Mental Game Learning Lab

Train Your Mind

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BaseballCompeteConfidenceCourageFlow StateFocusImageryMindfulnessMindsetPreparation

Control What You Can Control

Control what you can and understand what you can’t. I’ll say it again, control what you can and understand what you can’t. This is such a tough task in baseball because there is so much that is outside of our control. In my own career, this was the hardest lesson that I had to learn. You can’t control the wins and losses. You can’t control the weather. You can’t control what the other team does. You can’t control the umpire’s decisions, and you can’t control your stats or whether or not you even get a hit.

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Have a Plan

Not enough athletes do this. They don't plan for when things go sideways in competition. Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” I'm saying that we need to plan for after we get punched in the mouth. For anything external that could go wrong like if the other team does something to upset you or if there's a bad call, bad weather or if you make a costly mistake.

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Focus on the Present Moment

In baseball, there’s countless, countless things to try to pull our attention away from our intent.  But our intent requires us to be in the present moment. Well that following through with our intent requires us to focus on the present moment, right?

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Practice Pressure

There’s a quote from the navy seals that says we don't rise to the occasion, we sink to our level of training. And I think this rings really true in sport as well. I noticed a lot with athletes, I myself was one of them, who put in a ton of work in training, but it just doesn't always seem to be translating into competition. And I think the biggest reason is that we don't practice the skill of competing under pressure enough.

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Know Your Why

Why do you play the game? Why did you begin playing the game? Every athlete that I've asked these questions to, whether it be baseball, softball, golf, you name it, has said something along the lines of: It's the complexity of it. Or it's the beauty of it. Or it's just the fact that you're taking a very difficult and nuanced activity and doing it really well. If you've been playing your sport since you were a kid you might not even completely understand why you’ve always loved it. You just knew it was really fun and you showed up and balled out every time.

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Pre-Game Nerves Pt. 3

If you’re someone that’s prone to having unwanted, elevated levels of nerves before competition, here's three ways that you can manage those.

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Pre-Game Nerves Pt. 2

So why does it sometimes seem like our pre-game nerves wreck our performance? Well it's not the nerves, it's not the importance of the game, and it's not the fact that we're being evaluated. It's our interpretation of all of it. It's the belief that the demand of competition outweigh our abilities to compete.

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Pre-Game Nerves Pt.1

The dreaded pre-game jitters. We've all probably experienced them before and they’ve probably wrecked our performance a time two. But I'm not convinced that it is the nerves that themselves that wreck our performance but it's more that we don't know what they are, why they happen, and how we can handle them.

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Show Up With Courage

This might sound a little crazy at first, but one thing that I think athletes should prioritize over being confident is being courageous. And again, I want to reiterate that being confident is incredibly important and it comes from being competent. But sometimes the athletes who are competent and who should be the most confident in their abilities really struggle from a lack of confidence and you see this a lot in athletes who overtrain or get really nervous before games or who seem to be perfectionistic and if any of these sound like you, you might be wondering how you can put in so much work and still doubt your abilities when game time rolls around.

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Confidence Breeds Confidence

In sports we talk a lot about the importance of being confident and confidence is incredibly important. The top competitors in the world are some of the most competent people in their abilities. But, sometimes we talk about confidence as if it's something that you can just muster up out of thin air and it's not.

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Stop Chasing Past Performances

Stop chasing your past performances. More often than not, when we have a really good game or a really good bat or a really good rep or whatever it might be, we tend to think that we have to follow it up with another performance that is just as good, if not better.

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Why Train the Mental Game?

If you’re an athlete and you’ve never done mental training before, you might be wondering what it is and how it helps. To put it simply, it is the development and strengthening of mental tools and strategies that help you perform your best.

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