May 30, 2019 | Tagged Coaching,
Worth More than Just Basketball
Ambition on the basketball court can be a great source of motivation or a dangerous problem.
If you value yourself based on what you do rather than who you are, you are going to encounter heartache
Research by Jennifer Crocker, who has worked on a series of self-esteem studies, found in her latest research that college students who based their self-worth on external sources--including appearance, approval from others and even their academic performance--reported more stress, anger, academic problems, relationship conflicts, and had higher levels of drug and alcohol use and symptoms of eating disorders.
A young man who was one of the best players in the state of Washington and starting to get noticed by a number of D1 schools went with a group of friends to a state park. At the state park was a tree with a large rope that swung people wide over the river 25 feet below. The danger of this was having to navigate the rocks below. One girl tried to swing out and drop into the river but she became frightened and clung to the rope. She was dangling out too far from the edge to help her get back to safety. The D1 Sophomore prospect reached out to help her and lost his footing falling 25 feet onto his head. He was in a coma for many days and eventually emerged. He found out his competitive basketball days were over. Before the accident basketball was his entire life. His entire worth as a person was based on his basketball. He became depressed. Some key people came into his life and began to share about life beyond basketball. He began to see that his total self-worth was connected to basketball. As he began to reconnect his worth to being alive and to the joy of giving to others, he began to rebuild his life. Now he teaches and coaches and brings hope to many people who know him. If you base your belief on the fact that God loves you and you are a person of infinite value, joy will be the outcome.
Coaches
Many coaches base their worth on their win/loss record. This is dangerous and can cause pain in the home, on the team and with yourself. Coaches who live this way use capitalistic words when coaching their team: he/she was worthless yesterday at practice or he totally wasted his chance or she’s a huge liability or he’s a great asset. When we value our win/loss record we start to treat people as objects and pawns on our chess board. Learning to value coaching beyond win/loss and seeing it for the transformative calling coaching can be will help you find basketball worth it even during a tough season.
Parents
Any loving parent understands the profound experience parenting can be which makes the lack of sleep, difficulties and challenges all worth it.
As parents we want our kids to feel a strong sense of self-worth. We want them to value their skills, their talent, and their future. Seeing a child struggle with low self-worth is excruciating for parents.
Most people make a mistake by trying to improve feeling of self-worth by trying to build up self-esteem through talking about all the things their kids are doing well. The focus goes on external success, grades, athletic success, appearance and popularity. However research shows that trying to increase self- worth through praise and focus on external success actually lowers self-worth. In fact, the more successful film star Shia leBeouf’s life became, the more suicidal, depressed and reckless he became.
So what should we do?
Research has found that one of the best ways to improve self-worth is to improve self-compassion. Your ability to have compassion on your mistakes and to avoid expectations of perfection will help raise your feelings of self-worth. Self-compassion is not letting yourself off the hook for poor behavior or lowing the bar, it means to be able to show compassion for yourself and not judge yourself too harshly for mistakes or shortcomings. The amazing research is that people who have higher levels of self-compassion actually have demonstrably superior performance than those of lower self-compassion.
Parents can give this to their children through their own example as well as having compassion for others. If you are very critical of other people and extremely harsh about other people’s shortcomings, you will be creating a habit of judgment rather than compassion that your children will naturally internalize. Improve your own self-compassion and you will see the fruit of this in your children’s self-compassion and higher self-worth.
About NBC Basketball
NBC Basketball trains the total person. Their vision is for athletes and coaches to be their best on and off the court. NBC Basketball has camps, academies, clinics and training sessions all around the USA, Canada, Italy, Austria, the UK, and Thailand. For more information about NBC Camps visit www.nbccamps.com.