What Real Confidence Looks Like in a Young Athlete
Confidence in a youth athlete isn't about winning. It's about what happens after a mistake.
A confident kid can come back from a setback, a bad game, or an error without crumbling. They're okay with it. They know they did their best, and they don't need anyone else to tell them that to believe it. That's the real marker: belief that comes from within, not validation that has to come from outside.
The opposite is what I see constantly. Kids trying to please their parents. Kids comparing themselves to their friends. Kids performing for approval instead of playing for themselves. It destroys confidence, and you can see it in how they move. It shows in posture, in the way they carry themselves, in every step they take on the field.
This is why I always say confidence has to be built bottom-up, through the body, not top-down, through words.
Why You Can't Talk a Kid Into Confidence
You can't hand a kid confidence through motivation or a pep talk, because they don't believe it yet. They don't have the proof in their own body.
This is the piece most people miss. A kid can hear "you're good enough" a thousand times from a parent who loves them, and it still won't land, because there's no internal evidence to back it up. So instead of telling kids how to feel, I ask them questions. What do you notice? What do you feel?
Most kids default to "it's fine, it's good." So I go deeper. What feels good? Tell me more. It makes them uncomfortable at first. But by the end of a session, they're telling me things I can actually work with. They felt lighter. They felt faster. They felt more in control.
You can't tell a kid to feel that way. You have to let them explore their own body, experiment, and discover it for themselves. Do that enough times, and they stop needing anyone to convince them. They start believing their own body, and that belief becomes confidence.
Marcus: A Case Study in Half an Hour
One of my favourite transformations is a kid named Marcus.
He came to me shuffling, head down, hiding behind his dad. He was a decent soccer player, but his confidence was in the floor. We didn't give him a pep talk. We showed him how to move more efficiently and how to use his breath to his advantage.
It changed in half an hour. He was a different kid. You could see the increase in speed and performance immediately, but more than that, you could see the shift in how he carried himself. He went from a kid who could barely answer a question to a kid who opened up completely once he started understanding how he actually felt from within.
Watching that transformation happen in real time is one of the best parts of this work. And it doesn't stay in the session. A couple of months later, Marcus came back and told me he was now one of the better players at lunchtime soccer. No rules, no referee, big tackles, emotions running high. He used the breathing work we'd done to stay calm under pressure and hold his own.
That's the whole point. Confidence built in the body transfers to real life, under real pressure, with no one coaching from the sideline.
Why Posture Is the Root of Everything
Posture is one of seven movement standards I coach, and it has the single biggest impact on a kid's confidence.
Pulling a kid into a more upright position opens up the chest and lets them breathe properly. This isn't just a coaching hunch. Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg ran a study specifically on children and found that body posture can genuinely shape how a child feels, not just how they appear to others. When a kid holds themselves differently, they feel different.
Posture is also the foundation everything else is built on. Without good posture, you don't get good push off. Without good posture, you don't get a clean heel strike or proper arm drive. Without good posture, you can't breathe well under pressure. Every other movement standard traces back to this one. Fix posture, and you start fixing everything downstream of it, including how a kid feels about themselves.
The Two Ways Parents Unintentionally Damage Confidence
Parents love their kids and want the best for them. That's never the problem. The problem is the language and framework around that love often works against the goal.
I see two patterns constantly, sitting at opposite ends of the same spectrum.
The first is over-encouragement. Telling a kid they're great, they're one of the best players, they did amazing, when the kid doesn't have internal proof to back it up. To the kid, it can feel like their parent is just saying nice things, because it doesn't match what they believe about themselves. All that encouragement, meant with love, can end up falling on deaf ears.
The second is rescuing. Stepping in before a kid is allowed to struggle with something hard. "Don't worry, I'll do it for you." This teaches kids that hard things are something to avoid rather than something to work through, so they stop trying.
Somewhere in the middle is the role parents actually need to play: the coach. Someone who understands how hard something is, shows their kid how to make a better decision, but still gives them the autonomy to work it out and build the confidence themselves.
Research on youth sports backs this up at scale. The Aspen Institute's Project Play surveyed almost 4,000 young athletes and found that support or pressure from parents can make or break a child's entire experience in sport, with former players reporting far higher rates of pressure-based parenting than kids still playing. I've written before about why kids actually quit sport in Melbourne, and pressure from well-meaning adults is right at the centre of it.
If you recognise this pattern in your own household, this is exactly what The Unshakeable Parent was built for. It's a set of six protocols for the specific pressure moments where parents tend to rescue or push without meaning to — the night before a game, the car ride there, the car ride home — so you know exactly what to say and do instead.
A Real Moment: The Rescuer and the Pusher on Full Display
I was coaching my stepson's soccer team a few weeks ago, and during one game I heard four different dads shouting different instructions at their kids from the sideline. The kids looked like headless chickens. They had no idea what to do because they weren't being allowed to think for themselves.
I stopped the session, blew the whistle, and told the parents to let their kids make their own decisions, make their own mistakes, and think critically without being told what to do the whole time.
I got some silence back. But that night, two of the dads reached out. One texted an apology. Another sent an email thanking me. It's an easy trap to fall into, because shouting instructions is often exactly what happens at home too. But it takes away a kid's autonomy every time, and autonomy is where confidence actually grows.
What to Say Instead: Shifting From Outcome to Effort
If there's one shift parents can make immediately, it's this: stop putting emphasis on the outcome, and put it on effort instead.
When a parent's focus is always on winning, scoring, or the result, a kid can internalise it as conditional love. If I don't win, my dad doesn't love me. If I don't play well, my mum doesn't think I'm good enough. That's a heavy, damaging belief to carry onto a field.
This lines up with decades of research from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose studies found that praising effort rather than outcome or ability leads kids to persist longer after failure, enjoy the task more, and avoid the fear of being seen as not good enough.
Instead, show your kid you noticed their effort. I saw how hard you ran for that ball. I saw how much more you put into this game than last time. Let the results take care of themselves. When effort becomes the thing that gets seen and celebrated, kids stop performing for approval and start playing for themselves.
It's worth looking at what happens at a national level when a whole country builds sport around this idea. I've covered how Norway removed scores from kids' sport until age 13 and still went on to dominate the Olympics — proof that taking the outcome pressure off kids doesn't hold them back. It sets them up.
Fixing the Comparison Trap
We live in a comparison culture, and it's brutal on kids. Social media only shows highlight reels, so kids are constantly measuring themselves against an edited version of everyone else.
Parents do this too, often without realising it. Comparing a kid to a teammate, or to their own sibling. Why can't you do that? It's one of the most common ways confidence gets chipped away, even when it comes from a place of wanting more for your kid. It's also not a small factor in why kids leave sport altogether — the Aspen Institute's research found being compared to other players was cited by former athletes at nearly double the rate of kids still playing.
The fix isn't to stop noticing what other kids can do. It's to change the narrative around it. Instead of "why can't you do what they can do," try "look what's possible when you put the work in." It's not a comparison against someone else anymore. It's a window into what's achievable for your own kid, on their own terms.
Getting to Know Your Kid: The First Step Any Parent Can Take This Week
If a parent is watching their kid struggle with confidence and doesn't know where to start, the first step is simple: understand what's actually going on inside them.
Ask open-ended questions, and don't expect an answer right away. Give it 24 or 48 hours if needed. A kid's brain isn't developed enough to process and answer complex questions on the spot.
Skip the classic "how was school today," which almost always gets a flat "fine." Ask instead: what did you learn today? What were you proud of today? Who did you play with? What did it feel like being you today? These questions give a kid room to actually answer, and they open a door into understanding how your kid experiences their world.
It takes vulnerability from the parent too. But starting this at a young age means you get to know your kid, and just as importantly, your kid gets to know themselves. That self-understanding carries directly into how they show up in sport.
If you're noticing your child holding back physically as well as emotionally, it's often worth checking whether technique itself is part of the confidence gap. The two are more connected than most parents realise.
Why This Work Matters to Me
I do this because I know what it's like to have none of it. Losing rugby to injury as a kid took my confidence with it, and that absence followed me into every part of life outside of sport. I never believed I could do something well. I needed to be told what to do because I had no trust in myself.
Now I get to teach kids what I wish someone had taught me.
One of my favourite stories is a young kid named Eli. His dad's biggest worry was that Eli showed a lack of effort on the football field. Right after a session where I taught him how to run properly, I turned to Eli and said, "show us some speed." He gave this little smirk and sprinted straight past his dad.
The smile on Eli's face, and the smile on his dad's face watching it happen, is exactly why I do this work. Confidence built from the inside doesn't just change how a kid plays. It changes how they see themselves, and that's a gift that lasts a lot longer than any single game.
Where to Start This Week
If what you've read here rings true for your own kid, you don't need to overhaul everything overnight. Start with the body.
Fire The Engine is our entry-level movement program, three sessions built around the exact drills that helped Marcus go from shuffling and silent to sprinting past defenders at lunchtime soccer. It's the fastest way to give your kid a real, physical experience of what their body can do — the kind of proof no pep talk can replace.
And if you know the confidence gap in your house is showing up in the pressure moments — the car ride there, the sideline, the walk back to the car after a tough loss — The Unshakeable Parent gives you the exact language and protocols to use in those moments, so you're building your kid up instead of accidentally tearing them down.