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Baseball Compete Confidence Courage Flow State Focus Imagery Mindfulness Mindset Preparation

Hitting the reset button

Do you ever find yourself unable to shake off the mistakes you make in games? Maybe it’s a strikeout at the plate, and you take that at bat and the field with you. Or maybe it’s an error you make in the field and it snowballs into two or three errors. While we’ll never be able to eliminate mistakes from our games, we can learn to reset from them and respond in confidence. It’s this ability to reset and respond that separates the most consistent baseball players from everybody else.

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The Power of Imagery

One of the best ways you can improve your performance as a baseball player without even having to move a muscle is by practicing imagery. Here's what it is and how you can use it. Imagery is a practice that involves mentally creating images of ourselves executing different skills and tasks. It's like daydreaming on purpose. It's intentional, detail-oriented and requires no physical effort. Meaning, it's a great way to get extra mental reps.

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Self-talk that works

Our minds always seem to have something to say, don’t they? In baseball, we notice that our minds are constantly talking to us, whether we want them to or not. Sometimes what they have to say helps us and sometimes it doesn't. Regardless, we call this internal dialogue self-talk. Now most self-talk is automatic, meaning we don’t have control over it. And this automatic, uncontrollable self-talk is most often evaluative. Full of judgment on how well or poorly our minds think we stack up to everyone else. And as I mentioned, sometimes it helps us but many times it doesn’t.

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Distance From Thoughts

One of the things that you can do as an athlete to focus more effectively and ultimately perform better is to create some distance between yourself and your thoughts. Let me explain what I mean by that.

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You Won’t Always Feel Confident

You hear it all the time as a baseball player. You just gotta have confidence. When you ask a player what the most important mental skill is, confidence is probably the most common answer, and it's true. It's incredibly important. But most of us don't take the time to ask: Where does confidence come from? What does it really mean to be confident? And how can I build confidence that lasts? But as simply as possible, confidence comes from evidence. If we want to be confident baseball players then we have to put the work in. And then we have to go out and play good baseball. We need evidence that we can do it if we want to feel confident.

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Process>Outcome

The easiest trap to fall into as an athlete is prioritizing the outcome over the process. So making things like wins and stats and awards the central focus over the act of playing the game and doing what it takes to play the game well. And going after accomplishments isn't a bad thing. We should want to be good at what we do and take pride in that. We like to be recognized for being good at what we do but when we make that the main thing, we put both our performance and enjoyment at risk. And why is this? Much of it is because we're sacrificing a task relevant focus. A focus on what we want to do in the immediate moment. Outcomes lying the future outside of our control.

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In the Now Pt. 2

Now, we know peak performance happens in the present moment. But how do we make sure that we're actually focusing on the present moment? One way we can do this is by creating and using a refocus routine. This is a routine that we can use to help us shift our focus back to the present moment when we notice that our minds have become distracted either during practice or competition.

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In the Now Pt. 1

Peak performance happens in the present moment, in the here and now. When you're competing in baseball, the only thing that matters is this pitch. This is challenging. Umpires make bad calls, other teams trip us, our teammates make mistakes, you make mistakes. The difference between the players who overcome this adversity and those who don't is how quickly they can refocus to the present moment.

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Confident Action

So I’m reading this book called The Confidence Gap by Russ Harris and it's a fantastic book for anyone to read, athlete or non athlete, who struggles with self-confidence. And in the book he discusses this made up rule that we all seem to be following at times which is where our mind tells us, “Once I feel more confident I can do blank or once I feel less anxious or less worried or less afraid I can do blank.” He also brings up two different definitions of the word confidence. The first being, a feeling of certainty or assurance and the second being, an act of trust to reliance.

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Let It Happen

High performers have high expectations and as they should. But sometimes we hold on to these expectations too tightly and this can really hurt performance. When we're really good at something because we’ve worked really hard at it and we've done really well in the past, we expect to be really good in the future. And inherently, there's no problem with that, but problems do arise when we think we have to play to a certain level of performance. I have to hit 350 this year. I have to be a starter.

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Be On a Mission

If we want to take our baseball careers as far as we possibly can and we have to be on a mission. Your mission is made up of your reasons for playing the game and wanting to play it at a high level. It provides us with purpose, direction and intensity. It reminds us why we're competing in such a difficult game when we're faced with challenges. Without a mission, we're really just going through the motions and we break when the game is at its toughest.

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Fear of Failure

One of the biggest things holding us back from competing at a high level is both the unwillingness to experience fear and the unwillingness to experience failure. And this isn't irrational or unreasonable because failure and all the thoughts and feelings that come with it really do suck and anyone that says they don't or that they're easy to respond to is kidding themselves.

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