The Parental influence.

As we just mentioned, besides the genetic predisposition, environment has a big influence on how much of our potential we are going to develop, and families are one aspect of the environment that brings both, genetic heritage and environmental input. Nowadays as some families posses enough resources, we (Including me) tend to believe that we need to provide everything we can to our children in order to minimize their challenges and the eventuality of failing. The ones that had experiences success for themselves tend to forget the challenges they had to overcome to get where they are today. Basically, it is a type of consumerism. We create kids that are being “conditioned" to receive but do not develop the skill to go out of their comfort zone to get what they need and eventually fail in the process. Challenges and failures help a player to become mentally tough and resilient. It is also difficult for new tennis players to understand that in order to improve and gain expertise in all areas of their game, they have to learn to collaborate with the diversity of other players. Tennis will put all the participants on the edge of growth the includes players, coaches, and also parents. We as parents, have to own the fact that we have our own desire to fulfill some of our dreams through our children, we want to have our kids be happy and make us happy. However to fulfill our expectations as parents could be a difficult task for our kids. They have a hard enough time trying to fulfill their own.

We tend to think that the comfort zone only refers to physical laziness, but that is not the whole picture. The comfort zone expands its domains to cognitive or emotional ways of being and becomes an impediment to change patterns of feeling and behaving in those two areas that are extremely relevant for the development of high performance. We want our kids to learn the meaning of sacrifice and effort but we do not want to see them making mistakes or in emotional distress, so we do not let them develop the important quality of resilience in the process. When the results are not what we want, we tend to interfere and blame coaches, training partners, courts, environment and any external factor that we can’t control, forgetting or not completely understanding that the seed of high performance lies within us and the things we can control.

One of the big tasks is to help kids to learn how to become more responsible beings, how to put effort, how to listen and take corrections, how to be resilient and tolerate frustration. However, as soon as they fail we go for a quick fix and take them out of the cause of pain. And all of these ideas are applicable when it comes to parenting as well. We will also face the frustration of seeing our kids not achieving what we want, not putting the effort we expect, not practicing or focusing the way we think they are supposed to. So here is a call to look at ourselves as parents and see how all this relates to us and our own sense of success and failure.

Evolve Your Game!