Month: January 2012

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6 Traits of Successful Baseball Parents

How is it that baseball can teach us so many things? Who would of thought that the underlying philosophies can be applied to all facets of life? Now, I can’t help but be simply fascinated by the incredible experiences that people can share when they embrace the relationships, life lessons, obstacles, and other personal discoveries that baseball provides.

The “Art of Baseball Parenting”, is no different. Like baseball players, they are faced with their own challenges which is why the ability for baseball parents to face them effectively is a topic worth talking about. Let’s start with “6 Traits of successful baseball parents”.

The traits were gathered from emails of parents sharing their own philosophies! Don’t forget to comment below and tell us yours!

1. Measure against your own standards, not others– The expectations that you have set for your player/child should be specific to them and them only. Your player doesn’t need to be the best on the team. Only the best that he can be given his present level of capabilities. With this kind of approach, the best that he can be will continue to grow.

2.Know who you are- What is your purpose in life? Is it something worth dying for? Even living for? It’s important to live a purpose driven life. It’s the best way for young baseball players to see what it means to establish responsibility, accountability and leadership so that they can apply these principles as athletes.

3.Learn from those around you- Do you think the responsibility of your baseball player’s development lies solely within the hands of their coach or instructor? Absolutely not! You spend just as much time with your child on a daily basis if not more than their coach. Why not contribute? The right information is out there for you to utilize so that you can eventually provide baseball advice that helps!(especially at this site:)

Trust me. No one will care more about your child’s baseball development than you. Period.

4.  Focus on the process, not the outcome- Baseball is a game of failure. The sooner you are able to teach your player to learn to deal with failure as a “feed back mechanism” and as a way to make adjustment to find success in the future, the better off they will be. Be process oriented! How do you do this? Adopt this mind-set as your own in everything that you do. The positive influence will happen naturally.

5. Give your player freedom- There is no excuse for a player to ever feel pressure from their parents to succeed. The image that a parent should covey to their player should always be unconditional support. That’s it! Baseball is hard enough. Always strive to be a source of support, aspiration, and credible advice. These deeds will come back to you in ways that you can’t possibly imagine.

6. Be goal oriented- Have your own goals and aspriations. The more motivated you are about life and the opportunities that are prevalent wether you see them or not can teach players to view life in a similar fashion. Often times, we forget just how much of an influence we have on those around us. Let us not forget of our own innate leadership skills!

The more we can inspire, the better the results. Baseball players are contantly learning both on and off the field.

Lets make sure we teach them skills that will make them shine on the field!

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How to help your son become a better baseball player

Would you agree with this statement?

A baseball player’s development is never finished.

If you agree with this statement, continue reading. If you don’t, just go here.

When it comes to trying to understand what sets a successfull baseball player apart from players that are simply mediocre, or players that never truly reach their potential, you will find that every successful baseball player had been able to make the mental, emotional, and physical adjustments required to compete and succeed at the next level.
The players that fail to do so are eventually weeded out.

So is being a baseball player simply “the survival of the fittest?”

No, not at all.

Baseball is the survival of the “most positivly influenced”.

Let me explain.

During the process of a baseball player’s development, especially at the early stages, a player is developing certain habits and traits that will eventually influence their athletic abilities as well as emotional and mental habits. What’s important to realize is that these capabilities and habits are being learned through their environment and for the younger players, they are being learned from adults.

Are you a baseball parent? Great! Here is where you come in.

During the early stages of a baseball player’s development, they are either consciously or unconsciously observing the words and behaviors being demonstrated by their parents and coaches and are associateing it with being an “adult”.

So what does this mean?

It means, as a parent, you are 100X more influential in your son’s ability to be a better hitter, fielder, or pitcher than you could of possibly ever imagined.

It means that you can play the BIGGEST role in your baseball player/child’s carrer, providing them with the skills to overcome any challenges that baseball has to offer.

How so?

Imagine being in line at the grocery store with your family, and all you can think about is how long the wait is. You’re in disbelief about how long you have been waiting and it’s showing. You’re anxious, frustrated, and beyond irritated. Sounds familiar? As you are voicing your complaint, you don’t realize that your son is observing this lack of poise and before he even realizes it, he is adopting your behavior as his own assuming that this kind of behavior is acceptable.

I guess you could say, that this kind of behavior isn’t a big deal considering you’re just in a grocery store trying to buy your milk and eggs. But guess what? This lack of poise won’t cut it on the field.

The ability to be patient is what allows hitters to lay off of pitches in the dirt.

The ability to stay calm is what allows pitchers to continue to compete aggressivly despite any sort of adversity.

The ability to focus solely on what you “can” control(eg:Your breathing, emotional response, internal chatter) and off of things you “can’t”(eg:the wait of the line, bad drivers, weather, or bad umpires) is what separates the players that play more from the players that don’t

As a parent, as you show a lack of poise in the face of things you can not control , you are showing exactly how “not” to be a better baseball player.

You are your child’s full time baseball coach and trainer.

The second you are willing to leverage this role as an opportunity to help him develop while off the field, the quicker you will see results off it.

Choose to be the leader in your baseball family and you will find that this alone creates talent.

 

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A successful baseball player’s secret trait revealed

I’m about to tell you a little known secret that has been utilized in all works of life throughout the pursuit of happiness and success.

If you take advantage of this advice, there is no doubt in my mind that it will help you in the pursuit of a baseball scholarship, a professional baseball career, more playing time, better baseball exposure, college finances, scholarships and anything else you could pursue in the realm of turning baseball into a career for yourself or your child.

Are you ready for this “secret” trait?

It’s “FOCUS”

Wait, wait, I know what you’re probably thinking! “I already knew that” right?

But listen carefully, I don’t mean focus as in ,” having the discipline and motivation to stick with a particular task until completion”. What I mean is this…..

What you focus on will MAGNIFY in your life as you give it more attention. The more you focus on opportunities, the more opportunities will seem to appear in your life and more importantly, you will be able to leverage these new “opportunities” which you would have missed had you not had it as a “focus”.

So how do this help you as a baseball player or parent?!

Do you need a scholarship to help pay for college?

Do you need a mentor who can help give the right kind of baseball advice?

Do you need a different baseball environment?

Regardless of your role, everyone in the baseball community has certain needs and desires that they would like to be meet. We all have goals, the trouble is, at times we find oursleves struggling to accomplish these goals, or getting these needs met.

Fortunately, the solution is almost always present and can bee seen, given the right perspective!

Here is a perfect example below

The interesting thing is, the opportunity that can help provide you with these things is out there probably right in front of you staring you in the face. The trick is to adjust your perspective so that you can see these opportunities and take advantage of them while they’re still present.

Baseball will give both players and parents every opportunity to succeed but it will always be up to the individual to take action and make something happen.

The questions, “are you ready to take action”?!

Can you think of any “Moon Walking Bear Opportunities” that you may be missing out on?

Tell me below. I would love to hear your thoughtS and bounce ideas!

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The greatest baseball advice you will ever receive

With this new year beginning and bringing about the new baseball season, I want to introduce the player/parents/readers to a very interesting idea and philosophy which l will share with a story.

This is a story about courage, responsibility, faith, and most importantly about losing any sort of entitlement about life circumstances.

Almost ten years ago, motivational speaker Hal Elrod was driving with his girl friend to his home in Fresno, CA after given a speech that ended with his very first standing ovation. He had just turned twenty and was very much enjoying his early success. So much so that he thought of calling his parents to share the news but realized it was almost midnight and didnt want to wake them. These were the last thoughts going through Hal’s mind after a car coming from the other direction collided with his car head on. They both were traveling at 70 mph.

The driver had been hanging out at a bar and was only slightly intoxicated but that was enough from him to think that the highway was was the off-ramp.

Hal’s mustang collided with the man’s Chevy and though Hal’s airbags protected him his car was pushed into oncoming traffic. Hal’s side door was hit by another vehicle, crushing is pelvic bone, shattering his elbow, and smashing the bones in his eye socket into pieces which left this eye hanging loosely from it’s socket. The celling of Hal’s vehicle had buckled and sliced a V from the front of his skull to the back of his head.

When the paramedics arrived on the scene, the “Jaws of life” tool was used to tear the roof back to get to him. Hal started spewing large quantities of blood. It just so happened that the car had been keeping him alive. Hal has such a large hole where his femur punctured through that the pressure from the car door was keeping him from bleeding to death.

Throughout the race to the hospital, Hal had flat-lined on more than one occasion.

6 days later he had finally woken up from a coma induced sleep.

An average student through out high school, Hal had only spent one year at a junior college before dropping out. After starting out a refurbished career in sales and realizing it was more conducive to his personality, he found himself making 6 figures at an annualized rate.

At some point in his career he had learned about a philosophy called the “5 minute rule” from one of his sales mentors.

The mentor had told Hal:” You are going to have customers who aren’t going to buy from you. Some might be rude to you and cut your appointments short. You are going to have days where you aren’t going to reach your goals. And it’s okay to be negative at times. But not for more than 5 minutes. You’ve got to live by the 5 minute rule. Complain, moan, vent, pout, get it out of your system, do whatever you have to do. But just for 5 minutes. Beyond that, there is no point dwelling on the situation. Instead put 100% of your energy into something you can control. What can you do now? How can you move forward?

A few weeks after regaining consciousness  and his memory in emergency care, Hal remembers calling upon this advice and experience to help him adjust to this traumatic experience. Hal has later been quoted as saying” I very quickly came to the realization that I had to accept what happened to me. And while I felt plenty of negative emotion about the accident before that realization, after I had that thought, my feelings around it disappeared almost over night.”

Hal realized that there was zero benefit in focusing on things that have already happened to him, so by focusing his energy on what he can do to turn this experience into something positive and a lesson, he was able to overcome this absolutely life-changing experience.

Playing baseball will undoubtedly serve us our own obstacles. It will probably not come in the form of a traumatic accident such as Hal’s but it will force us to come to grips with things that are beyond our control.

Injuries, bad coaches, and failure will always be there to test our own ability to press on.

If you can think of an obstacle right now, just tell yourself you have only 5 minutes left to feel sorry for yourself, after that, your job is to come up with one thing that can be learned from this experience, and one thing that you can do now in this moment to change things for the better.

It’s impossible to fail if you choose to never give up, and the opportunity to demonstrate that truth begins now.

The sooner you learn this the sooner you can apply it in the game of baseball.