One of my recent articles gave a statistic from the sports psychology world stating that it requires about 5 positive comments to overcome 1 negative comment when coaching young players. This means that negative comments carry a lot more weight in the mind of a child than do positive comments.

Most people lack real confidence.

But this extends far beyond young athletes to most of the population. Most people dwell on criticism or a bad experience far more than they think about praise or positive experiences. This all comes back to the beliefs that you have implanted in your brain throughout your life.

If you continually tell yourself that you are no good at something then your brain will pay a lot more attention to the evidence to support that viewpoint than it will to evidence that contradicts it. Your brain is always trying to uphold your beliefs.

Since most people have limiting beliefs, they are more focused on negative feedback than positive feedback and that’s how the whole 5 to 1 (positive to negative) ratio gets established – 1 negative piece of feedback is as powerful as 5 positive pieces.

Seeing the sunny side of life

I ran across a couple of papers this week in Psychological Science and The Journal of Neuroscience showing how brain activity that controls this, changes as we get older. Our brain circuits that filter your positive and negative experiences actually rewire as you age.

When we are younger, our brains allow negative information and bad experiences to go straight to our automatic responses. We don’t think about them too much or evaluate them before we allow them to affect us. On the other hand, positive feedback and good experiences get some extra processing by the ‘higher functioning’ part of our brains before we allow them to effect us. The positive stuff has to pass through a filter before we believe it but the negative stuff doesn’t.

As we age this begins to reverse. Our filters of the negative stuff get stronger and our filters of the positive stuff get weaker. We allow positive stuff to affect us more easily (in a good way) and screen out some of the negative stuff. We don’t spend so much time dwelling on criticism and accept more praise.

This is just an average description of the whole population. Of course, there are people that are good at filtering out the negative stuff early in their life and others that never get good at it. There are people that take complements and praise very well at a young age and others that never learn how to accept it.

Speeding up the process

So the question becomes, can we do anything to accelerate the process? Can we ‘train our brains’ to become better at accepting positive stuff and better at filtering out negative stuff without having to wait until we get to our elder years?

I believe that you can. There are certainly things that you can do directly to pay more attention to feedback that will boost your confidence and dismiss other experiences that tend to bring you down. There are also many indirect things that you can do to support the health and maintenance of your brain.

This comes back to performance concepts that I’ve discussed before. Your brain is in a constant state of remodeling itself. It is up to you whether the new updates you make on a daily, weekly and yearly basis will be the same as the old ones, or improved.

You can ensure that your new updates are physically stronger with the basic nutrition, sleep and physical and mental exercise needs – or not. You can also ensure that your new updates perform better by working on your ability to think for yourself and replacing some of your limiting beliefs with empowering ones.

Over time, this will strengthen your filters to deal with all your negative experiences and allow more of the positive experiences to get through. Science shows us (as discussed above) that our brain circuits have a natural tendency to improve on this front as we get older, but the speed at which you do it and the final levels that you reach are up to you.

Focus on the good feedback and your health, and the brain circuits that control your positive beliefs will literally get stronger and faster. This will increase your confidence and your ability to control your own life.

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While running on the treadmill this morning I was watching a soccer game on TV and had the realization that soccer is really a great game for brain fitness. I have played and been around the game all of my life but hadn’t really made the full connection to brain fitness until now.

In my last couple of posts, I’ve been introducing the concept of EPIQ performance. The fitness of your brain controls your Emotional, Physical and Intellectual performance. Soccer, and many youth sports, contributes to each aspect of your EPIQ performance by challenging all of these individual pieces.

Improving Body Control

The physical part is a ‘no brainer’. Kids and adults actively engaged in a sport will improve their physical intelligence. This may be your brain’s ability to regulate your cardiovascular function – as in aerobic sports; your brain’s ability to control fine motor skills – as in most sports; or both. Soccer is a great game for both cardiovascular conditioning and motor skills, which will improve your physical intelligence.

Strengthening Emotional Response Circuits

Soccer and other sports also boost your Emotional intelligence (EQ). Why? Sports teach kids how to deal with failure – if they have a supportive team environment. Everyone needs to learn to deal with failure and defeat and sports are a great way to learn how to do that in a safe environment. They teach you how to get back in the game after making a mistake or simply getting beat.

Sports can also teach you incredible control over your emotions – again, as long as you are playing in a supportive environment. How? In sports, you need to charge your emotions up so that you can compete at your best. You need to play with high levels of intensity. Furthermore, in contact sports, like soccer, you need to play with great bursts of aggression to compete for the ball.

But then you need to turn it all off in an instant. One second you are struggling with everything you have against an opponent and the next second, the play is over, and you need to be able to let that go and treat your opponent with respect.

Sports are a great opportunity to learn how to control your temper. Players have countless opportunities where they feel wronged by an opponent or an official – but they must learn to manage their response to be effective in the game. In the 35 years I have spent on the soccer field, I have never seen an official change his call because a player got angry.

Many people fail to master this part of sports. Kids must learn how to bring their intense emotions to bear during the play, and then let them subside when the play is over. This is where games like soccer can boost your EQ (and your game) if you can focus on the skill of emotional regulation.

IQ Boosting Sports Experience

Finally, soccer can also improve your intellectual performance or IQ. You say – come on. How can that be true? Soccer is a very dynamic game, meaning the play is changing all of the time. Many people who don’t know the game are surprised to learn that there are very few set plays in soccer. A good team just reads each other on the fly and figures out what to do next.

Because of this, playing soccer and other sports, always challenges you to reevaluate your situation and adapt in that instant. To be a good player, you need to constantly monitor what is going on around you and figure out your next move – whether you have the ball or not.

The dynamic nature of the game is constantly challenging you brain to read, interpret and respond – over and over again. This works on problem solving skills and decision-making capabilities at the same time. Not only that, but the environment that this learning takes place in is charged with high levels of emotion and intensity – which is known to enhance the learning process.

So next time you watch your kids play a soccer game, understand that they are getting much more than a physical workout. They are learning to regulate emotions, solve problems and make decisions. They are increasing their EPIQ performance that will help them in other areas of life as well.

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Many fall sports are starting up again as school approaches. Personally, I am coaching a couple of 10 and 11 year old boy’s soccer teams (one reason I haven’t posted in a while). It’s a lot a fun to get out there and act like a kid again and pass on some experiences that I have been lucky enough to collect over the years.

In preparation for this year’s season, I read a book by Jim Thompson, called ‘The Double Goal Coach’. The book is about keeping the goal of teaching kids life lessons through sports, first, while at the same time having the goal of trying to win games. I highly recommend this book to anyone who either coaches youth sports or has a child in sports.

The Emotional Tank

One concept in the book that I want to focus on today is what Jim calls, the ‘Emotional Tank’, or E-Tank. It relates very well to the EQ, or emotional intelligence, that I have written about in past posts. But where the EQ is an individual’s ability to control their emotions on a regular basis, the E-Tank refers to any given point in time and how an individual, in this case a young athlete, is feeling about themselves.

When an athlete has a full E-Tank, they are feeling good and are able to rebound from mistakes. They are also able to take a little constructive criticism as it’s meant – to help them improve. If their E-Tank is empty then they will have difficulty recovering from their mistakes and be unable to see the value in coaching points that they might hear.

It’s our job, as coaches to try and boost our players E-Tanks for a couple of reasons: first, for their own benefit as a player and an individual; and second, for the team’s benefit because they will play better and improve more in practice.

Many studies in sports psychology conclude that the ideal ratio of positive comments and encouragement to critical corrections is about 5 to 1 - Meaning five acknowledgments of good play for every correction. That may seem like a lot but it’s what seems to work. The magic ratio will be different for different kids but it must be weighted toward the positive side.

Parents are in Control

But it’s not only us coaches that need to work on our young athletes E-tank. The experiences they get at home, especially right before practice have a huge effect. If you are a parent of an athlete, you can help your kid’s coach and his team dramatically by trying to fill up their tank before bringing them to practice.

In my first couple of practices, most of the kids seemed excited to get back into the season and showed up with a full E-tank. However, there are always going to be a couple of kids that aren’t having the best day and need a little extra encouragement.

When I noticed this, I tried out Jim’s techniques of 5 positive comments to every 1 correction and it really worked. I was able to get a couple of kids who didn’t seem to be that into it to turn it around and pick up the effort.

I plan to pay close attention to the E-tanks of my players at each practice and do what I can to keep them full. But to really boost a kids EQ requires filling up their E-tank all the time with all the stuff that I’ve discussed in previous posts – nutrition, sleep, physical activity (more than just twice a week at practice) and encouraging them to believe in themselves.

Parents have far more influence on their child’s performance on the athletic field than most realize. Focus on regularly filling your young athletes E-tank and you will notice a big improvement in their performance on and off the field.