I start my presentations to coaches by asking: “How many of you feel more like a counselor than a coach?” Nearly every hand pops up in the room. When my grandfather coached my dad’s little league baseball team in the late 1960s, he just had to make sure the boys learned the basics and didn’t hurt themselves too much. When my dad coached me in youth lacrosse in the early 1990s, he taught offensive sets and defensive packages, and he felt confident helping my teammates and I manage pre-game jitters and sadness after losses. When I coached a U11 team in the early 2000s, the job morphed.

Pre-game jitters became anxious paralysis.

Post-loss sadness turned into crushing depression.

One in-game mistake cascaded into extreme negative self-talk.

What the heck happened? Between 1970 to 2021 American society moved toward digital record keeping, crafting a personal “brand,” and infinite comparison online. My dad and I cannot look up our youth team’s records, but I can google every team tournament result and a good amount of individual player statistics for athletes born after 2000. I tell young people all the time how impressed I am of them. I say: “If I had to go through middle school or high school with the way things are now, I don’t think I come out alive.” The explicit and implicit pressure to be great at everything is, quite frankly, insane. Our young people are being prodded toward an impossible vision of success, based almost entirely on external factors, and the adults AGREE that this isn’t a good idea, yet everyone continues to hurtle forward in fear of falling back even just a little.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” — Edward O. Wilson

I see young people with the warped idea that everything they do counts on some cosmic leaderboard, and anyone below the top 10% doesn’t stand a chance in being successful in life. I tell coaches a version of Mr. Wilson’s quote in that we have godlike technology coupled with Stone Age brains, and that’s just the adults. Add the developing brain plus learning to navigate ever-changing peer expectations to the mix and it’s a wonder all teenagers today aren’t catatonic.

Yet we continue to drive forward, head down and teeth gritted in pursuit insane future expectations because of the failure of mental toughness. This is why I teach Mental Agility to coaches and why I’m excited to be presenting at the 2022 USA Lacrosse National Convention in Baltimore, MD on January 15th. Mental toughness works when you have a clear vision of success and the skills necessary to attain that success, but it fails miserably when the goals are vague and the players cannot cope with their daily lives. Instead of pushing young people to keep their heads down and grind through their problems, Mental Agility teaches them to get their eyes up, survey the problem, and choose a better angle of attack:

• I teach coaches how to assist their players in becoming more aware of negative self-talk and distorted thinking patterns.

• I demonstrate simple breathing and posture exercises that rapidly produce a calmer state of mind.

• I emphasize the strategy inherent in Mental Agility to slow everyone down and more accurately assess what is happening in the life of a player and teams as a whole.

• I explain why the brain thinks the way it thinks at different stages of life, and how coaches can more effectively model healthy coping strategies to their players.

Mental toughness has led to a generation of burnt-out athletes and coaches throwing up their hands in exasperation. My objective with Mental Agility is to provide coaches with a set of reliable tools that will help their players de-stress on and off the field.