Lesson of the week: believing in ourselves
This week, we learned about believing in ourselves.
Believing in ourselves is having the confidence, a positive attitude, and resolve to believe in our abilities.
With a sport-to-life coaching lesson, we intend to use this lesson to help kids develop a strong sense of confidence so they believe in themselves.
We've learned that teaching kids to believe in themselves is an essential lesson as it develops resilience, creates a positive outlook, enhances mental health, and strengthens social connections. These valuable effects can be seen after children learn this lesson through play.
We've learned to implement this lesson through play using team huddles and the C.A.R.E. method. Additionally, it's also essential to create challenges as steps to help kids develop self-belief step by step, and these come with a set of adaptations. Some challenges include: making S.M.A.R.T goals, self-talk, and visualization (among others).
But sometimes, implementing the sport as a life lesson might not work perfectly; that's when we learned we can pivot and find other ways to teach this lesson—adaptations such as the following.
These could be sidequests in which kids make up within their larger challenge in order to promote autonomy and them making their own parameters around play.
Timeouts are another way to do this when you feel kids are losing focus on the lesson by regrouping them and refocusing on the day's topic.
The difficulty dial is another excellent adaptation, and it's taking a step back and assessing if the current level of difficulty is too high or too low for the kids and adjusting accordingly.
