Winning With Character, ESF Subject Matter Expert Dr. Jim Loehr’s new podcast, delivers science-based strategies on how to improve performance and leverage competition to build character. The podcast is targeted towards listeners from all competitive fields, but it is particularly aimed at parents and coaches interested in maximizing competitive experiences in children and young adults. The goal of the podcast is to foster lifelong values such as integrity, perseverance and resilience.

This Podcast is the second of a two-part series. Click here to listen to or read Part 1.

Listen to Training Parents for Competition: Part 2

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I divide character into two separate categories. The first category I call performance strengths. These are important life skills that are fundamental to achievement in life.

First, focus. Helping young people to focus, to actually learn how to narrow their range of perception so that when something is happening on the side of the field, they focus on what’s relevant and they keep at bay things that are irrelevant to what they’re trying to do. This is a life skill. Sport teaches that. You can see young soccer players out on the field as they’re starting out. They’re not that focused, and while they’re walking around and talking to friends during the game, you’re thinking, oh my goodness. But you realize that this is all part of a learning cycle. It’s not winning the game that you should be focusing on, it’s how are they developing focus.

How about their persistence, their ability to keep pushing even though they may get compromised results? Maybe they didn’t get what they wanted, they didn’t score the goal or they didn’t win the match that they had hoped they would win. Maybe they double faulted as a critical time in the tennis match.

How about resilience? They lose and are able to come back quickly because resilience is critical in life. In sport, you’re always faced with some kind of failure experience, and you have to overcome it.

How about optimism? Teaching kids how to be optimistic in spite of the fact that they haven’t won that many games, they haven’t scored that many points in basketball or they’re involved in activities that they’re not really that good at it yet, but they’re developing the sense of hope and optimism that they can get better and learn. They’re developing confidence in themselves as an athlete, as a person who can do and become competent. It’s referred to as self-efficacy.

Sport can build self-efficacy, or confidence as a person. That’s what you should be looking at as you watch your son or daughter interact with a coach, other players or their fans. Who are they becoming as a consequence of all of these demands and influences?

How about their sense of self-control? Their ability to develop a sense of delayed self-gratification knowing that they can’t have everything right now. Sport can teach that beautifully.

How about mental toughness and emotional toughness? The ability to stand strong and control your nerves, control your ability to not strike out emotionally or get angry or upset and actually develop emotional control.

How about decisiveness? Rather than looking for other people to tell them what to do, they start becoming more independent, more decisive on my own. You want to look at their ambition, their sense that they want to do something exciting here. You want to see that they have a lot of self-motivation as opposed to being pushed to do things by others. You want to see their ability to be reliable, to know that others can rely on them to fulfill what they’ve been taught to do in these competitive situations. You want to see that they’re becoming more and more disciplined in how they operate, how they prepare for games, how they act during the games and how they perform after the games.

These are performance skills, character strengths that will help them in every arena of life. This is what you should be looking at.

The highest order of importance, in my judgment from the 40+ years working with athletes in a competitive arena, is what I would refer to as ethical moral strengths. Imagine if sport were able to teach some of these, because these, if you begin to think about it, are the cornerstones of a healthy, fully-functional human being. When you think about who you most want to be as a human being, the highest priorities will inevitably fit into this ethical and moral category. For me, these represent the gold-standard of a fully functional human being.

The first of them is honesty. Can sport teach honesty? I believe it can. It can also teach dishonesty. Participation by itself does not lead to stronger character in the moral and ethical sense. In fact, there’s evidence that the longer you are in competitive sport, particularly team sport, the more you tend to compromise some of the critical variables such as how you treat others, honesty, even integrity. Because winning is put at such a high level, everything is subservient to that final objective driven by the league, by the coach and even by the parents.

Trustworthiness. How important is trustworthiness in a human being, and can sport teach that? Can sport help people understand how to develop an interaction with others so they can be trustworthy, so they can develop a sense of importance in their identity?

Sport can teach you to be dependable. It can even teach issues of kindness, humility, compassion, being grateful for what you have, being loyal and being a person of real integrity. It trains you to be a person who actually does what you say you’re going to do. These are the crown jewels that you want to be remembered for when you think back on your life and the legacy you leave behind.

Sport doesn’t necessarily drive those in a positive direction. If these values are being comprised in any way through the sport experience, parents need to intervene. These values are the true gifts of competitive athletics. Not just the performance character strengths, but understanding how to get along with other people, how to interact with others in a very ethical and moral way, how to show sportsmanship, how to be great examples of ethics and how to not allow ethics to be compromised simply for the sake of winning.

These strengths of character, both performance and ethical moral, are best thought of as muscles, just like muscles of the physical body, and they are built in precisely the same way. That is: energy investment. You build kindness in the same way you build a bicep. You build honesty in the same way you build quadriceps strength. You invest energy and you do it repeatedly.

What is so interesting is one can definitely have a very high profile of performance character strengths and have very little of the moral and ethical strengths. That is a calamity. We see it all the time on Wall Street. We see people getting into all kinds of trouble. Just because you’re a high achiever doesn’t mean you’re going to be an ethical moral person.

If we just simply drive performance skills and don’t really look at the ethical moral side of this, we miss and extraordinary opportunity and often teach the wrong things and prepare people in the wrong way for the life that they will lead later on.

These strengths of character, like so many things in life, need to be balanced. Confidence is a critical performance strength, but if it’s not balanced properly by humility, it can become arrogance. We all know what it’s like being around people who are very confident to the point of being arrogant. They have huge egos, they are kings and queens in their own minds, and sport can actually allow that to happen because if you’re very talented, you win a lot. Parents who see this, who see their kids getting very cocky, very over self-assured, they sometimes think that’s a positive. It becomes a positive only when it’s balanced with appropriate humility. You might be able to do this particularly well, but you need to really understand its relevance to everything else in life. Humility is a major balancing component of the dynamic of confidence.

If you have a lot of humility and you don’t have confidence, what you get is insecurity. Confidence is the muscle that needs to be built if you have a lot of humility and a sense of vulnerability about how competent you are. You need to develop a sense of confidence, and that confidence muscle is built in precisely the same way you build muscles of the physical body.

Another example is in the area of mental toughness. You can have a very strong muscle of mental toughness, of tough-mindedness, but there also has to be a balance if you’re going to be a real effective human being with kindness and compassion. In fact, our heroes who are arrogant, who show great mental toughness but really have no affection for others, we’re not drawn to them because they’re not really the kind of people who we want to admire and hold on a pedestal.

All of these seeds are really grown in the early days of competition. And parents, if they have the purpose right for sport, will prevent this from going off the rails. Every opportunity you have to really build these really important strengths of character, both ethical and performance driven, will give you an opportunity to make sure that the sport experience provides a justification for all the time, energy and money because it actually does add to the dynamic value of their lives. It helps them become successful human beings for the rest of their life. That is the value of sport, and that is why, as parents, you give as much of yourself and your energy to your children through sport. This has to be done, however, with the right focus and intent.

This is Jim Loehr, thank you for listening. Remember, every day is a training day to build character.

Jim Loehr is the co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, a New York Times Bestselling author and an ESF Camps Subject Matter Expert. During his 40-year career as a Performance Psychologist, Loehr has worked with hundreds of world-class performers from the arenas of sport, business, medicine, military and law enforcement. He has been instrumental in developing ESF’s 8 Character Virtues and is a consistent resource in aiding our efforts to build character muscles in our campers. For more information, Visit Dr. Loehr’s website, Winning With Character.