Competitive Spirit (eBook)

Using Sports To Teach Kids The Skills of Lifelong Success

J.D. Kinimaka (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
188 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-3160-0 (ISBN)

'I wrote this book for all the new parents who need help raising their kids' When you become a parent, nobody hands you an instruction guide on how to be a good parent. You learn what you know from watching your parents, and that is not always a good thing, such was the case for me growing up. I had a wonderful mother, who was a great example of kindness, faith, and love. However, she could only form so much of my path on how to be a good father. I was a young boy that only had my father's examples to watch and learn from, which were not entirely the father that I wanted to be. Fortunately for me, I had my sports, and I had many great examples in coaches that would ultimately help to develop and form my future skills as a parent. My high school sweethearts' father who was also a high school baseball coach and a huge influence on how I wanted to raise my kids. Parenting is hard enough even when you have a great partner to help you raise your kids. Unfortunately for me, twice divorced with two separate sets of kids from each mother, I ultimately needed to figure out how to raise all six of my kids as a single dad. I wrote this book to help parents that may be in a similar situation of trying to figure it all out. Either with a great parent partner, or as a single parent, this book will help. My strategy and success in raising all six of my kids was to put them in competitive sports at a young age. Let's face it, we all want to raise 'winning' kids, whether that be on the field, court or just to simply win at life. It's a constant struggle even more so today with all the uncertainty going on in the world. We need to help provide our kids with a solid foundation of security and belief in themselves that they can succeed! In this book I will focus on some critical concepts to help you succeed raising confident and successful kids. •Out-of-the-box ideas, learning new parenting techniques to give your kids the competitive edge. •Instilling the Three Pillars to succ

The greatest coaches in the world understand what winning truly is: a habit, a mindset, and an expectation. Knowing how to win means knowing how to prepare relentlessly for all foreseeable circumstances. It means striving for perfection through mind-numbing repetition. It means knowing how to look for solutions instead of excuses. And it means respecting the strengths of all opposition while having the confidence to face them head-on anyway. Let's stop pretending our responsibilities as parents, managers, and coaches are less than they truly are. Teaching others the skill of winning is one of the toughest jobs in the world, especially if you have little experience winning yourself, but it's not impossible.

CHAPTER 1

WINNING

“Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.”

— Vince Lombardi

My family was one appendectomy away from winning the Hawaii State Wrestling Championship.

Twice.

My oldest daughter, Courtney, worked her tail off for years, all so she could get a shot at winning States. She started learning how to wrestle when she was ten-years-old. But at that time in Hawaii, there weren’t many ten-year-old girls getting into wrestling. So, Courtney trained with boys, and she trained hard. By the time she joined her high school wrestling team, she could pin most of opponents with relentless precision. She was deadly, and she was hungry. She wanted to win.

By Courtney’s senior year of high school, she was in prime condition to dominate States. But then, three weeks before her qualifying matches were set to start, she doubled over in pain in her mom’s living room.

“My stomach hurts!”

Courtney is a tough girl, so I knew for her to complain about stomach pain was a big deal. Her younger brother, Kalei, didn’t buy her pain. “Stop faking,” he pestered her. “Suck it up.” Kalei teased her all the way to the emergency room. He didn’t let up until a doctor informed us that Courtney’s appendix had burst, and she would need an emergency appendectomy. Yeah. Ouch.

Twenty-four hours later, my daughter was laid out in a hospital bed with a line of stitches near her belly button. When I asked her how she was feeling, her reply was instant.

“I’ll be back up and moving in no time. State qualifiers are in a week, Dad,” she said, “and I’m not giving up.”

I was hesitant about letting Courtney compete at States. The tournament was so soon after the surgery, and she would be going up against the toughest girls in her weight class. I started to protest, but she wouldn’t hear it. She was too tenacious to sit back and watch while someone else took her spot at States.

Sure enough, one week later she was back on the mat, three wins from qualifying for States. At the start of her first match, pain flashed across her face the moment her opponent laid hands on her. But while Courtney looked in agony, her performance showed no signs of weakness. On paper her win was dominant, but I could tell she was suffering, and her next match would only be harder. I couldn’t help but worry for her health.

The look of concern on my face must have been apparent, because as soon as my daughter saw me she said, “I got this, Dad.”

Courtney’s next opponent had extraordinary strength, the kind you want to sit back and marvel at when it isn’t directed at your wounded child. This impressive opponent and my daughter traded score for score in a tightly contested match, and the longer it went on, the more I worried Courtney’s injury would be too much to overcome. Then, midway through the match, Courtney let slip a heart-lurching groan. She was losing her footing. This has to stop, I thought, and started toward the referee to stop the match. But the match ended before I even reached the ref. My daughter pinned her opponent, and won.

Courtney’s final qualifying match would pit her against the toughest girl of the day. I knew my daughter was strong, but her injury was no joke. So, I called her over to the side to talk with me. She was breathing ragged, resisting the urge to clutch her stomach and fold in half. I swallowed hard to keep from showing her how worried I felt.

“I think you’re done,” I said. Courtney shook her head. I asked her to reconsider three times, and each time she simply shook her head. When it was time for the match to start, she walked away from me without saying a word.

As soon as the match began, tears started rolling down my daughter’s cheeks. Her face turned bright red as she struggled beneath her opponent’s iron grip. Then I started to cry. It was torture, watching Courtney try to overcome a pain that would only get worse. After a few more agonizing seconds, I started to make my way toward the referee again. She needed to stop before she hurt herself beyond repair.

She must have seen me out of the corner of her eye, because suddenly she exploded out from under her opponent’s grasp. Like a raging animal, she threw every ounce of strength she had left down on the mat. From that moment, the match ended quickly, and Courtney locked her spot in the State Championships. I embraced my little warrior, but I knew I was in for a tough conversation later.

On the car ride home, all of Courtney’s adrenaline subsided and she sobbed. With nothing to distract her, the pain was overwhelming. Every bump on that drive sent her hand flying to her stomach. When we finally made it back home, I helped her into the house and laid her in her bed. A few hours later, I came to sit with her. I had some bad news to break.

“You’re finished. No States.”

She started crying again, but this time not from physical pain. “Dad, I’m not done! I can’t be done until I win States! And this is my last shot before college!”

States was always the goal. She was so close. She just wanted to finish strong. She wanted to follow through on all the lessons I had ingrained in her. And as agonizing as this moment was, this was also the moment I knew I had accomplished my goal as a parent.

“Listen to me,” I said, keeping my voice calm and resolved, “I need to tell you a secret. I don’t care if you win States. In fact, I’ve never cared about you winning States. That one victory was never the point. The point was that you learn to fight for it. You have become the person I want you to be, and I know you will be successful in all you do for the rest of your life…After you heal from your appendicitis.”

She stared at me in shock. How could I, the father who had relentlessly pushed her and demanded so much from her, suddenly dismiss the final victory? The truth was, and still is, that the point of my coaching was never with one specific victory in mind, but with a specific character in mind. I wanted my kids to be successful competitors in the real world, and I used sports to build this character. Courtney proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she knew how to win. She didn’t need to win a State Championship to convince me any further.

We hugged, and I left her to rest. Before I closed the door, I turned back and added, “Don’t tell your brothers and sisters I said I don’t care about winning States.” She nodded, understanding.

One year after my daughter’s appendectomy, almost to the day, her brother was staring down his shot at States. He had dominated his junior season. There wasn’t an opponent he couldn’t take down, escape, or leg ride with surprising ease. He was a shoo-in for States… Until a minor throbbing in his stomach erupted into a searing pain.

I was at work when his mom called to tell me about his emergency appendectomy. I immediately called his sister. Her response was a little shocking but understood.

“Payback’s a bitch!” she laughed into the phone. “That’s what he gets for ripping me so hard!”

THE JOB OF A COACH

Competition is an inevitable part of life. Every time we submit an application to a college admissions office, a resume to a hiring manager, a bid to a prospective client, or a request for a raise to our boss, we are competing. We even compete with inanimate objects, like the estimated arrival time on our GPS, or commercial breaks when we race to the kitchen for a snack and try to make it back before the show resumes. Competition is everywhere, and with it, the pressure to win.

If you are a sports coach, your job is to train your athletes to win games. If you are a manager, your job is to train your employees to win business. And if you are a parent, your job is to train your kids to win in life.

There’s no two ways about it. If you are not winning, then you are not succeeding. Unfortunately, most parents today believe they can prepare their kids for life without fostering a fiercely competitive spirit. There can be several reasons for this false belief. Some parents find competition disagreeable. Some parents don’t want to see their kids get hurt. Some parents believe they can spare their kids discomfort with money. The problem is that as long as parents are sheltering their kids from competition, they are failing to prepare their kids for the real world. Instead of setting their kids up for success, they are setting them up for defeat.

When parents allow their kids to squeak by with participation trophies, they teach kids there are rewards for losing. There are no rewards for losing in the real world. Losing teams don’t get to play in championship matches. You aren’t given consolation jobs when you bomb an interview. When you lose a bidding war on a new house, you can’t move into the garage while the winners live in the rest. To enter into competition is to risk loss, and there is no sugarcoating the sting of defeat. So, if you don’t want your kids to be familiar with the pain of loss, teach them how to win.

Winning is a unique skill with many applications in life beyond the realm of sports. Teaching others how to win is its own...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	9.2.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft
ISBN-13	979-8-3509-3160-0 / 9798350931600

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