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Everyone learns slightly differently. However, there are some general rules of thumb for coaching and teaching sports that hold true for most people.
1. Keep it simple. Focus on one thing at a time until it becomes a good habit. Then add a new element. Avoid giving too much information and lists of things to think about or the athlete will become overwhelmed or confused.
2. Focus on the positive. It can be helpful to show the right technique in contrast to the wrong technique so you can really see the clear difference. But you don’t want to focus too much on what not to do. Otherwise those negative images are the ones that stay in the athlete’s mind. 3. Be encouraging. Build on what the student does well rather than focusing on everything he or she did poorly. Avoid scolding.
4. Take small steps. Avoid foolish and overly difficult expectations. People generally learn best when they can have success and then build on their successes.
5. Be specific. People learn better when you are precise rather than vague and open-ended.
6. Have fun. Sports are about having fun and enjoying yourself.
by Dr. Alison Poulsen Healthy Relationships and Effective Communication
While judging too harshly or quickly may be harmful to you and your relationships, being discerning and making quick judgments is a critical skill for survival as a human being.
Making judgments is necessary.
First, we need to determine when making quick judgments is useful and necessary, and when it is inappropriate or harmful.
Our life experiences allow us to make quick general assumptions in order to survive in the world and save time. We don’t have the time to thoroughly get to know every person we meet or to completely analyze each situation. So we make certain assumptions from a myriad of subtle clues, such as the way someone talks, dresses, moves, and glances around the room. Our assumptions may be wrong, but on the whole they save us time and often avert danger or disagreeable circumstances by enabling us to make quick judgments based on intuition and the given circumstances.
Imagine being interviewed for a job by someone who cruelly reprimands her secretary right in front of you. While she may be responding to other stresses in her life, your quick decision or judgment not to work for her may save you a lot of heartache in the future.
Now imagine walking down a dark city street and approaching several young men in pants sagging to the ground walking with a tough-guy swagger. While these young men may be on their way to the library and pose no danger to you, through experience, you may conclude that young men dressed that way are more likely to be dangerous than a group of older women dressed in suits. While such stereotypes may not be a reason to arrest someone, they may be a reason to remain alert.
Harsh judgments or intolerance is destructive.
It is important to avoid overly severe or disparaging judgments. When we judge harshly and treat other people with hatred, contempt, or intolerance, then we are causing ourselves to live in a small-minded state of fear which diminishes our well-being as well as that of others around us.
“When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself”
~Earl Nightingale
Intention and balance are key.
Yet we deceive ourselves if we think we can live with total tolerance and thereby avoid making judgments. Very often, especially in critical moments, we don’t have time to gather full information; nor do we need it. In fact, we would be naïve, waste time, and harm ourselves if we stopped making judgments, including snap assessments.
Throughout life, intention and balance play key roles. Depending on the circumstances, if we balance tolerance with discernment, understanding with self protection, and our past experiences with an openness to the unexpected, we are probably on the right track.
Avoid being overly judgmental toward yourself as well.
Ironically, when you say that you hate it when you’re judgmental, you are being judgmental about yourself. The implication is that you are bad or hateful. That is overly-harsh, which is not the most effective way of adjusting your judgments. If you are trying to become more tolerant, then be more understanding toward yourself as well. Don’t punish yourself for a natural process of learning from past experience. Just attempt to be less severe in all your judgments.
Emotions of sadness and grief often expose the depth of a person’s feelings of loss, love, or longing. Cutting off those feelings may result in losing connection to the heart. If there is no time for grieving, the feeling of loss mounts until you develop a fear of the hollow place inside.
However, dwelling too long in a state of sadness can cause you to cultivate a chronic state of sadness. Neurologist John Arden shows that sustained thoughts and feelings of sadness can lead to a neurological perpetuation of sad thoughts and feelings.
For instance, in grieving about a divorce, people may have thoughts such as, “How could I have let this happen?” or “I’m no good at relationships,” or “I’ve been so stupid.” If sadness turns to brooding over thoughts like this, the thoughts become neurologically connected with the feeling of sadness. A person then can become stuck in a rut of obsessive negative thinking.
Dr. Arden states,
The longer you stay in a low emotional state, the greater is the probability that those neurons will fire together when you are sad and will therefore wire together. As a result, this will become the chronic foundation of your emotional experience.
Succumbing to and remaining in a perpetual state of sadness can cause a vicious cycle that makes it hard to move onto other emotional states.
While it is necessary and healthy to feel sadness at times and to grieve, it is important to avoid creating an entrenched neuro-network of sadness. It becomes necessary to seek situations where one can experience other thoughts and feelings.
After experiencing some time of grieving for a loss, ask yourself “What could I learn from this?” By focusing on learning and growing, you break the negative emotional cycle. Ask yourself questions, such as, “What could I do to make my life more fulfilling?” or “What thoughts would make me feel more gratitude right now?”
Here are some ideas of how to step out of all-consuming sadness:
– Try calling a friend just to say hello.
– Play music from a time in your life attached to good memories.
– Volunteer at a local hospital, church, or community center.
– Pick a language, any language you’ve ever wanted to learn, and enroll in a course in person or online.
– Improve your vocabulary in your own language (http://www.vocabulary.com/.)
– Write a list of projects you’ve always wanted to do, but never had time for (painting, re-organizing, etc.), and pursue one and take the first step towards making that a reality.
Sadness is a deep human emotion that highlights the transience of life. It is a reminder that life wants to be lived whole-heartedly.
Many of today’s teenagers and young adults are smart and knowledgeable, but lack direction and self-sufficiency. Moreover, young adults who live at home often feel resentment toward their parents for enabling their dependence. With ambivalence, they readily take advantage of support being offered, yet feel resentful for being dependent. Even trust-funders of the super wealthy, who gladly accept financial support, often lack purpose and feel deficient as a result of their cushy dependence.
Initiative and Independence
In our Western culture, economic independence leads people to feel self-empowered and capable. It feels good to be able to rely on yourself, to take care of yourself, and to feel capable of pursuing your own goals.
Although parents may have the best intentions, they can handicap their children by over-protecting and coddling them. Teenagers who are given too much turn into adults who lack initiative and impulse control, often becoming under-achievers. They may act as though they willingly reject the ambitions of the mainstream, but often they are simply afraid of their own ability to persevere and to withstand failure.
The only way to learn perseverance and initiative is through experience, which usually occurs when you have no other choice. You get comfortable with the possibility of failing when you have to start trying and failing, and are no longer daunted by it.
Prefrontal Cortex Development
Until recently it was thought that the prefrontal cortex develops fully by age 20 or 25. More recent research shows that this part of brain development is not age dependent, but contingent upon experience, that is, the experience of controlling impulses, having to plan and use one’s judgment, and suffering the consequences for bad judgment. So children whose parents make all their decisions, and whose activities are limited to well-structured schoolwork and regimented sports, may have delayed prefrontal cortex development, despite high IQs and grades.
If our young adult children are living at home rent free, and we are cooking all the meals and doing all the laundry without them lifting a finger, they are missing out on developing their prefrontal cortex’s ability to plan, make judgments and develop the basic habits required for living on their own.
Moreover, the transition to moving out will be more difficult than if they have to pay rent, do their own laundry and contribute to shopping, cooking, and cleaning. In the latter case, the transition to live on their own will be quite easy, with only a few additional requirements such as signing a lease and paying utilities on time.
Increased Responsibility, Decreased Handouts
By making most of the decisions for our children, we weaken them. By allowing them to make decisions and requiring them to take responsibility for their actions, we strengthen them.
The least traumatic way to help children gain the habits of responsibility and self-sufficiency is through gradually increasing their responsibility and independence. Like anything we learn, progressive advancement is much easier than dramatic revolution. Running a marathon can kill us if we’re out of shape. Yet, almost anyone can do it if they take the time to train properly and continuously escalate their capabilities.
A loving environment at home that fosters independent thinking and appropriate decision-making and that encourages responsibility, self-sufficiency, and contribution, helps form children into capable young adults. Summer jobs are a worthwhile experience, and quite different from summer camp in that the child is not the client to be pleased, but the employee who needs to please the customers and the employer. Children learn the value of work and money when their parents pay for less and less, other than college tuition, and when they are responsible for contributing and for buying their own non-essentials as teenagers and most everything else as young adults.
Rather than projecting their feelings of inadequacy as resentment on their parents, self-empowered and independent young adults tend to feel gratitude and respect for their parents.
The human stress response evolved as a response to emergencies when fight or flight was necessary for survival. When physical survival is your goal, stress is very helpful. Stress hormones rev up the heart rate and blood pressure, improving blood flow, which allows you to act quickly.
Negative effects of unhealthy stress:
Today, we have few physiological emergencies for we are rarely in mortal danger as we were on the African savannah millions of years ago. Yet we still react with stress for purely psychological reasons, such as worries about mortgage payments, traffic jams, and work problems. Unfortunately, stress hormones streaming through our bodies all of the time can cause all sorts of health problems.
Chronic, ongoing stress has been linked directly to a shorter lifespan and disease. The increased adrenaline and cortisol due to chronic stress kills brain cells, leads to heart problems, clots the blood, and causes kidney and liver damage. Large amounts of cortisol can raise blood sugar and cholesterol, which turn into fat around the belly. Fat retention weight gain is often a stress response.
Positive effects of stress:
Staying Alert:
We wouldn’t want to eliminate stress altogether, because it can alert us to the occasional emergency. Mild doses of stress keep you alert while driving in a snowstorm or while sitting in a business meeting.
Pleasure:
At the right level and the right time, adrenaline provides excitement and stimulation. Without any stress response, you couldn’t enjoy a speed sport or falling in love. Many people enjoy a ride on a rollercoaster for the simple reason that it invokes the stress response, but it is safe and short lived.
In small doses, and with adequate control and knowledge that we are not really in danger, stress arouses our sensations and heightens our interest and pleasure. Thus, meeting new people and falling in love can be pleasurable partly because of the stress involved.
How to avoid unhealthy stress:
The goal should be to have the right kind of stress and in the right doses — something that is not too dangerous and is transient rather than ongoing.
Research shows that people who have more control in their lives experience less harmful stress. People in low-ranking jobs with no authority experience substantially MORE unhealthy stress than those in the apparently higher-stress, high-power jobs who have more control over their work. Unhealthy stress increases as level and control in one’s job decreases.
However, there can be relief from unhealthy stress in those who feel subordinate in their jobs. When people in low-level jobs view themselves as having a key role in another area of life, such as being captain of a sports team, a parent, or a crucial player in a volunteer organization, they tend to have reduced levels of stress. The key is that they exhibit leadership qualities in an area of life that they see as valuable and important.
Other ways unhealthy stress can be lowered include increased autonomy, appreciation through monetary reward or praise, social affiliation, exercise, laughter, and the practice of mindfulness. Everyone can benefit by finding something they love to do and people to do it with.
