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The athlete – or student, or businessperson, or performer, or human being – who is entirely driven by external benchmarks and comparison is dooming themselves to a long, possibly endless string of disappointments and putting themselves at high risk for burnout. Burnout is what happens when we not only lose our desire to continue in an activity, we actually come to resent it; there is often a feeling of real emotional and physical distress when we’re around it. This is an alarmingly common phenomenon in the world of youth sport; 70% of kids quit before age 13, and girls quit at a higher rate than boys. In addition to body shaming, authoritarian coaching, and elitism, a huge problem with education and youth sport is that adults are running the show based on adult sensibilities and priorities, structuring spaces based on what they think they know about “what kids really need and want,” ignoring evidence and never asking the kids what’s important to them. This leaves youth spaces governed by adult priorities that include winning at all costs, making money, and some notion of hard work that usually happens at the expense of fun, kindness, compassion, long term development, personal growth, psychological safety, and self-expression. I want to make it clear that I don’t think they’re all wrong, these adults. There are people out there doing incredible work, using their knowledge of, and experience with, kids and the application of developmental principles to do real good. I had the opportunity to work in one of those spaces when I was in graduate school in Boston, and it wrenched my eyes open to the disparity between growth- and outcome-driven youth spaces. It changed my life, and I mention it only to point out that people like John McCarthy and the graduate mentors at Get Ready are currently a rare exception that starkly exposes the rule. Much of how we adults organize youth activities and behave around kids is well-intended but misguided at best, and at its worst can be a serious threat to their well-being. Teaching our young people to rely entirely on extrinsic motivators - like winning, like statistics, like dollars - pulls the rug out from underneath their ability to take command of their own learning process and pushes them to - sometimes dangerously - specialize too early, skip developmental steps, and subsume their intrinsic purpose with a desperate search for outside validation. Extrinsic motivators are not inherently bad, but they narrow the possible definitions of success to the point of creating a sense of futility and failed comparison if everything doesn’t go exactly right. On their own, external drivers create psychological and motivational brittleness because they lack the stability of an internal organizing principle, much in the way a still-beautiful tree that is breaking down internally is vulnerable in a storm because of its lack of internal stability. It looks solid and beautiful and vibrant outside (for now), and we might in fact laud this tree for its beauty, take selfies in front of the tree, pay to visit the tree, and tell our friends how magnificent the tree is. Under the right circumstances, the tree might stand up for a long time. However, remember that this tree lacks healthy heartwood, and because of this, its roots have an ever-increasingly tenuous hold on the Earth. This tree is dying, and can no longer transport the nutrients necessary to keep it strong and resilient. It might look good for now, but eventually the strain starts to show, and when the wind picks up or brings with it rain or sleet, this tree without a healthy center is likely to crack and fall under the pressure of the storm. Continued at playfreesport.com…
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