With spring comes the end of winter sports and the kick off of baseball throughout the country. How can athletes prepare for the onslaught and sheer length that is 162 games, maybe more if they are lucky? Here are my thoughts to make tackling the mental approach for the long haul more effective.
- Find fun and be yourself. The best opportunity to not only perform optimally but to bring that level of performance day in and day out is to enjoy the process involved with training, preparing, and performing. Find what about the game most intrigues you, how fortunate you are, and explore how you can give yourself more enjoyment. Do this while being your true self. We are most happy when we can just be us and do what we love to do.
- Have clear goals. Don’t burn yourself out with monotony. Challenge yourself in different ways and continue to grow as an athlete and human. This will keep you motivated, build confidence with every goal you attain, and provide learning opportunities for you to understand how you best improve.
- Balance long-term (LT) and short-term (ST) mindsets. There are pros and cons to thinking in the LT and ST. The skill is knowing when to leverage each one. Thinking in the LT is beneficial when you need the big picture or the culmination of your efforts to motivate you. I also harp of leveraging LT thinking when coming off setbacks. At the beginning of the season, you have such a long time to adjust and improve. At the end, you can rely on a season of successful performances to help bulldoze through ST failures. ST mindsets is where athletes should live! ST thinking provides more sense of control, clearer performance feedback, and allows you to focus more on the process of performing every second. Win every play.
- Manage your energy. Our physical and mental energy is a finite resource. Find ways to recreationally recharge, doing things you enjoy and potentially could provide active recovery. I challenge athletes to explore and incorporate long-term energy control strategies like autogenic training, progressive relaxation, meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, and imagery training.
- Take a snapshot of how opening day feels. I remind athletes to take inventory of how opening day is so they can go back and use that experience as fuel when they need it. Opening day is exciting, motivating, full of possibility and positivity. Shouldn’t every day be this way?
- Build on successes. All sports, not just baseball, are so stat-heavy that we judge others and ourselves on batting averages, ERAs, OB%, and first-pitch strikes. When we do not fulfill these categories adequately we tend to see our performance and the day as a failure. What is ignored is all the things you did right that day. Most likely 96% of your tasks you completed with flying colors. Don’t ignore it.
- Connect with those around you. It is a long season. Everyone needs others to lean on not just in times of stress and struggle but social support and the sense of connection within a team actually improves everyone’s ability to perform better.