One mistake, that's usually all it takes, and you can tell when you're watching your daughter compete and one missed play, one mistake turns into two, three, four, and now she's spiraling and she can't seem to snap out of it. As parents, it can be one of the hardest things to watch. You just wanna tell her to shake it off, move on. It's not that big of a deal. Next play. But those things typically don't work, and there's a real reason why. And in today's episode, I'm going to be breaking down why this happens and how to help your daughter get over these mistakes faster using a two-second reset that I think all girl athletes need to have. Let's get into it. If I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bre. I am a mental performance coach for girl athletes. I'm also a long time head volleyball coach, so I see this play out all the time from a coaching perspective as well. And here's what I hear from moms. I'm curious if this sounds familiar to you you. And I'm a mom, too, so I can see it, but it's one mistake, of a sudden she's in a downwards spiral and she can't seem to shake it off. Her negative self-talk after one or two errors in the car ride home. Maybe she had a great game, but she can't stop talking about the one or two things that went wrong. Maybe one little thing went wrong, and then it snowballed into something bigger, and now she is benched for the rest of the game, and it's frustrating when that happens too. Or maybe you have a athlete who ends up getting emotional on the court and crying, and those emotions take over, and obviously we can't have that when she is competing. I know that if you've been in any of these situations, it can be frustrating, but also this is a very normal experience that most athletes go through. It's just that most athletes aren't taught how to respond to mistakes in a way that actually keeps them in the game. First, I want you to know what's happening in her head, and then I'm gonna teach you the thing that I teach all athletes inside our program, The Elite Competitor Academy. So number one, our brain's number one job is to keep us safe. So your daughter's brain is designed to keep her physically safe and psychologically safe. That's its only job. Now, physically safe, obviously, that's, keeping us breathing. That's very helpful. But psychological safety is really important for teen and tween girl athletes as well. So this is, do I still fit in in this environment? Am I still accepted by this team, by this coach? All of that. And mistakes actually lead to a threat to her psychological safety, and here's why. Mistakes often trigger a threat of not being liked, a threat of being pulled out, looking dumb in front of other people. So her amygdala is this small part of her brain that senses threat in her environment, including a threat to her psychological safety. So when mistakes happen, she now is sensing a threat in her environment. Her brain, that part of her brain, is picking up on that. And then her sympathetic nervous system kicks in. Her fight or flight or freeze or fawn response. So when you see your daughter, like, freezing out there and, making silly errors, this is what's going on. And when she's spiraling like this, when she's actively in this moment where she can't bounce back, nothing you say from the sideline, nothing her coach says from the sideline, nothing her teammates say can actually bring her back. And I know you're like, "Wait, so all of this time saying, 'Shake it off, next play, you got this,'" those aren't bad things to say. It's just that she doesn't know actually how to do those things in the moment. Those words are what you want as an outcome, but it's not actually giving her a tool to do that. So here's how we can help her develop this tool. She, in order to bounce back quickly, there's three things that need to happen. Number one, she has to first of all, have a mindset shift around mistakes in general, from mistakes are to be avoided, they're the worst thing to happen, to mistakes are actually necessary for my growth, they're part of the learning experience, all of that. Now, here's the thing. You're probably like, "I already tell her that." Right? Her coach already tells her that, that mistakes are okay. It's okay to make aggressive errors. And that's the problem. A lot of athletes are getting that messaging from you and from their coaches, but then they don't know what to do with it or about it because they make a mistake, they spiral, and then they get taken out because they don't actually have step two. So step two of this process is she has to know her triggers. So I explain to athletes it's like a traffic light. So green is flow state. That's actually where we want your daughter to be when she's playing her best. She's not really thinking very much in green, in flow state. She's just playing and doing her thing, okay? Yellow is when something happens. So this inevitably will happen in all competitions. Right? We have, a game tonight I'm coaching, and there's gonna be something that happens. An athlete will make an error, a ref will make a bad call, her teammates will do something. The opponent might do something. Right? Th- it just happens. But most athletes don't recognize the shift from green to yellow because they go directly to red. Red is she's spiraling. She's beating herself up. One mistake is no longer one mistake. It's two, three, four And that's when you see in her body language that she's slumping, she's hesitating, she's not taking risks. We don't want our athletes ever to get to red in a practice or in a competition because it's really hard to get back to green. We need them to recognize when they get to yellow, so that's step two, know her triggers, and then step three is to have a method to come back to green. So our method that we teach inside the Elite Competitor Academy is a snapback routine. So a snapback routine is a very simple failure recovery system. It's a combination of three things. A breath to engage her parasympathetic nervous system, a reset word that she says at the top of that breath, and then a reset signal on her exhale. Okay, so it's very simple. It takes two seconds or less. Athletes actually go through a little activity to determine what their reset word is. So they reflect on best past playing experiences, how they wanna play in the moment, or how they wanna feel in the moment. So some athletes use words like fun, free, fierce, calm. Sometimes it's a silly word, some, and that's just totally fine. And whatever they want, but that will help remind them how they want, how they wanna show up in that moment The reset signal is very simple. It's like, adjusting a hair tie or a sock or, putting two fingers together. Something that they can do to ground them in the present moment. It could even be looking at something that's stationary in their environment, but it has to be able to travel with them from court to court, field to field, wherever they compete. So that routine is something that all athletes that are inside the Elite Competitor Academy with us, our mental training program, they have a snapback routine that's custom to them that they can use in those moments where they recognize they get to yellow and they need to come back to green. And the key is that they practice this, just like any other skill. Because mental training skills are skills. They're just like passing, setting, shooting, swimming, hitting, like, all of those are skills that your athlete doesn't use one, or learn one time and then never use again. They are skills that they learn and then they practice every single practice. Mental skills are the same. So athletes inside the academy have their snapback routine, but then they're also practicing that skill along with all the other skills that they have built every single day when they are competing, when they're practicing, and that is how they build the mental skill muscle so that they actually have those skills to lean on when it matters. If we expect our athletes to be able to use these in pressure situations and they haven't practiced them or they haven't learned them, it won't happen. We don't rise to the expectations. We don't rise to the challenge. We fall to whatever we have trained. And I've seen this over and over again as a coach when I'm coaching in really big moments, when we're in championship situations or when we're down and we need to battle back, when we're playing teams that are maybe marginally better than us, but we are able to stay strong mentally and come back from mistakes and not let one turn into two and three and four, because it's such a game of momentum. A lot of sports are, but volleyball especially, the one that I coach. And we know that if we go down that path, that it's going to lead to destruction, right, if we just let one mistake turn into two and three and four. Most athletes know that as well. And you can talk all you want, coaches can talk all they want about like, "Let's not make one mistake turn into two, three, four." They can talk about it, but that's not actually building a skill to be able to know what to do in those moments. So the snapback routine is one of those skills that athletes can really lean on that's very tangible. Now, if you wanna learn more about how to develop this skill plus two others that we teach inside the academy, go to our free training for sports parents. It's at trainhergame.com, and you can register for a time or you can choose an on-demand option where you can watch it. It's about 45 minutes, and I swear it's worth your time though. You can put it on in the background. I teach three skills. Number one, how to help her bounce back from mistakes, so I go a little bit deeper into this skill. Number two, how to help release the pressure she's putting on herself. And three, how to flip her negative mindset. So three useful, tangible skills that you could be helping her with. We also talk about The Elite Competitor Academy on that training. So if that's what you want your daughter to do for the next step, we talk all about what the academy is, what's included, all those good things. So I will link the training below in the show notes, as well as The Elite Competitor Academy if you want to check that out. Hopefully this is helpful. I hate to be the bearer of bad news that your shake it off, be a goldfish, next play, while those are wonderful things to say, if she doesn't actually have the skill to do it, it's not gonna happen. So give her a skill like the snapback routine so that she can actually lean on something tangible in those moments. All right, I will see you in the next episode