How Sports can Help your Child

The way to build a child’s self-esteem is by teaching them how to set goals, work hard, accomplish tasks, understand the body, and learn from failure. Introducing your child to sports is just one of the ways they can build these skills.

Goal Setting: Playing sports gives the child an enormous pool of goals to choose from like mastering the basic skill set, becoming more fit, getting stronger, or winning the league championship.

Individual sports like running, swimming, or golf are great for children of all levels because not only can they compete with a team, but they can also compete against their own scores or times.

Hard Work: Through sports, a child will learn that practicing diligently with the team may not be enough; to improve they will need to spend extra time practicing certain skills on their own.
Doing so will not only build confidence, but it will also garner praise from the coach and teammates, while putting the child in a leadership position giving incentive to his teammates to improve themselves as well.


Accomplishing Tasks: After losing a game the child can learn that there is no shame in working hard and coming up short. The key is effort, personal development and having fun.

Understanding the Body: In sports children learn to value their body for “what it can do” not simply for “how it looks”. Children who play sports have a more positive body image and experience higher states of psychological well-being than those who do not play sports.

Learning from Failure: Children gain self-esteem by playing a game hard, losing, picking themselves up, congratulating the other team, and then going home and working hard with hopes of defeating that team the next time. Working hard to improve is something that can help children gain confidence thus bolstering their self-esteem.

What is Employee Engagement anyway?

Today in North America job satisfaction is at an all time low with fewer than 1 in 3 people being engaged at work. In the past 25 years a marked loss of "job satisfaction" has put less then 35% of people happy or proud of their work, the environment they work in or their current position within a corporation.

Disengaged employees cost the North American economy up to $350 billion per year in lost productivity.

What can be done?

GREAT leaders need to focus on engaging employees with :

GROWTH

• Meet one-on-one to assess the career goals of your employees
• Acknowledge what skills, experience and knowledge they need in order to identify those goals
• HELP them to identify ways to close the gaps between their goals and the where they are now in their career
• Offer mentorships, job rotations, meetings and job training

RECOGNITION

• Show appreciation readily, but make sure it is deserved
• Don't just say it or use email. Written notes are highly valued
• Offer recognition in public or with their peers or a boss present
• Ask people their opinion; get them involved

TRUST

• Your words and deeds must match
• Be transparent; share the bad news along with the good news
• When you make a mistake; acknowledge it
• Never say anything about a person that your wouldn't say to their face
• Constantly remind everyone of the Big Goal and the Plan that will get them there