How to Help Your Child Build Emotional Intelligence in Sports: Dealing with Disappointment & Frustration

High-level sports is an extremely emotional experience. When you score a goal, your team wins, or you get recruited to an elite club, you feel like you’re on top of the world.

However, the low’s in high-level sports can be just as extreme as the high’s. When you make a mistake, your team loses, or you get cut from the team, it can feel like your dreams are being dashed to pieces.

These moments hurt, but they don’t have to inhibit your athlete’s focus or personal development. Through the power of emotional intelligence, your athlete can learn to process and regulate their emotions, rather than letting these strong feelings get the best of them.

Here’s how you can help your child deal with frustration, disappointment, and other heavy emotions by building emotional intelligence:

Step 1: Understand Where Emotions Come From

We learned again and again in our careers that feeling frustrated is just a natural part of playing soccer. The other team is actively trying to frustrate you, and if they’re a good team, they’re going to succeed.

Soccer is also famously known as a game of mistakes. Players are constantly putting themselves in uncertain situations, with only so much control over the outcome. You can make a perfect pass, but your teammate might miss it.

Additionally, today’s chaotic soccer landscape is a surefire recipe for disappointment. Players get cut from their teams for all sorts of uncontrollable reasons, and even the most talented players get overlooked by top college programs.

The point is, frustration and disappointment are inevitable in soccer, so there’s no point in pretending they’re not there. This brings us to a major step towards building emotional intelligence: accepting - not rejecting - heavy emotions.

Step 2: Accept the Inevitability of Heavy Emotions

Accepting your athlete’s emotions means letting them know there’s nothing “wrong” with what they’re feeling. If anything, this is exactly how they’re supposed to feel in these situations. Heavy emotions are merely an occupational hazard of being a high-level athlete.  

So, when your athlete is feeling frustrated or disappointed, it may be helpful to tell them that countless other athletes are going through the same thing, including their favorite professional soccer players.  

How do high-level athletes deal with these emotions over and over again? By accepting their inevitability, or constantly telling themselves, “This is supposed to happen.”

Step 3: Don’t Dismiss or Minimize Your Athlete’s Emotions

Viewing heavy emotions as normal or natural makes you feel more capable of dealing with them. It’s not as if your athlete is experiencing anything out of the ordinary, right? If these emotions are natural, the ability to process and recover from them must be natural, too.

What you don’t want to do is dismiss your athlete’s emotions, or act like “It’s no big deal.” This can make your athlete feel like heavy emotions are an inherently negative or dangerous thing that shouldn’t be talked about openly. When we don’t give emotions the attention they deserve, we can’t learn how to control them.

Processing emotions isn’t exactly pleasant, but it’s a natural activity that countless people have gotten used to, especially high-level athletes. If so many other athletes can face their emotions without crumbling to the ground, there’s no reason your athlete can’t join their ranks.

Step 4: Emphasize the Value of Emotional Intelligence

Since heavy emotions are so prevalent in sports, emotional intelligence is unquestionably one of the most important skills an athlete can possess. In fact, many iconic athletes have even gone as far as to say that emotional intelligence is the primary difference between a good player and a great player.

When your athlete tells you that processing emotions isn’t easy, you can tell them it’s because being great isn’t easy, either. If your athlete wants to be great, heavy emotions are going to be ever-present in their lives, so they might as well learn to deal with them now.

At Beyond Goals Mentoring, we know that young athletes aren’t always prepared for the emotional element of sports. That’s why we’re dedicated to helping them develop the mental tools to stay focused when adversity strikes, just like their favorite athletes.

So, if your athlete is struggling with heavy emotions or feels overwhelmed with the pressure of high-level competition, let’s set up a mentoring session today.