One Thing Will Help Your Teen Perform Under Pressure

Is your teen nervous when it really matters? Do they freeze, overthink, or doubt themselves when the pressure’s on?

In this episode, I’ll share the one powerful thing that can help your teen show up with confidence — even in high-stress moments. Whether they’re an athlete, artist, or academic, this tool will help them stop focusing on what they can’t control and start performing like the person they want to be.

This one shift changed everything for a teen athlete I coach. And it can help your teen too.

Are You Caught in the Parent Trap?

Discover the hidden patterns that are keeping you stuck—and how to break free.

Take this quick (and eye-opening) quiz to uncover which common parenting trap you’re falling into with your teen.
Get a personalized roadmap to help you parent with more clarity, confidence, and connection—starting today.

https://benpughcoaching.com/parenttrapquiz

Transcript

Ben: 0:00

I'm Ben Pugh and you're listening to IMPACT! Parenting with Perspective. This podcast is all about helping parents manage the mental and emotional drama that comes with parenting teens so they can focus on what's most important. Building rock solid relationships and having a powerful impact on their teen's life. Join me each week as I dive into real tools to help you and your teen turn struggles into strengths.

ben_1_07-31-2025_144424: 0:33

Hello guys. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for being here. I am excited for today's topic. If you are new to listening to me, you might not realize this, but I coach parents of teenagers and I often coach teenagers and I have this little subgroup that I love coaching, but these are kind of elite high school athletes. Like one of my recent clients, he is. Elite basketball player, and his question is, his current question as a freshman isn't whether or not he'll go to college. It's whether or not he will attend one of these few. Elite colleges, like a college that you would know in the NCAA tournament for basketball year after year. Now, I love coaching elite athletes, and recently I had a awesome coaching call and I wanted to share some insights from this conversation with me and a young man had now due to privacy and all that, I'm not like I. Won't have a recording of that for you. I'm just gonna kinda recap it. But today we are going to talk about how elite athletes, they need struggles to help them reach their potential and how they think has a huge impact on how they perform and how they play, especially under pressure. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight. This podcast is for you. If you have a teen athlete who struggles under pressure, even if they don't really struggle under pressure. This is something that. Could help them even up level their game. Now, if you're a parent of a teenager and you're like, oh, well I guess I don't need to listen to this episode. My teens don't play sports, that's okay. You can still apply these lessons, whether it be with your teen in sports, or maybe they're in drama. Or maybe they are really into getting good grades in academics. The things that we're going to talk about are applicable not only to any teenager who experiences high pressure, but they're also applicable to you as a parent. So. Today, like if you have a teen who's struggling, like this might be a podcast that you let your teen listen to teenager. If your parents are forcing you to listen to this, I am sorry. I'll make it as fun as I can, but mainly I just wanna give you guys as much help as I can efficiently. So some of the key takeaways that we're gonna talk about today are how your confidence. It doesn't come from your circumstances, it doesn't come from the things around you. It comes from your identity, your preparation, and focusing on what you can control. So let's talk about this young man. By the time you've listened to this, that coaching call would maybe be. Two, maybe three weeks away. But anyways, he's one of my teen clients and one of the few that I take on during high school football because I just don't have a lot of time after hours or in afternoon hours, which is usually when teens are free and I'm usually at football practice. Anyways, he was super frustrated. He recently. Injured his hamstring. He's working on coming back from that and he wasn't sure if he was ready and he was going into a seven on seven tournament, feeling a lot of doubt and a lack of confidence. And he was wondering, what if I'm not good enough, especially after my injury. Now for parents, if you have a high achieving teen athlete, you've probably seen this. The setbacks could be like an injury. It could be not getting along with players or a coach or just performance slumps. And sometimes the pressure that these athletes experience comes more from what they think about themselves and what they think others are thinking about themselves. Then it comes from circumstances that are actually true. And so it's always really important to take the time to explore. What's really going on to not just buy into, oh, my coach is a jerk, or, and I'm injured. I'm so far behind. And that was for this young man. Like that was a thought that he brought up. He is like, man, I feel like I'm so far behind because of this injury, and I feel like I'm not ready to perform at the same level that I was. He's like, my skill level has gone down. So when we started this coaching call, I wanted to ask him like, where do you think you're supposed to be right now? And he was talking about like, well, if the injury wouldn't have happened or if I could have practiced more, instead of having to just hobble around on the sideline and, and we got to this point where we were able to identify that. Dude, you are arguing with your injury. You're arguing with reality. We know that you're supposed to be injured because that's what happened. Like that's your reality. And anytime you argue with reality, you lose.'cause reality is what is. And when we could start to shift and really question this belief that, man, I should be further along. I should have more reps. I should have been able to practice more. And I see this a lot in the parents that I work with, the teens that I work with, oftentimes you are fighting. Your current circumstance, you're fighting the reality as it exists around you. And one of the most important things that you can do is to really accept it for what it is so that you can then build from it instead of trying to fight against it. And for this young man with the hamstring injury, that was super important. He kept on telling me like, oh, this shouldn't have happened. Like I had done this to help prevent it. I need to be practicing. And I'm like, dude, you are where you are. Your hamstring injury is not good. It's not bad. It's just your body letting you know, dude, you've got some weaknesses here that we need to address and if you address it now, which if you have an athlete dealing with any functionality issues or maybe. This young man dealing with his hamstring, I highly recommend the, it's called the A TG app. It's created by the knees over toes Guy Ben Patrick, I recommended it to this young man. He's been rehabbing his hamstring and he is doing great. Anyways, when we were able to question the thought that, man, I should be further along, or. My skill level has gone down. Then we were able to explore other things. We were able to explore like, well, what experiences do you have as a quarterback? That the hamstring didn't take away, and this kid has been playing quarterback his whole life. Like he understands things about football that I don't understand as a freaking high school football coach, because he's got more experience as a quarterback than I do. I've only ever played quarterback in practice when we don't have a guy to do it and I gotta step in. When we were able to identify, like, look. You have years of experience. How much varsity game time do you have? How many games have you won in varsity? How many games have you lost? These are all things that give you experience and help prepare you that your hamstring injury can't take away. And when we broke this down. When we broke this down and we identified the varsity experience, the hours of practice, the mental reps, all of this. And when we were able to see, oh, the injury doesn't take away from that, it changes the lens. And he was able to see, oh, there. Just a few things that I can control that I need to focus on. And his fear wasn't based in truth. It was based on this lie that he was telling himself that I haven't done enough. I'm not good enough. My skill level has gone down. And when he was able to shift his mindset, he from feeling confident, he was completely full of self-doubt to feeling confident. And then I asked him, I'm like, okay, there's all these things that you can't control. We can't go back in time and undo the injury, which if we could like. It wouldn't be wise because then you would've avoided the injury, but you wouldn't have fixed any of the underlying problems and you would be constantly on the brink of re-injuring. So that's one thing we can't control. We can't go back in time under the injury. We can't control whether it hurts or not. We can't control whether you're teammates pass or catch the ball. We can't control what your coaches think. We just identified all these things that he couldn't control, and then we're like, well, what can you control? He's like, well, I can control how I warm up, like with a hamstring injury, if you don't warm it up and give it the proper time that it needs, it's gonna flare it up and it's gonna hurt. And I'm like, awesome. So maybe rather than watching game film or preparing and reading through the playbook, your form of preparation needs to be taking care of yourself and warming up and hydrating. And when he was able to see, oh, I'm focusing on all this stuff outside of my control. I'm just gonna shift my attention and do the few things that I can control. I'm gonna hydrate. I'm gonna go to the seven on seventh thing early so I can properly warm up a lot of teens. What they'll do is they will focus on all the things outside of their control, and that's why they feel anxious. That's why they're constantly nervous and stressed out. But if you can help your teen shift their attention from all these things outside of their control to the few things that they can control, that will empower them because they're wasting a ton of energy on the stuff outside of their control, and they can re harness that energy and use it on the few things that are within their control. And for this young man, one of the things that he needed to let go of that was outside of his control was other people's model about him. So if you're new to me, you probably, I don't know, maybe you haven't heard me talk about the self-coaching model. This is a model that I use. I learned it from Brooke Castillo, and it talks about like. A circumstance. This is this thing that happens. It's outside of your control and it's factual and it's neutral. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just neutral. And then there's the thoughts that you have about that circumstance and your thoughts create feelings inside of you. And our feelings fuel our actions, and then our actions create our result. Now, this young man is very aware of the model. But he was focused on external models. He was worried about like, well, what if my coaches think I'm lazy? What if they're not happy with me because I don't play well? And I'm like, dude, you can never control your coach's model. And if you're dealing with high school athletes. This is one of the number one things that I coach high school athletes on. So many high school athletes are so afraid of what their coach is thinking about them or feeling about them, or what their coach is gonna do or not do. Like, are they gonna let me play? Are they gonna let me start? And they spend so much time focusing on their coaches model that they're not focused on their own model. They're not managing how they think and how they feel, and they're not behaving in a way that's. Aligned with who they want to be. So for this young man, when he was able to shift his mindset and realize, oh, my confidence doesn't have to come from like a strong hamstring or what my coach thinks about me, my confidence comes from my preparation and I've prepared and I've done everything within my power. Like, yeah, I was injured, I was out for weeks. That's okay because I am doing. What's within my power and he was able to shift his attention and control the few things that were within his control. Now the super fun thing was this young man texted me after this seven on seven tournament and it was awesome what he said. And let's see, I gotta scroll down and find it, but he is like. I played really well today, like nine, outta 14 passing with three touchdowns. He later told me, he is like, dude, I only played 30% of the reps and I got all the touchdowns, and he said, thank you. The call before really helped on what I needed to focus on before and during the game, and when it comes to elite athletes crumbling under the pressure. Of a big time stage. It's usually their focus. They're not focused on what's important. They're not focused on the things that they can control. They're focused on like, oh, well, what if I hurt my hamstring again? Or, what if my teammates get mad at me? When you can shift your attention and when you can control the controllables. It will help you be the type of player that you want to be. Now with this young man, we talked a little bit about identity. A lot of times we attach our identity, we attach our confidence to like how we play or the outcome of the game, like whether we win or whether we lose or whatever. And. That isn't helpful because you can't control how you play. Sometimes you can't control whether or not you win, and your identity isn't just for you doing great, like your identity is who you are when things are great or when things are bad. And so in this coaching call, I asked this young man like. What is your identity as a football player? He's like, I don't know. And told me a few things. I was like, wait, let's just imagine that you go out, you perform super well, you win. Your coach is like, oh, man, we need you. Like, you get more than 30% of the reps. He is like, I'd feel proud. I'd feel c. And I was like, would you feel humble? And he is like, no, probably not. He's like, I'd feel excited, I'd feel energized. And I'm like, awesome. Now imagine that you lost and you played terrible. Is it okay to still feel confident, energized, content happy? And he is like, oh yeah, totally. The only one that he said maybe wouldn't apply is. Being super proud of himself. Like, if we lose, I'll probably be more humble. And I was like, awesome. See how this is reframing your identity, who you want to be now that you've thought about losing? Is it appropriate to be humble when you win? And gracious? And he's like, yeah, totally. He was able to realize that his identity, who he wants to be as a player, win or lose. Does not need to change based on the circumstances around him. He can be the fearless leader, he can be confident, he can be humble and kind, whether they win or whether they lose. And so now his job is like, rather than worrying about like, are we gonna win? Are we going to look good? Are we gonna do all this? No, it's just, I'm going to control the controllables and I'm going to show up and be the player that I want to be. And in this case, it worked out really well. He was able to let go of attachments on whether or not they won or lost. He was just able to show up and play as the player that he wants to be. Now, this is one of the cool things about when you or your teen work with me. You get my cell phone number and we get to interact back and forth via text. Sometimes we'll even hop on phone calls. I love creating a program that meets the individual needs of the person that I'm coaching. So if I were working with your teen, if they needed me in between coaching calls, they've got free access to text me if they are into sports. I'm a coach. I love coaching young men. I want to hear like, how did you do in the tournament this weekend? What are some things that you struggled with? What are some things that went really well? These are the type of things that help high school athletes become elite athletes because they stop worrying about things outside of their control and they start managing the few things within their control. And if you look at the best athletes of all time, that's what they're best at. Didn't matter if they got a bad call, didn't matter if, like, I remember Michael Jordan being sick when he played Utah in the It's either 98 or 99. I can't remember either way. We lost Michael Jordan won. He couldn't control whether he was sick or not, but he could go out and do his thing. He could make his shots. He could play defense only the way that he could. When you start to realize this, it will uplevel how you perform as an athlete and as a parent. If you apply everything that we just talked about, it will help you uplevel who you are as a parent. It will help you start being the parent of your dreams rather than reacting to your teen and all of a sudden being the parent of your nightmares. So a couple of things to keep in mind. Whether your teen is an athlete or an artist or an academic, they're gonna face pressure, and that's okay. Our teens need to face pressure so they can be resilient, so they can learn who they are, uncover their strengths, solidify their identity. And this one is really hard, especially for me as a parent and as a. Actual football coach, it's hard for me to accept sometimes that I cannot do this for my players. I can't perform for them, but I know that I can help them build the inner foundation that it takes to perform at their potential. With peace and confidence and power, and that is what I want to invite you to do. Like you can do the work for your teen, but you can help them with their mindset. You can help them with their emotional health, and you can help build that inner foundation. You can do the work on the inside that changes how you perform on the outside. Now, if you or your teen. Need a live coach. Whether your teen is like, I've coached teens that are in drama and yeah, it's different than football, but the principles still apply. I've coached baseball players, basketball players, football players, even rugby players. If you or your teen,'cause I've coached a lot of parents too. If you guys need help, I would love to offer you a free one-on-one consultation where we can explore what you're struggling with and I can let you know like, are we a good fit or not? Like we are going to find out together. And if you are flexible time-wise, that's one of the kickers.'cause right now. I am coaching high school football in the afternoons and evenings. If you and your teen are flexible with times, even if you're not like, we could still hop on this free call and figure something out, but feel free to go to ben pugh coaching.com/mini and let's see how I can help your teen perform at their highest potential and see how I can help you be the parent of your dreams and either way. Come back next week. I'll have another podcast for you, and if you've enjoyed this podcast, please go leave me a five star review. A written review helps even more. It helps parents just like you who are looking for support, find this podcast and know that it's a good one. People don't want to. Start listening to a podcast if they don't think it's gonna help. And if they can see how it's helped you, that will help them get the help that they're looking for. So thank you for being here. I will see you next week.