Awfulizing and Awe
Helping Young Athletes Stop Dramatizing and Start Discovering
Awfulizing does not mean an athlete is weak, dramatic, or making things up.
Sometimes, what happens in sport really does feel awful. A torn ACL can feel awful. Getting cut can feel awful. Losing a championship game can feel awful. Being embarrassed in front of teammates can feel awful.
Hard things should be named honestly. Pain should not be denied. Disappointment should not be dismissed. Athletes do not need fake positivity, forced confidence, or shallow perspective. They need to see things as they are, not worse than they are.
Awfulizing happens when the mind takes a difficult, disappointing, or painful experience and turns it into something unbearable, permanent, catastrophic, and self-defining. It is not simply saying, “This hurts.” It is when “this hurts” becomes “I cannot stand this,” “this should not be happening,” “this is the worst thing ever,” or “this proves something is wrong with me.”
That is where many young athletes get stuck.
The Ego Dramatizes the Moment
Young athletes often do not only describe what happened. Their ego turns what happened into something personal and overgeneralized.
“I made a mistake” becomes “I always mess up.”
“I lost” becomes “I am not good enough.”
“This is hard” becomes “I cannot handle this.”
This is not just negative thinking. It is negative self-referential processing. The athlete’s mind turns inward. The game is no longer just a game. The mistake is no longer just a mistake.
This is especially important with adolescents because the developing brain is highly sensitive to identity, evaluation, belonging, and comparison. Young athletes can easily get pulled into questions like:
How did I look? What do they think of me? What does this mean about me? Am I falling behind? Am I wasting my potential? Am I enough?
The more threatening the experience feels, the more the athlete’s world shrinks. Attention narrows. The body tightens. The ego dramatizes. Instead of staying connected to the moment, the athlete gets trapped in fear, image protection, and self-judgment.
Awfulizing Shrinks the Athlete’s World
Awfulizing makes the athlete smaller. Not humble-small. Fear-small.
It shrinks the world down to one performance, one mistake, one coach’s opinion, one ranking, one comparison, one outcome. It turns sport from a place of development into a place of survival.
Many young athletes already live in a highly evaluated world. They are watched, ranked, posted, compared, praised, criticized, and measured. Their performances travel farther than they used to. Their mistakes can feel public. Their status can feel fragile.
So when awfulizing becomes the default language, the athlete learns to experience difficulty as danger.
Not, “This is a hard moment.” But, “This cannot happen.”
Not, “I have something to learn.” But, “This proves I am behind.”
Not, “I am being stretched.” But, “I am being exposed.”
This is how pressure becomes unnecessary. Not because the moment does not matter, but because the meaning attached to the moment becomes too heavy.
Awe as the Antidote
There is another kind of awful we have almost forgotten.
The older sense of awe is not merely “cool” or “amazing.” Awe is the feeling of encountering something vast, something beyond our current frame of reference, something that stretches how we understand ourselves and the world.
Awe makes us small, but in a healthy way. Small in the sense that we are part of something bigger.
This is deeply important for young athletes because awfulizing creates unhealthy smallness. It says, “You are small because this moment is too big for you.” Awe creates healthy smallness. It says, “You are small because life, sport, growth, and possibility are bigger than you can fully control.”
That kind of smallness is a gift. Awe pulls athletes out of obsessive self-focus and into something wider. It expands attention. It softens the ego. It invites humility.
This is why sport can be so formative. At its best, sport is not just rules, objectives, scores, and outcomes. It is an encounter. A rhythm. A relationship with challenge, uncertainty, limits, teammates, opponents, coaches, places, and possibilities.
A young athlete can encounter awe when they realize how difficult mastery really is. When they compete against someone better than them. When they travel to a new place. When they meet people from different communities, cultures, and backgrounds. When a teammate sacrifices for them. When they lose and discover they are still standing. When they play beyond what they thought was possible. When they realize the game is not only something they control, but something they participate in.
Sport can bring athletes beyond where they have been.
And isn’t that great? To encounter something surprising. Something they could not quite predict. Something they did not fully see coming.
The brain rewards surprise. Learning happens when reality does not simply match expectation, but updates it. The athlete thought they knew what was possible, and then something new happened. They thought they knew their limits, and then those limits moved.
That is part of the wonder of development. But awfulizing blocks wonder.
It makes surprise feel like threat. It makes uncertainty feel like danger. It makes difficulty feel like evidence against the self.
Awe does the opposite.
Awe says, “There is more here than I can fully grasp.” Awfulizing says, “This is too much for me.”
Awe opens. Awfulizing closes. Awe expands the athlete. Awfulizing constricts them.
Let Yourself Be Moved
One of the great losses in modern youth sport is that many athletes are surrounded by opportunity but closed off to wonder.
They are playing, but monitoring. Traveling, but comparing. Competing, but protecting. Training, but proving. Winning, but still anxious. Losing, and feeling destroyed.
They are around something big, but trapped inside something small. This is where adults can help.
Parents, coaches, and professionals can help athletes name the difference between reality and exaggeration, pain and catastrophe, disappointment and identity collapse. But we can also do something deeper.
We can help them recover awe.
We can point them back to the vastness of sport. The beauty of skill. The mystery of growth. The gift of teammates. The privilege of competition. The surprise of finding out they can do something they once could not do. The humility of being challenged. The wonder of being part of something that existed before them and will continue after them.
We can help them stop asking only, “What does this say about me?”
And start asking:
“What is this showing me?”
“What is this teaching me?”
“What is this inviting me into?”
“What is bigger than my fear right now?”
“What can I appreciate, even here?”
Young athletes do not only need tools to handle pressure. They need experiences that expand them. They need to be brought out of the cramped room of ego-driven self-judgment and into the larger world of development, relationship, competition, community, and meaning.
How We Help Athletes Encounter Awe Again
If awfulizing shrinks the athlete’s world, then we need to help them encounter experiences that expand it.
This does not happen by accident. It requires formation. It requires helping young athletes step outside the small box in front of their faces and into real experiences with real people, real challenges, real places, and real consequences.
It is hard to evoke awe while scrolling. The phone often pulls the athlete back into comparison, evaluation, image management, and self-referential thought. Who saw it? Who liked it? Who is ahead of me? What do they think? How do I look? Am I enough?
That small box can make the world feel smaller, not larger. And when the world gets smaller, awfulizing becomes easier. So part of helping young athletes develop a healthier perspective is not only teaching them better self-talk. It is giving them formative experiences that pull them out of themselves and into something bigger.
Create phone-free spaces around practice, games, meals, and travel.
Do not make this punitive. Make it formative. Help athletes understand that attention is part of development. If they are always half-present, they are less available to be moved, challenged, surprised, and connected.
Expose them to new places and people.
Travel tournaments, community service, camps, team retreats, visiting another school, playing in a different environment, or serving younger athletes can all stretch their world. Awe often begins when athletes realize their normal world is not the whole world.
Let them struggle with something difficult without rescuing them too quickly.
Skill mastery can evoke awe because it reveals depth. The athlete realizes, “This is harder than I thought,” and eventually, “I am capable of more than I knew.” But adults often interrupt this process by trying to remove frustration too fast. Some struggle is not harmful. It is formative.
Help them notice beauty, not just outcomes.
Ask athletes what they noticed in the game beyond the score. A teammate’s courage. The rhythm of play. The speed of the opponent. The sound of the gym. The difficulty of the skill. The feeling of being fully absorbed. These details help them encounter sport as more than performance evaluation.
Use reflection to widen the story.
After games, do not only ask, “How did you play?” Ask, “What did this teach you?” “Where were you stretched?” “What surprised you?” “Who helped you?” “What did you appreciate?” “What did you learn about yourself, your team, or the game?” These questions move the athlete from self-judgment into meaning.
Build relationships that are bigger than status.
Team meals, shared stories, older athletes mentoring younger ones, coaches telling athletes why they matter beyond performance—these moments matter. Belonging widens the athlete’s world. It reminds them they are not just a stat line, ranking, or role.
Invite them into service.
Have older athletes coach younger players. Let teams serve at community events. Encourage athletes to write thank-you notes to people who helped them. Service pulls the athlete out of the ego’s narrow obsession with image and reminds them they are needed, not just evaluated.
Young athletes do not need us to manufacture dramatic, life-changing experiences every week. They need us to help them become more available to the experiences already in front of them.
The hard practice. The long bus ride. The new opponent. The teammate’s vulnerability. The beautiful pass. The painful loss. The unexpected breakthrough. The quiet moment after the game. The realization that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
That is how sport forms people. Not only by helping them perform better, but by helping them see better.
Awfulizing says, “This moment is too much for me.” Awe says, “There is more here than I realized.”
They need to learn that something can feel awful without becoming everything. And they need to rediscover that sport, at its best, is full of awe.
It can surprise them. Stretch them. Humble them. Connect them. Move them.
But only if they are open to being moved.