Building Our Girls Confidence and Keeping Our Girls Confident

Being a girl dad and a girl coach, I am often asked what the difference is between coaching girls and boys.

My most common answer is that I spend most of my time building up my high school girls' confidence, and I spent most of my time managing my high school boys' confidence.

I was always finding ways to get my boys to have more realistic expectations of their abilities, as they would usually overestimate their abilities and performances. I find that I spend an almost equal amount of time building up my girls and getting them to understand how good they are, because they usually underestimate their ability and performance.

With the high school boys, they were always thinking that they were better than their individual opponents. In practice and games, they usually have no problem going one on one and breaking away from the team game. We would spend a lot of time watching film breaking down when we took a good shot vs. when we should have passed the ball for a better shot.

With my high school girls, I had to get them to be more confident in taking shots and chances. In practice and games, they usually looked to pass the ball or run the play all of the ways through, and I would spend time teaching them and showing them opportunities to be aggressive independently.

I hate speaking in generalizations and stereotyping, but I want to be the best coach that I can be for my daughter and others, and these are the observations that I have seen personally, and there are studies that agree with this.

But as I coach my 9-year-old, 4th-grade daughter and her teammates, I find that they are on par with their male counterparts in terms of confidence. For the most part, they don't lack the confidence of the boys. So what happens between 4th-grade and high school?

Studies have shown that girls emerge from adolescence with a poor self-image, relatively low expectations from life, and much less confidence in themselves and their abilities than boys. This is a trend that is reported in many adult studies as well.

So, as a girl dad, one of my goals is beating this trend by helping my girls with their confidence and helping them keep their confidence.

5 steps that I have seen that will help are:

1 - Identify Your Self-Limiting Beliefs
See when and where there are negative thoughts. See what triggers those negative thoughts. To beat a lack of confidence, we have to find out where it starts, and it starts with an action and in our mind.

2 - Challenge Your Negative Thoughts
When you start to think negatively, stop, and think about something positive. Think about a time when you were successful. Imagine that a friend came to you needing help with thinking positively. How would you respond or give them advice about thinking positively? Use that advice.

3 - Change Your Thoughts
The final part is to replace those negative thoughts with positive thoughts. This might be an all-day, everyday thing, but confidence starts in the mind.

4 - Own You Achievements
When you do something successfully, find a way to remember and store that memory so that when you aren't feeling confident, you can come back and think about times when you were successful.

5 - Contain Your Failures
Monitor how you respond to failure. When something goes wrong, own your part, but don't unfairly place blame on yourself for things out of your control.

6 - Identify Role Models
Having visible, strong female role models can inspire women and help them cope with stressful situations that they encounter in their careers. Representation is important. Help your daughters find strong female role models that they can look up to.