Month: August 2010

Posted on

How to be a true baseball player

What does it mean to be a true baseball player today? Whats expected of a player today has changed much since when Mantle and Mays were playing. For one thing baseball players make a whoooooole lot more money now than they did then. Think about it. The minimum salary for a Major league contract is $400,000.(thanks to the players strike in 1995). I don’t care who you are…..that’s a lot of money.  But regardless of what level you play at, to be a true baseball player there are a few qualities that you MUST have.

1. Make the right choices
A true baseball player is aware of his ability to utilize the power of choice. He understands that it is HIS choices that determine what he gets out of baseball regardless of circumstances. If he is injured, he can CHOOSE to press on. He can CHOOSE to be patient and nurture his body with the right foods so he may heal properly. He can Choose to get enough rest.  A true player knows that he can CHOOSE to fight even if his team is losing by 10 runs. He can Choose to be a leader, or do the right things of the field. A fake player hasn’t the slightest clue of his ability to choose what he thinks and feels. That’s why he gets beat.

2. Be willing to fail
A true player can take failure and learn from it. I mean truly learn from it, and become stronger. No longer does he shy away from failure, even more importantly, he doesn’t get mad, complain or develop excuses when things don’t go his way between the lines. He’s too focused on making an adjustment, on finding a way to succeed, so he doesn’t waste his energy on any kind of negative emotion.  A true player competes even when failure seems likely.

3. Be Confident
Being confident, especially during a long season, is hard to be on a daily basis. It’s just a hard fact of this game that there will be days were you may feel like you just don’t have it. But how you react to your lack of confidence is important too. Can you do it with the determination that you will transcend your self-doubt? That you will show up and leave it all on the field. Confidence is expressed through how we think, feel, and also the words we use. Confidence is adopting a determined posture and moving forward even if failure seems unlikely. This is the only way to build courage and the ability to persist.

4. Knows how to Dream
Part of making your dreams come true is having discipline with how you think, or more specifically the content of your thoughts. Literally, the pictures you see in your mind dictate what you will experience in the future.  A true player is aware that his present circumstances are the outcome of his thoughts he has had in the past. He knows that through practice, he can control his mind to think only about success (hitting a line drive up the middle) and not failure ( I can’t strike out here, I hope I don’t make an error!) This kind of concentration does take time, but the best players have it.

5. Knows how to re-channel his sexual energy
A true player doesn’t take his sexual energy for granted. Through practice, he has learned to transmute his sexual energy into his performance on the field. He doesn’t waste this powerful energy and leave it on a level of lust. Simply put…he doesn’t waste time on his laptop:) Napoleon Hill has said,

“Sex desire is the most powerful of human desires. When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, will-power, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times. So strong and impelling is the desire for sexual contact that men freely run the risk of life and reputation to indulge it. When harnessed, and redirected along other lines, this motivating force maintains all of its attributes of keenness of imagination, courage, etc., which may be used as powerful creative forces in literature, art, or in any other profession or calling, including, of course, the accumulation of riches.”

6. Love the game
A true player has learned to truly love this game. As a full-grown adult, he plays this game exactly the same way he played when he was a child. Though he may be getting paid to play a child’s game, on a good day, when the smell of freshly cut grass and the sound of the ball of a bat makes him feel like he can play this game forever…..for free even, he feels thankful for being a baseball player. It’s this gratitude that can pull him through the difficult times of the season. The long bus rides, cheap hotels, slumps, losing streaks. A true player lives in the moment.

Posted on

Increasing your confidence in 20 minutes

Confidence. Just say that word in your head. What does it mean to you? For me it means believing that I am able to perform up to my expectations toward the task at hand. Now for baseball, confidence is as valuable as gold….no forget gold. It’s as valuable as a diamond because in the beginning, for a lot of players, our confidence is about as shiny as black coal. It takes a lot of refinement for the coal to turn into diamonds. The other reason I have compared confidence with diamonds is well diamonds are a girls best friend, and its true, chicks dig the long ball.

So where does this confidence come from. I’m sure you have been told that confidence comes from success, but havent you also heard success comes from confidence? So which is it? It’s both, and neither at the same time. The best way to have confidence is simple. Create it.

If I put 100,000 dollars on the table and said, I will give you this money if you can make yourself shed a tear, do you think you could? Of course you could!!!! So why would the emotion of confidence be any different. One of the biggest misconceptions about sports and competition is that, we can’t choose how and what to feel. The truth is you can! By understanding that the images in your head have a direct connection to the emotions you feel. Picture yourself being successful, you’ll feel good. Imagine yourself booting a ground ball. You’ll feel bad. It’s actually a pretty simple process.

Remember, every thought you have ever had, every feeling you have ever felt was a choice, whether a conscious or unconscious one.

I bet you my bottom dollar that if you could see what was going on inside of Derek Jeter’s head you would see images of him succeeding not failing. There is no reason why you can’t do the same.

So how can one develop the ability to choose to become confident consistently? Practice.

Like batting practice, or fielding ground balls, you need enough repetitions.

Get in a comfortable environment, and sit in a comfortable spot. I recommend not laying down. You want your mind and senses sharp.

First, I would like you to go into the past and think of three separate instances where you succeeded in baseball. Hitting a game winning home run, striking out the side, or simply moving the guy over from second or a simple line drive to the opposite field. It can be anything as long it was success related. Now go through these three separate events one at a time. Picture the  uniform you were playing in. Was it  a day game or night game? Were there scouts in the stands, so on and so on. Now you have used your sense of sight to replay this event. Bring in your other senses. Was it cool or hot outside? Did the air smell clean? Bring in all of your senses until you are truly reliving the successful experience. See?!! Your brain doesnt know the difference from what it sees in its mind and what it sees in the physical world. You have basically convinced yourself that you have succeeded yet again. This will take some practice, but with time you will feel and see great improvement.

Hank Aaron attributed much of his success to visualization. He found a way to put himself in the vibration of success by seeing it happen in his mind. He was a success before the game even started!

The second exercise, I would like you to perform is take three instances where you failed. A time when you struck out in the bottom of the 9th, booted a ground ball, or walked in the tying run. Now as you go through this experience of failing, change the picture. Visualize yourself actually succeeding in this same situation. What would you have done differently? Imagine how good it feels to finally have done this the way you wanted it to happen. Use all of your senses again. This is one of the best ways of creating a new confident future for yourself, by simply re-creating your past by changing it from teaching you to fear failing again to reminding you that you have already succeeded because you have seen and experienced it in your mind!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, the last exercise. Take all the images you have collected in the previous two exercises and project them into the future. Imagine nothing but success in your future and it will come. These three exercises should take no longer than 20 minutes.

Sitting down and using your mind may not sound like the most exciting thing to do but think about this. Baseball is 90% mental. Is mastering the mental game worth enough to do some mental exercises everyday for you? Remember, part of baseball is failure; there is no way to control this, but what we can control is our reaction to it. By staying committed to doing whatever it takes to be a confident player, enough successes will come that the failure will be easier to except and can be used for positive motivation.