Erika Carlson, of Excellence in Sport Performance re-visits the Athlete’s Audio Academy to discuss her work with young female athletes.

Think competing on the field is hard?  Combine that competition with a dash of perfectionism, an added component of social interaction, some discomfort around the concept of taking the lead, and you have some modern 10-17 year old female athletes.

That’s a recipe for winning, eh??  (Much less developing life skills!)

Erika focuses her practice on younger athletes like this, and had some advice for the athletes themselves, parents, and coaches working with young girls.

Erika has dedicated the last 12 years to developing and implementing mental training programs to help her clients achieve their goals in sport.  She is pleased to be a Certified Consultant by the Association for Applied Sport Psychology.  She recently presented at the AASP Conference in Providence, RI.

Erika is also a Member of the American Psychological Association (division 47), and IDEA Health and Fitness Association.

The sports she has worked with include, but are not limited to; soccer, golf, baseball, softball, gymnastics, acrobatics, track and field, basketball, volleyball, swimming, BMX, lacrosse, wrestling, equestrian, and hockey.

She works one on one with athletes, coaches, parents, teams, and offers workshops on:

• Controllable Confidence

• Finding your drive: Motivation & Goal Setting

• Your Internal Coach: Self-Talk & Focus

• Consistency = Routines & Intensity Control

• Leadership – Leading by Example and Vocal leadership

…among other topics.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and is an avid cyclist.  You can follow her on twitter @sportpsycher, and you can see if she’s a good fit for you or your team here.

Below is a transcript of the interview, provided by the BEST transcription service:  SpeechPad.com.

Bob: Hi and welcome to the Athlete’s Audio Academy. I’m Bob Kinnison.

A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to be joined by Erika Carlson of Excellence in Sports Performance. We spoke about the specific issues that relate to child athletes in the 12 to 14, 11 to 15 range.

One of the things she said really struck a nerve with me as a possible topic for another interview, so she is back with us today. Hey, Erika. How’s it going?

Erika: Excellent. Thanks for having us back.

Bob: You bet. Good to see you. So “the” thing, that one little piece that you said was, “80% of my practice is working with female athletes.” Since we were talking in a youth arena, I extrapolated that to mean a lot of younger women athletes. Is that right?

Erika: Absolutely. Yes.

Bob: I’m fascinated, because I’m not one and I’ve never been one, by what specific challenges you see in the younger female athlete population, and maybe you can give some advice for young girls who are struggling with that. This is my first question. Do you see a difference between some of the issues that show up in your female athletes and your male athletes?

Erika: Absolutely. There are quite a few that are different. I think one of the key issues is that some girls, certainly not all, but some girls do struggle with giving themselves permission to really have the confidence to win and to have that killer instinct to really go after it and do it, and get what they want out of it.

There’s a part of them that wants to hang back and wait until they feel like it’s okay to go out there and get it. In my experience I don’t find that the boys suffer with that nearly as much. They’re out there to get theirs and get it taken care of. Some girls are that way too, and that’s fantastic, but I do find that some girls come in and really kind of find it in themselves to go there.

Bob: I know you work specifically with individual athletes, with the individual challenges that they are facing, but for that group of girls that lacks the killer instinct or doesn’t have the confidence in themselves to drive it and push it, what do you tell them?

Erika: If they find themselves in my office it’s usually because they are wanting to get somewhere so there is a goal in mind. There is some sort of disconnect between what they really want and what they are willing to do to get it. That’s one of the things I assess early on. If that goal is there and it’s theirs, and that’s one of the things I assess, too, make sure it’s theirs and not parents or somebody else’s, but it’s something they really want to achieve, then I will work with them on starting to break those goals down. Just going back to basic goal setting and figuring out how they are going to get there, looking at the commitment that it takes to achieve some of those goals, and creating a map of how they are going to achieve that.

That would be one strategy. A lot of the mental skills play into that, through adjusting the self-talk and what they are saying and how they are saying it. Creating those messages inside themselves and really challenging some of the beliefs they have as well.

Bob: I know I said this last time we got together, but I was sort of flashing back on my entire childhood athletic experience. I’m picturing after practice, we’re all sitting on the ground, most of the time getting barked at by the coach about something. There wasn’t a whole lot of interpersonal dynamics or social difficulties between guys.

Guys slap each other on the can. They give you a punch on the shoulder and it’s over. You know what I mean? I wonder if that’s another challenge that you find with female athletes because, as we know, women just have more communication receptors. They are much more nurturing and much more sensitive to all of that. Is that something that shows up a lot with the young female athlete?

Erika: It certainly does. It’s a big challenge for many of the young female athletes to overcome. A lot of these girls want to be friends and that’s how they understand relationships to be. On teams where they are good friends and are getting along, that tends to help the team chemistry.

Of course, the challenge is that if cliques develop or some girls feel like they are friends and some girls are not friends, girls have a hard time sorting through those issues. To add to that piece, the majority of our girl’s teams are coached by men. And because men are men and have not had the life experience that we women have had, they oftentimes kind of wish social issues would just go away.

They don’t. They have to be managed and dealt with. I know a lot of great coaches that ask for a lot of help in this department. They know they haven’t been in this position and they aren’t sure how to sort through it. The social complexity of a team is no different with the girls than it is with the boys, for sure.

Bob: What’s another thing that you find a substantial difference between your male athletes and your female athletes?

Erika: Over the time that I have been doing this work, I do see a lot of the perfectionistic tendencies that come through. What I mean by that is girls who expect perfection. That’s the goal. The goal is to perform perfectly, to be the perfect weight, to look a certain way, to get straight As, or maybe to work a job in addition to school and athletics and everything else.

These girls tend to be very high performers. Unfortunately, many of them are not always happy people because there’s so much going on inside of them. So I’m teaching them the skills to be more realistic with their expectations.

Again, we’re back to goal setting and getting away from perfection, which really means constant failure since we know perfection doesn’t really exist. In pointing that out and kind of flipping the coin on them a little bit and saying, “If your goal is perfection, that means that you are failing all the time. Is that really where you want to be,” that oftentimes that will shake them out of it to some degree and they’ll start looking at things in a much more realistic way.

There are times where what I offer is not appropriate for what they need and maybe a clinical referral is required. But most of the time it’s just that they kind of wear the perfectionistic badge of honor because somebody sold them that was a good thing. Then they flip the coin on it and say, “Well, I’m never actually perfect, so let’s start getting a little more real. Let’s go after achievement, but not perfection.”

Bob: As we talked about the last time we got together, there’s a whole lot of development of life skills and development of attitudes and behaviors that is going to help that athlete long after they are done playing or as they continue as athletes, but on their entire life as well.

You also mentioned that you do a lot of leadership work, particularly with young girls, and I know with some soccer associations and teams. Speak a little bit about the developing of leadership skills in the young female athlete and why it’s important.

Erika: We all know that leadership is incredibly important on teams, and that holds true for youth female teams, too. Through my involvement with teams I saw that there was a need for it. I was constantly hearing coaches saying, “We don’t have any leadership,” or “We don’t have any leaders.” I kind of took that to heart, found some great materials and really had to work to adapt them to a younger population.

The materials are written for college and high school, and then I have some younger athletes that do the program as well. But certainly some of the issues that we run in to, some of the bigger leadership challenges for female athletes, number one would be enforcing. Girls don’t like being the bad guy on the team. They don’t like getting after their teammates if they’re not on time, if they don’t have the right uniform on, if they’re not focused enough during warm-ups, if they’re not pushing it hard enough in sprints. For young girls, being the enforcer is a very uncomfortable place for them to be.

By their late teens and into college, that gets much, much easier. But it’s a huge challenge and again, I really get into the leadership roles and help these young girls develop a job description so that being captain of a team or being a leader on the team is not so much of a popularity contest as it is, “Here’s the job description. Are you willing to do the job?” Because it is a job.

We take that approach to it and we get great feedback from coaches. These girls just really can step into their own and find out what their style of leadership is and really run with it. It’s a neat thing to see.

Bob: One of the things hiding underneath what you’re talking about, and I think I said it the last time we got together, as transparency. But there’s really a consciousness involved in a lot of what you do. At least that’s the way it sounds to me.

You could fall into these patterns of being the enforcer. You could fall into these patterns of not being the enforcer. But hey, let’s just take it all out on the table and get conscious about what the job description is. Let’s you and me down and sort of create what this really is and decide if you want it or don’t want it, rather than you just acting like you want it sometimes or not really settling into the role. That self- consciousness and self-awareness seems to be a big part of it, too.

Erika: Yeah. I think that a big piece of that is what I personally bring to my services. That’s my approach to everything. I’m not going to tell you to do it this way, this is not exactly the right way, but here’s a job, here’s you, let’s see where we can make these two things come together and work in a way that works for you and works for the team; gets the job done but really brings out your strengths as well.

That’s really how I see this stuff coming together. Again, it’s very empowering for kids. They’re used to being told how to do it, when to do it, and how many times to do it. So it’s very empowering for them to have a say and be part of the process. And that’s fun for many.

Bob: Focusing on development and not achievement. That’s Erika Carlson, and her practice is Excellence in Sports Performance. You can Google that, or it’s Erika with a “k”, Carlson with a “c”, sports.com to find out more.

Thanks so much for being a guest on the Athlete’s Audio Academy. I hope that many young women and athletes of all ages are helped by what you had to say.

Erika: Thank you.