Raising Pro Athletes

Parents’ Guide To Building Mental Toughness In Young Athletes

• Marina Villatoro Kuperman

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Ever watched your kids crumble under pressure at a competition? Yeah, been there. This episode is all about the ultimate game-changer: mental toughness training!

It's not about being born tough, it's about building mental strength! I'll share a personal story of my son's competition flop, to show you how important mental preparation is. I'll also share some awesome tips on mental toughness that'll have your kid's mind feeling like their biggest cheerleader, not their worst critic. So, let's dive in!

We argue that 80–90% of performance comes from the mind and share a simple, daily routine parents can run at home to build mental toughness in young athletes. A tough result at the Spanish Cup becomes the trigger for a five-part training system that turns pressure into focus.

• debunking the myth of being “born” mentally tough
• parents’ responsibility when teams lack time for mindset
• a competition story where thoughts derailed performance
• awareness as the starting line for change
• daily visualization tied to clear, controllable goals
• meditation to notice and release unhelpful thoughts
• rewriting stories to focus on what can be controlled
• journaling wins, lessons, and if-then plans
• commitment to short, consistent practice across the family

If you enjoyed this episode, like, subscribe, please leave me a review, share it with your friends, and remember it's really important for us to all work together


About This Podcast

It takes a village to raise a pro athlete.

For the first time ever this channel takes you behind the athlete’s ‘unspoken’ road what it really takes to raise athletes.

What to expect when you listen:

Real, Raw Truth

Laughter

The Struggles & Successes

ABOUT YOUR HOST:

Marina Kuperman Villatoro, a mama who is on a mission to help her sons reach their athletic (rock climbing) goals and dreams.

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SPEAKER_00:

Mental toughness for athletes. Guys, this is everything. Like, I can't even tell you it's everything. Okay. We are past the point that does my kid want to do this sport? Absolutely. Obviously, they're already doing it, they're practicing, they're committed to it. However, what we do forget a lot of times, and I probably think the majority of the time is that 80% to 90%. Yes, I'm saying this correctly. 80 to 90% of anything we do, especially with sports, is all mental. It's how we perceive what's happening, it's how we could react to what's happening, it's how tough we are mentally. There are all these components, and it all boils down to mental toughness. Okay. Mental toughness. Now, what's amazing to me is that people believe that we're just some people are just born more mentally tough than others, and that is a complete and total lie, myth, misconception, however you want to call it. It's not true. It's not true. Okay, so what's really important is that we as parents could help our child become mentally tough. Look, a lot of our kids who are competing, they are part of teams, right? And teams is fantastic because that's where they learn their skills. That's how they learn how to do their sport really well. And a lot of times the teams and the coaching they are limited in time that they could focus on other things versus the skill of the sport, right? Because they only get maybe between one to three hours several times per week. And the whole mental toughness training, which is literally that, it's a muscle that you need to train or retrain because a lot of times it's already trained poorly. They are just not able to do it. So we as parents, we have that potential, we have that capability. As a matter of fact, I believe that it is our responsibility to be able to be there to train our kids how to be more mentally tough. And what's funny enough is that when we could teach them, we become mentally tough ourselves. And let me tell you, it's a good thing. It's a really good thing. We should all be doing mentally mental exercises all the time. So we and a lot of times it just doesn't happen like that, right? Like we can't just start telling our kid, well, you need to practice this because they need a motivation, they need an inspiration, they need a reason for why they need to even go there because it's the because mental stuff is invisible, right? Nobody really sees it. Like when you're training your bicep and your bicep starts to grow, become stronger, it's very visible. But with mental toughness, it's not that easy. And luckily, we had this opportunity, and now we are literally riding this opportunity to know and so what happened was our youngest son, who has been doing been doing pretty well in competitions locally, went to the Spanish Cup, and his mind got the best of him, like or the worst of him, right? I call it he became a servant to his mind. His thoughts went all the wrong ways. First and foremost, he was thinking a lot of things he was saying to myself, you know, everybody's expecting me to win again. I am the number one in this particular category. They're gonna, what if I don't win? They're all gonna think badly of me. Um, what then he went into the really wrong place as well about all the his competitors thinking, oh, they're so much better than me, they've been training for so much longer, they've been winning, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, what did it do to him? First of all, it's all thoughts, right? None of it is true, none of it was really the fact or any of it was true whatsoever. But what it did was it completely destroyed his mental toughness. And when it was time to compete, he didn't even make it to the finals. And what's really important to understand is that he definitely had the skill physically and underknowingly, how to get to the finals. But it was all about the lack of mental toughness because before he would never really let me go there and train him and work with him. And this is something that I've done for years, so I definitely know how to do this really well. And what was interesting though, after he didn't even make it to the finals, he did really poorly, he did have enough mental strength to recognize that it was his mind that got the better of him. And that's when I was able to jump in and be like, that's because you're, you know, we don't do any mental training, any mental toughness training. And that's when I was starting to, and that's when I saw that window to be able to start with the training. And the way we did it was, you know, a lot of times, even though I'm not all pro YouTube, because I think a lot of the videos that we're watching on YouTube, they overlook all of this that we are going through right now. But in this particular case, we hit YouTube with visualizations that athletes do. And Michael Phelps is one of the most obviously the most famous, most successful athletes that is very, very open and talks about the importance of visualizations for him. And you see him doing a lot of his visualizations, and then there's a lot of others, so we were able to really look into that and start that visualization activity and training daily exercise. It's a daily training, guys. All of this that I'm gonna be talking about doesn't take more than five to eight minutes per day, so you could definitely apply this and put this into your life. Okay, we now literally take this a daily practice when we are all together, all of us, including me, my husband. So I have come up with five steps, five, they're easy, quick steps, and I'm gonna and I'm breaking it down. You can go and check out all the podcasts and all the sessions that I have talking exactly how I do each one. There's five of them: one, visualization, two, goals. You cannot do visualizations without having goals. We're gonna really talk about all of that. Then we have meditation. Meditation is really important, right? And that also helps with the visualization because when you start to meditate, you can visualize a lot more because your mind is stronger and is capable of doing it on a stronger level. Then we have stories, or like I like to say them, rewriting stories and writing your new story. And the last is journaling, right? So they're all kind of enlaced together, so it's not that difficult for you to really be able to break it down because, like I said, all of what I just mentioned takes less than eight minutes per day, and it is a daily practice and it becomes fun. My oldest son says after he does it, especially with the visualization and writing it down, he feels excited and happy because when you visualize, you're training your mind to what is really happening, what you really want to achieve, and it's absolutely fabulous. So go and watch the other five where I really break down each one specifically because mental toughness will literally be the deciding factor between the winner, the one that truly becomes that pro versus the one that hobby. And you know what's really sad is that they become sad, like their confidence level also goes down, and it doesn't have to be like that. It is really that simple to be able to fix it, but you do need to commit you as a parent and your athlete, your child as well. I love to hear what do you guys do for mental toughness when you help your kids? How do you approach it? What do you guys talk about it? Like I said, it takes a strategic village to raise an athlete, right? So I love to know your thoughts on it. And if you enjoyed this episode, like, subscribe, please leave me a review, share it with your friends, and remember it's really important for us to all work together. I'm Marina, your host, mother of two aspiring rock climbers, and wife to an extreme athlete.