02/14/2023
⚾️⚾️⚾️ How’s Your Mental Game? 🥎🥎🥎
It’s easy to spend all our time on physical skills like hitting or fielding but, as the great sage once said, half the game is 90% mental. We need to give our players tools to persevere in a game where a 70% failure rate is pretty darn good.
Here’s one quick tool.
When a player is getting frustrated, I like to ask them to name 5 things they can see. This is a shortened version of the 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding technique which can be used for anxiety or stress.
To oversimplify it, when a person is experiencing strong emotions, one way to get the mind back under control is to focus on the physical senses. This allows your mind to slow down the emotional side of your brain and get it back in sync with the logical, sensory side of your brain. A neuroscientist would cringe at that explanation but it’s simple and even very young players can understand it.
In sports though, time is short and we can’t always go through the full 5-4-3-2-1 technique.
So, have them step back and name 5 things they can see, quietly under their breath. It will take them a few seconds at most and they can repeat it as many times as possible. To the outsider, it will look like they are just refocusing and gathering themselves… which they are.
I use this with players when they take a few bad hacks in a row or miss the zone on consecutive pitches and start to get frustrated. This works best when done right as the frustration starts to set in… think of it as the “don’t let molehills become mountains” from a mental perspective.
Tools like these are just as important as learning the correct hitting or pitching mechanics.
I offer private lessons in the Peaster / Weatherford area. I focus on pitching (baseball only), hitting, fielding, and catchers for baseball and softball. You can book a lesson through the Book Now button on my page.
