The Competitive Spirit

"I wrote this book for all the new parents who need help raising their kids" When you become a parent, nobody hands you an instruction guide on how to be a good parent. You learn what you know from watching your parents, and that is not always a good thing, such was the case for me growing up. I had a wonderful mother, who was a great example of kindness, faith, and love. However, she could only form so much of my path on how to be a good father. I was a young boy that only had my father's examples to watch and learn from, which were not entirely the father that I wanted to be. Fortunately for me, I had my sports, and I had many great examples in coaches that would ultimately help to develop and form my future skills as a parent. My high school sweethearts' father who was also a high school baseball coach and a huge influence on how I wanted to raise my kids. Parenting is hard enough even when you have a great partner to help you raise your kids. Unfortunately for me, twice divorced with two separate sets of kids from each mother, I ultimately needed to figure out how to raise all six of my kids as a single dad. I wrote this book to help parents that may be in a similar situation of trying to figure it all out. Either with a great parent partner, or as a single parent, this book will help. My strategy and success in raising all six of my kids was to put them in competitive sports at a young age. Let's face it, we all want to raise "winning" kids, whether that be on the field, court or just to simply win at life. It's a constant struggle even more so today with all the uncertainty going on in the world. We need to help provide our kids with a solid foundation of security and belief in themselves that they can succeed! In this book I will focus on some critical concepts to help you succeed raising confident and successful kids. • Out-of-the-box ideas, learning new parenting techniques to give your kids the competitive edge. • Instilling the Three Pillars to succ

The greatest coaches in the world understand what winning truly is: a habit, a mindset, and an expectation. Knowing how to win means knowing how to prepare relentlessly for all foreseeable circumstances. It means striving for perfection through mind-numbing repetition. It means knowing how to look for solutions instead of excuses. And it means respecting the strengths of all opposition while having the confidence to face them head-on anyway. Let's stop pretending our responsibilities as parents, managers, and coaches are less than they truly are. Teaching others the skill of winning is one of the toughest jobs in the world, especially if you have little experience winning yourself, but it's not impossible.

JD Kinimaka is a successful father of six wonderful children. Four girls and two boys that have all been successful not only in sports, but in life. JD was born in Kauai, Hawaii and raised in Manhattan Beach, California. JD's whole life was centered around sports since the day he could basically walked. He had been groomed by his father, Joseph, to be a football player. JD always knew that he would play professional football and his whole life revolved around that goal. He received a full ride football scholarship to a University in Kansas. This, however, was his first experience with adversity. He had always heard that he was the "best" and he would go on to play Professional Football and at the beginning of the season, he was doing great. The coach filled his ears with praise and told him how lucky their school was to have him. JD became complacent and overconfident and no longer fought to maintain his position on the team. JD went from being the best thing he had ever seen to constantly having the coach yell at him and no longer motivating him. That was JD's demise and could no longer take the negative reinforcement, he got burnt out and unmotivated. Motivation is a tricky thing, some kids respond differently to different kinds of motivation. JD was angry with the coach and quit the team and gave up his scholarship his senior year, forcing him to leave college without his degree. He moved back to Hawaii and got into real estate with his father. With the birth of his first child, his whole focus changed in life to raising successful happy kids. He threw himself in to putting them through sports, coaching their teams and coaching high school football as an as defensive coordinator. It was at the high school that JD shared some of the "winning strategies" that you will read in this book that he not only instilled in his own children, but also some of his high school football players that eventually went on to play in the NFL.