Use Your Business Skills to Win in Youth Sports: #1 Be Strategically Intentional

I believe that as parents and coaches, we all want our kids to reach their full potential in life. Youth sports undoubtably is a fantastic platform for our kids to do just that.? However, what if, without even realizing it, the habits you’ve built around youth sports are working against this ultimate purpose?? How do you know?? What can you do?

Your Success in Business Likely Holds the Answer

Think about what makes you successful in business: Strategic planning, defining purpose, and setting time-based goals; being intentional. These tools can be just as transformative when applied to your approach to youth sports.

In business, we wouldn’t embark on a major initiative without a clear purpose, a set of goals, and a plan to align our actions with those goals. Yet, when it comes to youth sports—one of the most powerful platforms for human development for one of your most important "assets"—we often rely on instinct or tradition instead of intentional planning. This lack of intentionality can lead to misaligned actions that fail to achieve what we truly care about for our children.

Why Do Parents Skip This Well-Known Best-Practice?

There are several powerful impediments that prevent parents from approaching youth sports in a way that aligns with their true goals.? Here are a few that might be standing in your way.

1. It's hard work.? It takes effort to be thoughtful and intentional.
2. Follow the heard.? Peer pressure is really powerful, for kids and parents.
3. Power perception.? Parents don't believe they have the power to create or choose the experiences they want.
4. Desire for status.? Status is a natural desire and when our kids are on display or being talked about, it stokes our natural desire for status.
5. Desire to win.? Winning is a primal instinct that everyone has.? That excitement you feel at a 7yr old baseball game, picturing your child getting an RBI double?? That's dopamine driving you to want to win.
6. Fear of under-development.? Ironically, this one actually leads to under-development.? It leads to rushing the development process.
7. Lack of perspective and impatience.? Parents lose sight of how many years and how much opportunity the child will have to develop skills and interest.? Rushing for no reason can backfire.

These are are normal impediments to being intentional about your approach to your kid's youth sports experience.? You have to be aware of these and put in the effort to avoid being derailed from your true objectives.

Applying Business Tools to Youth Sports

The tools you use every day in your professional life are just as applicable to youth sports. Here’s how you can adapt them:

1. Define What Matters Most: Is it physical development, emotional development, development of passions and success habits, community development, mindset development,? executive function development, leadership development, and teamwork development?? For a list of 50 ways kids develop to thrive in life, check out Sport4Growth's articles on Youth Development:?https://www.sport4growth.com/youth-development.? And here's the real powerful secret: pursuing these as your goals will never get in the way of their best development or performance in the sport.? Just the opposite! A focus on these will amplify their development and performance in the sport.? Winning, enjoying playing, enjoying their youth, are all also objectives worth considering.? Just make sure you explore and discover what matters most to you.
2. Have an Intentional Time-Bound Perspective: Whether it is the development of skills in the sport or development of skills to thrive in life, be intentional to determine by when these need to be accomplished and you will?gain the most powerful chance to achieve your goals.? Do you want them to win the championship at 10 years old or make the high school varsity team when they are 15?? Do you want them to exhibit the traits of a world class leader at 8 years old, or master those behaviors by the time they are starting their own company at age 28?? These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but too often the long-term is sacrificed for the short-term results (just like can happen in business!).
3. Align Your Actions with Your Intentions:? In business, we need to be aware of biases, noise, bad data, politics, fear, etc...In business, we need to prevent these normal challenges from derailing our approach.? The same is true when managing our approach to youth sports.? We need to be aware of the potential impediments noted above.? We need to be intentional about what we do, what we think and what we say.? e.g., If you are cheering loudly for your child to "shoot it," you are likely aligning your actions with your hidden desire to win or hidden desire for social status, and not your desire for your child to learn to make their own high pressure decisions.

Ask These Questions Now

One of the simplest yet most powerful tools for intentionality is asking great questions that deepen understanding - consider telling ChatGPT to ask you these questions.? In business, this technique helps to clearly define problems and uncover root causes. In youth sports, it can establish and clarify your true intentions:

• Why do I want my child to play this sport?? What do we want to achieve? By when do we want to achieve that? Why do we want to achieve those things?
• Why is it important to win?? Can we achieve our goals regardless?
• Why do they need to be on a certain team?? Can we still reach our objectives no matter what team they are on?? What do we need to do?
• By when do they need to have this skill mastered?? Is there enough time?? Plenty of time?? What does the natural development curve look like?
• By when do they need to exhibit certain levels of behavior?? Do I care how it appears to others?? How does it impact others?? How does the approach to learning the right thing to do impact their long-term development?
• What matters when I am on the sideline today?? Do they need my encouragement?? Do they want it?? Should I play a role in this?
• What do I hope for them to achieve in the future and what do they need to learn, by when, to achieve those goals?? How does sports impact this?

Dig deep and you just might find a simple answer that is both powerful and liberating.? The stressful sideline experience will disappear.? The challenging car rides home will be gone.? The disappointment and shame after undesirable moments will dissipate.? The calm of knowing that you are focused on the critical path to long-term success might set you free.

Course-Correcting with Intentionality

If you realize that your actions or goals are misaligned, don’t worry. Start by revisiting your purpose, adjusting your perspective, and making small, deliberate changes to your approach. Even small tweaks can have a profound impact on your child’s experience.? Once you have clarity on what you want to achieve, making small changes will be easy and highly impactful.

Conclusion

With clear intentions and deliberate actions in how you approach youth sports, you have the immense power to help your kids and your teams to reach their full potential in life. Nearly all of the sports infrastructure that we need to achieve this already exists. We just need to do what we do successfully in business: Have clear objectives, with a strategic time-frame and align our approach to meet those objectives.? Think about how this same approach will help your kids to reach their full potential through their youth sports experiences.

This is why I created Sport4Growth. I want to help parents and coaches gain tremendous clarity in their objectives and have the tools they need to reach those objectives. I hope you will join me on this journey to make youth sports the greatest human development platform on the planet.??https://www.sport4growth.com/