How to build confidence in your recruiting

Okay, so today I'm talking about how to build confidence in your recruiting and why recruiting is more than just the recruiting process. It's actually much more of a life process. And if you don't know who I am, I'm Tren Lohrer. I'm a former college quarterback. I run a program called Scholarship Accelerator where I help families get scholarship offers for college football at the moment at least. And so what this is going to look like, it's going to be an unedited long form video, probably around 10 minutes depending on what the time ends up being. And I'm just going to talk about what I talked about, confidence, recruiting process, life. And it's going to be again, unedited. This might be a little bit messy, might be ramble on. And so if you're listening to this, be sure to take notes because you want to get the Golden Nuggets. I'm going to share from my recruiting process what I've learned from other families and hopefully you can replicate it into your own. So let's dive into it. So again, I think, funny enough, recruiting process is just, it's just a growing up as a kid to an adult disguised as a way to play college, disguised as a way to pay for college. So like for example, you know, everybody starts probably around when they're 16, 15, 17, somewhere around there. I started when I was 16 and I was a 16 year old kid. I mean, yeah, I could drive, but I was by no means an adult. I was by no means grown up. And I can look back and say that when I committed to that four year, even when I was going through the juco process, I grew up drastically. It was night and day. It's night and day now and I'm only 22 and going from 16 to 22. I've learned so much and I grant a lot of that to of course the recruiting process and also playing football. Like both of those things grew me into the person, the man I am today. And I've gained a lot of confidence handling hard situations, handling things like, I mean, shoot, this whole brand that I'm building, this, you know, this program that I'm building, I can attest a lot of that to of course I went through the career process and that's what allowed me to like learn the skill of recruiting, but it also taught me how to handle this stuff. And so I think the recruiting process like, though a lot of people will give it flack and say that it's unnecessary, it's frustrating, it's confusing, it's I hate it. Whatever. That's also just life. Life is frustrating, confusing. You may hate it sometimes. And so I've learned a lot through that process. And I give a lot of credit to my parents for allowing me to take a lot of that process over and give me the freedom to kind of take control of it. More so than them being like, hey, Trenton, we need to do X, Y and Z. Like, you need to do this and that. And don't get me wrong, they definitely did. As I'm sure. If you're a parent listening to this, you may give your son instructions and they don't follow through. I did the same. If you're a kid going through the process and your parents are giving your instructions and you hate it, I've been there, trust me. But I learned a lot through just this process. Communicating with coaches, communicating with adults, marketing myself and deciding things for myself where I was going to commit to school. Those are big decisions. Like, I'm not going to hide it and say, these are small little decisions. And so you learn a lot about yourself through this process. And so I'm definitely going to be talking about how to gain confidence through this process. That way you can crush it. But I just want to preface this by saying, like, this confidence that you learn in talking to coaches and going through this process, it doesn't just apply to the small world of recruiting, it applies to the rest of your life. So take this stuff seriously. Don't just go, oh, Trenton's full of crap. Like, he's just rambling on. Which I don't get me wrong, I do. But I say take this stuff seriously because if you take it seriously, it will translate to more than just recruiting. It will translate to the rest of your life. So confidence in your recruiting. So let's go into it. And I say this because again, I was there as a 16 year old talking to coaches for the first time. I was so freaking nervous, feeling the heartbeat in my throat. I'm just like, I am even now. But you get confident. The number one way you can get confident is just more reps. Just like in football. Just like in any sport, the more you do something, the more you're going to be confident in it. And talking to coaches is no different. The more phone calls I had, the more camp conversations, the more in person visits, the more I was like, okay, this is just a normal conversation. Is it a little different from me talking to my friend? Yes. But like, ultimately they're, they're really not that different from you. And so there's three things, and if you're coming from my email, I just talked about these, but I'll break them down deeper. There's three things that allow you to get more confident about talking to coaches, and this is mostly talking to coaches specifically, but you could probably translate to this, to anything. So number one is mindset. Now this is the way that you think of things. That's kind of what it is. And so mindset is trying to change the way that you think about talking to college coaches. Because most kids, and the way I thought about it, you may think about this differently, but it seemed like such a big deal to me. And I mean, it is a big deal. You're presented with this huge opportunity to talk to coach, you want to play college football. Some of the coaches that you see, especially if they're at the FBS level, you see them on tv, you think of it, you idolize it. And so it seems like such this huge deal with such large consequences if you mess it up. And it's your one opportunity and I ask you to reframe it, because this is kind of what happened to me, is I started to realize. And you realize this slowly. I think it's just kind of more of a slow realization. But if you can learn from this lesson, you'll just have this realization way earlier. Like if you're 15, 16, watching this right now and you have this realization, you will have much better conversations, you'll crush it. Because like 15, 16 year olds do not think like this. These coaches are much more like you than you may think. You can get down to like just the hobbies that they have. I mean, they probably like football a lot, which they do their entire job is that they probably like the same things as you because again, football is their life, just like it is for you. And then if you tie that to the fact that most of them played college football, thus they had to go through the same process that you went. They were also those nervous 15, 16, 17, 18 year olds going through the same process. And they feel for you like they're not. A coach is not going to make fun of you because you're nervous or judge you necessarily. But having that reframe, realizing that will allow you to be more confident because they understand you. They get you. Like, you're not talking to someone who doesn't get you. You're talking to someone who probably gets you the most because they've been in your shoes. And so just realizing that hopefully that's already put off a bunch of weight off your shoulders when you're talking to coaches. Because I know it did for me and it slowly did over time as I realized that more now. The second thing is knowledge. So this is, this is the thing that people always confuse. Like they're like, all I need is to know how I talked in the last video about tactics versus principles. You can go check that out if you want, but knowing how definitely helps. It helps repair you. So that way you have things in case you kind of lose yourself. Things like questions to ask, the general flow of the conversation, how the conversation should go. If you know that stuff ahead of time, it makes the conversation easier because you're not just guessing out there. But by no means is it going to fully save you because if you're still super nervous, you might, you know, still lose the kind of yourself in that conversation and not be able to really use that knowledge to your full ability. So that takes me to the third thing, which is reps. Reps. Reps. Reps. Reps. Like anything else, reps in any sport is a big part of it because the more reps you get, the more confident that you get with it, the more that you get a feel for things. And so reps are a huge thing. You're able to get that confidence. And so I definitely recommend you try and practice these conversations without a college coach there. Just run through certain things, whether you're talking to your parent or even a teammate or whatever it might be. But reps are a huge thing. And of course the best reps are actual college coach reps. So the more you talk to college coaches, the more you're going to get more acquainted with this stuff, just like it was for me. So those three things, mindset, knowledge and reps. If you have those three things, you'll feel much more confident when talking to college coaches and it will lead to much better conversations. And again, that can be applied to anything else really. It doesn't really just stick with talking to college coaches, but it does give you the confidence and it helps a lot with that. So again, I think those, even if you dial in those three things and you get the reps and everything, it will translate further than just recruiting or translate to the rest of your life because you're going to have more conversations where you get nervous, you're going to have interviews, you're going to be, I mean, you're going to have conversations with other adults and having those nerve wracking conversations. Now, as you know, being a little bit younger, it's going to be a lot easier when you grow up and you do it as well. So hopefully this helped. If you got something from this, be sure to subscribe, follow like this. And also if you're wanting more direct help, then be sure to check out scholarship accelerator where you can book a call. We can talk about if it makes sense for you to work with us or not. And if not, no worries. We'll still point you in the best direction. So talk to you soon. Peace.