Don’t force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.
Tiger Woods
My two oldest sons were each dedicated competitive swimmers for around fifteen years, both representing the Cayman Islands at the Commonwealth Games.
She first told me that swimming is a sport where it is likely that the swimmers often feel pressure, particularly around their races. They know their times and targets, so do their coaches, so do their parents. Her advice was, first of all, for the parents to focus on the “dry” issues, on rest, food, general wellbeing, and to allow the coach to focus on the “wet” issues, ie on training, swim technique, as well as those times in races.
She then gave me that magical advice, which I have then gone on to share with literally hundreds of swim parents over the years. That advice was that after any race your child swims, the only words you say to them be:
Did you have fun?
Oh, and in 2014, when my oldest son was 20 and competing at the Commonwealth Games, it was held in Glasgow, Scotland. We managed to find tickets for a number of family and friends and they all crowded around him as he came out of the pool building after his first race. I stood back, waiting for them to finish congratulating him. He then walked over to me, a silly smile on both our faces, and he said “I know what you are going to say, Dad!”. Of course, he was right, I said the four words I had said to him after every race since his first one at the age of eight:
Did you have fun?
I have to say that while I then gave him a big hug, tears did flow for me then. This is a life lesson I share for parents, and it also has relevance to leaders and mentors supporting people in their careers. If people are good at what they do, that’s important, but if they are not enjoying it (at least a strong majority of the time), then you will ultimately lose them. They won’t stay forever if they are only good at it and paid to do it, they have to enjoy their work.
One last story. At the time I graduated from university and started the first of three years of Chartered Accountancy apprenticeship, I was a committed (and reasonably good) Basketball player. In the summer league just before I started that work in September I had played in one of the more successful teams, all of which were, as was the way with that league, mixed. The standard was high, so our female players were typically the very best in Scotland and a joy to play with (their core skills were typically higher than most of the men, who got away with height and athleticism!).
A few weeks into starting my apprenticeship, as I walked through the office I bumped into one of those top female players. Actually THE top player, the captain of the national team the year before. I said hello, found she was one year ahead of me in the apprenticeship. I then asked why I hadn’t seen her at the mixed league that past summer. She said she had quit Basketball. “You see”, she said, “I was really good at Basketball from a young age and just kept playing, but I never really enjoyed it that much, so when I started work I quit”. She was really, REALLY good at the game, with the opportunity ahead of her to not only captain Scotland but play for Team GB at the Olympics, but it just wasn’t for her. She wasn’t having fun playing, so she quit.