~ NAU athlete, Jeret Gillingham at the NCAA West Regionals 2025
Thank you for your question. This is a really big one, with many layers to explore if I am to answer it well. I appreciate the challenge!
I think that we should start by discussing a “healthy foundation,” what it consists of and if it exists.
Ideally, a healthy foundation for young athletes would be established within a sporting climate that emphasizes the athlete’s value and qualities as humans above their accomplishment as athletes. This certainly exists for very young kids where the emphasis is placed on having fun. However, as athletes get older, and the emphasis shifts to discipline, progress and competition, a truly healthy foundation gets harder, if not impossible to establish.
At first this statement might seem surprising. That is until we consider all the sources of influence that a young athlete receives: parents, coaches and peers, but also media and social media.
The primary challenge to building a healthy foundation in North America is that those who improve rapidly, or who perform better than others, will get more praise and attention than those who don’t. There is little that we humans seek more than praise and attention. This is especially true for young people who are particularly vulnerable to outside opinion regarding their value and identity, and who are still dependent on adults for their sense of safety and security.
Athletes’ attachment to outcomes is strongly tied to our human need for safety and security. When a young athlete makes significant improvement or gets noticed for being one of the better athletes in a group, attention, affirmation, and therefore safety and security is communicated to them in high doses. This is true even in settings with wise and loving people, who truly do value that person for more than their athletic accomplishments.
One further challenge is that before attaining a certain maturity level, most young people more strongly drawn to gaining outside accolades and peer admiration than becoming a better person. I suspect that the desire to grow as a person typically comes later in maturation.
And, I think this is often ok. Here’s why:
Something that I am very interested in is human psycho-spiritual development. By psycho-spiritual development I am referring to the basic and instinctive workings of the human mind and how that human mind perceives our role and belonging within life as a whole.
Healthy psycho-spiritual development involves an egoic stage: a period of time where a young person invests in something which provides some specificity to their identity (i.e. I am an athlete and I live a particular way, and I value particular things in part due to my commitment to athletics.) and which gives them a space and some challenges through which to discover their power. Often, athletic success, and the subsequent affirmation from others, reinforces their desire to experiment with an athletic identity.
Through this early athlete identity, young people learn that they have some control over their lives. They learn that if they work hard, they can improve their circumstances and realize goals that matter to them. These are very good, even critical realizations to have for someone just setting out in life. They are the early seeds of personal agency, initiative and persistence.
But, as you mention in your question, athletes quickly become narrowly focused on times and placings. Improved times and placings are alluring because they become correlated with attention and therefore, social security. They also become symbolic of an athlete’s ability to influence their lives. So, it makes sense that we become attached to them.
As much as a stage of ego development and experimentation with an athlete identity is natural, I also think that a stage of ego disillusionment should also be natural. Ego-disillusionment occurs when circumstances beyond our control frustrate our hard-work. Examples include, tough races and seasons, injury, illness, and plateaus and fluctuations in progress. During ego disillusionment stages, athletes suffer the emotional pain of gripping tightly to a specific goal, the tension that arises from the gripping, and the disappointment that falls upon them when the goal is not realized – especially if times and placings are their only metric of success for their experience and performance.
They may also notice a change in how they are treated by some people depending on how they perform.
Although this struggle is difficult to watch in someone you care about, I believe that it is a natural and healthy process. If a young athlete can notice the circumstances, their reaction to them, and receive support throughout – including alternate perspectives and ways to meet the circumstances other than greater intensity and attempts at control, these periods can lead to far greater maturity and resilience long-term.
Within a community of wise adults and peers, young athletes can notice their attachment to outcome within an environment that is safe and understanding. They can recognize that sport is inherently unpredictable. They can feel the tension that arises from their own rigid standards or their own post-poor-performance self-ridicule. They can witness the fluctuations of attention of others according to their performance and decide whose opinions should hold weight.
Our own witnessing of our experience and its effect on us is the first step to real change.
From here, hopefully accompanied by supportive others, but driven by their own observations and experiences, an athlete can take responsibility for their own story and attention. They can begin the long and challenging process of creating their own healthy foundation based on using sport to grow as a person if that is the perspective they choose. I think that this can only occur in a genuine and meaningful way once someone has reached the level of maturity where they can take responsibility for their own perspective. We are all on a different timeline in this respect. I have seen people begin this process during middle school, as adults, and at every point in between.
Personally, I am still working on strengthening my own healthy foundation!
You might have noticed that a few paragraphs ago I wrote that ego disillusionment should be a part of healthy psycho-spiritual development. Unfortunately, in North America, we rarely allow it to be. In my opinion, a large part of the issue with this lie in our capitalistic, individualistic, linear-progress obsessed society which continues to grip onto its own egoic stage of development. Many adults have not moved outside of the egoic stage themselves, which greatly delays a young athlete’s ability to do so.
When a young athlete experiences a plateau or decline in performance (normal stages in development), often the community around that athlete reacts as if something is wrong. There can be a great deal of urgency directed toward getting that athlete back “on-track.” This is especially true approaching “important” meets within “important” seasons. However, anxious efforts to resume linear progress can deny an athlete an important stage of development – a stage which if explored with patience could enrich their experience and performance long-term.
For example, I am currently working with a very good high school athlete. Their performance in their freshman and sophomore years of high school was exceptional and far exceeded hopes. However, in their junior year this athlete’s training environment changed and new fears around racing outcomes arose. They also became very aware of the expectations of running fans and the media and felt external pressure that they had not before. As a result, their performances have stagnated.
Thankfully, this athlete has a wise coach and parents. They sought help for the athlete, and they also removed any pressure to race to a certain standard (or race at all). As a result, this athlete has had the space to notice the story that they are telling themselves about what they “have to” achieve and the effect of that story on their system. They have been asked what they genuinely love about the sport, what they need to thrive, how they want to race, and the attitude they want to take toward it all. These questions have enabled this athlete to begin to build their own healthy foundation upon what they want their relationship with the sport to be.
Outcome-wise, this athlete’s season finished slightly better than it started. But, their enjoyment of their running and racing improved greatly. More importantly, in the space allowed, we have all learned a lot about them which will help us relate better to them, and help them relate better to their running, and to racing, in future seasons.
My first suggestion to wise and caring adults who are trying to establish a healthy foundation for their young athletes is to check in with your own. How well can you balance your own agency and ability to control with the uncertain elements of sport, and accompanying young people?
With this established consider asking the athletes in your care, when they are tormented over outcome: what are you believing? How does that feel in your body? What is that like for you pre-race, inside the race, post-race? Is there another way of seeing this? An alternate story? How might that different perspective feel?
I would also suggest pointing out the human qualities that you see in your athletes which they might have realized through their running, but which transcend running. For example, diligence, commitment, courage, resilience, self-awareness, humility and hope. These qualities describe them as people, not just athletes.
For the young athlete reading this, who wishes to soften their grip on outcome and begin constructing their own healthy foundation: first, any attachment to outcome, any desire for outside affirmation or attention, is completely natural. We are all working with that desire. When you are struggling with these feelings, notice how they feel in your body. Notice the likely discomfort and offer yourself some understanding and compassion for that. Consider, what is another lens through which I could see my circumstances? For example, instead of “I have to run finish in the top ___________,” how about, “I wonder how many people I can catch.” Or, “this race is an opportunity to practice focusing on one lap at a time.” Or, “this meet is an opportunity to notice everything that I am grateful for in this environment.” As passive as they sound, perspectives like these typically enhance performance. See how they feel. Give them a try.
One final thought on ego-development and ego-disillusionment. Earlier, I mentioned my interest in human psycho-spiritual development. Through reading and observations, I am realizing that much growth happens through a process of deconstruction and rebuilding as opposed to gradual growth over time. We seem to grow cyclically – the old falls apart to make room for the new, over and over – as opposed to linearly. Who would we be if cyclical progress was what we expected, looked for and supported in ourselves and one another? Who would we be if we understood that some struggles precipitate a necessary falling apart? One that would eventually lead to something new and much better being born? Egoic struggles such as fixation on outcome in sport, and the desire to find and establish a healthy foundation, is one area, if given the chance, we can find out.
MENTAL PERFORMANCE 
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