How Your Emotions Shape Your Performance: A Lesson From My 9-Year-Old

This week I witnessed something pretty special.

My son, Jax, was doing a workout with Nina and me, and he was getting beat.
Now, for one, this doesn’t happen often.
And for two, our workouts aren’t about competing with each other—we each have our own goals.

But Jax likes to win.

As I pulled ahead of him, I started paying attention to how he’d respond. At first, he dug in and worked harder. Then it happened… he became defeated.

His shoulders dropped.
He started to pout.
He quit trying.
He complained that he “couldn’t do it.”
His form fell apart.

Even though Nina and I tried to coach him with encouragement and motivation, he had already made up his mind: he wasn’t enough today.

That’s when I stopped him.

“You’re done. Sit down and wait for us to finish.”

He got upset. He cried.
This reaction wasn’t new—we talk often with Jax about how our emotions impact our performance, in sports and in life.

But what happened next surprised me.

After a few minutes, Jax got up on his own.
He picked up his dumbbell.
And he continued exactly where he had left off.

He finished the rest of the workout.
He accepted that he wasn’t going to have the best score that day.
And he refused to quit.

I couldn’t have been more proud.

As adults, it’s hard—really hard—to bounce back from defeat. Most of us struggle with that moment where our emotions take over and our effort collapses. But this week I learned something from my 9-year-old:

You can’t always control what happens to you,
but you can always choose how you respond.

Your emotional state is one of the biggest performance drivers you have. And the best part? It’s completely trainable.