Women and girls in sport receive conflicting messages about what it means to be strong and successful.

Self-sabotaging behaviors often function as protection from failure, criticism, or shame.

Athletes cannot eliminate every critical thought, but they can choose to do hard things anyway.

Self-compassion is not soft; it helps athletes recover from mistakes without abandoning themselves.

A podcast episode explored why women and girls in sport self-sabotage. An equally important question is: Who taught them that they need to?

From a young age, girls receive conflicting messages about how they are supposed to think, look, and behave. Be confident, but not cocky. Be strong, but not too muscular. Be competitive, but still likeable.

But being an athlete inherently challenges many stereotypes about women.

Think of how young girls play. They play with the boys, run fast, get dirty, fall down, get back up, and care far less about how they look. Sports are a space where girls get to be fierce and strong without wondering whether it makes them less desirable. Somewhere around adolescence, we start to see a shift.

It's almost like watching young girls start to shrink themselves, both in sport and in life, to fit everyone else's expectations.

Around this time is also when we start to see young women in sport become increasingly concerned about mistakes, appearance, and whether they are "good enough." Pressures are also felt externally, as perfectionistic pressure from coaches and parents is associated with greater perfectionistic concerns among youth athletes (Fleming et al., 2023).

In the most extreme but exceptionally common scenarios, women take a sideline from sport altogether.

Girls disengage from sport earlier and at higher rates than boys, with body image concerns, gender stereotypes, and sport environments among the top reasons (Matheson et al., 2023; Slater & Tiggemann, 2011).

We are Not Going to Banish........

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