not working, then we need to look at what we need to do differently. If it's not working, we need to look at what we want from that relationship so we can do it differently and do what we need to do to make it happen.
If it means that when I come home from work at night, I'm tired, so I don't interact with the coach the best, then I come home and then my wife can go and pick up. If we go to competitions and the coach is doing something that we deem as parents not to be the right thing, Then standing up in a competition or jumping up and down at that time isn't going to give the best outcome or the best performance environment for our athlete or our child. So what we want to be able to do is say, Right, after this competition, can we sit down somewhere and have a chat? We're doing it in a very amicable but also very accountable format. What were those things that we needed to look at as a parent? We wanted to make sure we understand our objective. What's our objective as a parent for our athlete our child. Then why? Why are we doing it? What's the big buy? Is it for them or is it for us? Is it to make them happy or is it to hold them account? Is it to make them do something because they were lazy?
Whatever your motivator is, and I'm not going to judge that. It's something that you need to be happy with. Then we need to look at how does that role look? If we were to write a job description for that role, what would it look like? Then we build that strategy and application of communication. It needs to be accountability, and then we need to calibrate. That process is no different for us as parents as it is for the athlete or the coach. This system works, so we need to just apply it in a different format. Being a parent of an elite athlete is a tough task. It's something that you can take great priding at certain times, and other times you feel like the worst parent in the world. And that's a difficult place for any parent to be. And something I think we need to come to grips with and to be happy with, that it's not always going to be plain sailing. It's not always going to be ideal. And it's about putting the right people around our child to help them achieve their goals. It's not our goals, it's their goals. And we can do that by putting the right people around them, by giving them strategies to deal with certain things and giving them every opportunity we can in the right context.
This has been a really different podcast. It's been one that I certainly, as a parent, struggled within the times. Even knowing what I know as a mind coach, I've had to step back sometimes and look at the way that I approach things. Sometimes I've been, because of what I know, a little bit over interactive with the coaches, and I needed to step back. We all need to adjust. We all need to make sure how objective is the right objective, and we stick to a strategy to achieve that. Hope you got a lot from this podcast, and I'd love to get some feedback from you, parents, on some of the issues you've had, or if this has helped you to see things a little bit clearer. And so until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
