Mental Strength: The Game Within the Game
This has the potential to be either a very long post, or better yet, the first of many posts regarding the mental aspect of playing the game of baseball. Anyone who has ever stepped onto the diamond would have to admit that it is not only a difficult game to play, but it is a game that is nearly impossible to master.
Take a survey of your players and coaches sometime, asking them the question: "By percentage, how much of playing the game of baseball would you suggest is mental?"
I asked this question of my team this past spring, and received answers varying from "50%" to "75%" to even as high as "90%". The point of the question isn't as much to get the answer correct. I'm not sure anyone really knows what percentage of the game is mental. Yet, we ALL know that at least some portion of it is, and it is likely greater than we think.
The main point of that question, however, is actually the follow-up question. Let's say that we agree that 50% of the game is mental. In saying that, we are saying that half of your success in the game of baseball is going to be dependent on how well you handle all of the mental aspects of the game... how well you handle failure, adversity, pressure, anxiety, stress, nerves, anger, frustration, errors, mistakes... etc.
Now – IF that is in fact true – if 50% of the game is mental, then how much time are we devoting in our practices to prepare our players in the mental game? What kinds of skills are we giving our players to work on strengthening their responses to difficult and frustrating situations that we know will always occur in every baseball game?
I'll admit, I spent several years not even considering this at all. And even after realizing that the mental game was important, I still didn't know how to apply it and certainly had no means to implement it into our practices. That's what this post is about.
Dave Hilton, on Brian Cain's Peak Performance Podcast, defined the mental game in this way:
"When we talk about the mental game, we are talking about the mental skills and routines you need in order to be able to take your physical skills to their full potential while under pressure."
I love that wording... "mental skills and routines." Yes, you can practice and build mental skills (in your daily team practices), and the way this is done is by teaching the power of routines.
Every successful person in the world knows and understands the power of having and developing routines that feed your mind, body and soul in positive ways. We all have habits, and our habits are either giving us LIFE and ENERGY; helping us to succeed and grow and get better in every situation we face... or our habits are sucking the life out of us, slowing us down and gradually killing our spirit and our ability to deal with situations effectively.
Before we talk about how to create routines to practice mental skills, let's consider some of the situations that occur in a baseball game that players sometimes have a difficult time dealing with. Can you think of any? Here are some that immediately come to my mind:
striking out
popping out
grounding out
making any kind of out
making a defensive error
giving up a home run while pitching
walking a batter
an umpire making a bad call against you
opposing team heckling or mouthing off
These are some of the most common situations that occur in a baseball game which require mental toughness and more importantly, mental conditioning and skill in order to be able to deal with them and move on and overcome the adverse situation. What follows is how I went about teaching mental routines to our players this past spring and how we practiced them in order to build the skills needed whenever we were faced with one of the situations above.
The FIRST thing I did was ask them this question: Why are we always surprised whenever one of those things (above) happens?
Think about that. How often do you make an out in your at-bat? On average, more often than you are safe. How often does an umpire make a bad call? How often do errors occur?
ALL THE TIME, right!? Those things are part of the game, and if anything in the game is certain, it is that these things WILL happen. So why do we act like we're so surprised when these things occur?
You see, it is possible for you to teach yourself that failure and adversity is to be expected in the game but that doesn't mean you have to take it in stride and be okay with it. You don't have to like it; the key is how you respond to it. I think this is why some people react to failure the way they do – with extreme anger, throwing or slamming equipment – because they don't want to appear as though they are "okay" with failure. They are competitors, which means they expect to succeed EVERY time. There's nothing wrong with that. But the realist in me says, any reasonable person certainly knows deep down inside that they are not going to bat 1.000, they are not going to throw no-hitters and shutouts every time they pitch and go undefeated every season. There IS going to be failure. We know it's coming.
So, the first thing we have to do is recognize that it WILL happen. Once we embrace that acknowledgement, then we ask: Okay, since you know something bad or frustrating is going to occur at some point, how are you going to respond to it when it happens?
What's your plan? What's your routine going to be for dealing with the frustration, flushing it and moving on to the next pitch or the next play?
I had our players write it out. It was their homework during the first week of the season. I wanted them to think about and write out two different routines that they would use: the first was their pre at-bat routine (and pre-pitch routine for pitchers); the second was their "red light" routine.
Their "red light" routine was what they would do when they recognized their frustration level was high. Basically, we want to play the game in the "green light" zone. When everything is green, everything is going well. But sometimes things don't go as well – "yellow light." Our goal is to be able to recognize when we are getting "RED." And "red light" means STOP.
So the first part of our routine, when we've just experienced an extremely frustrating occurrence, is to PRESS PAUSE. Whatever your first instinct is... whatever your default, autopilot reaction to the situation is... PAUSE it and choose not to go there.
An action you can take to practice pressing pause is take a deep breath. That deep breath is used to "release" the bad thing that just happened.
Then, secondly, do something physical: adjust your batting gloves, or take off your hat and wipe the sweat, or clean the dirt off the pitching rubber, or any number of small, physical acts. This takes your mind off the bad thing that just occurred and gets you ready to focus on the next pitch.
Finally, the third step is to take another deep breath, and this one is taken while your eyes are fixed on a focal point. This second deep breath is a refocusing breath (the first one was a "releasing" breath). The deep breath on a focal point helps your mind to slow everything down and focus on one thing... the next pitch, the next play.
Now what we have is an actual routine to help us be mentally stronger while playing the game. In the same way we have fundamentals and drills to help us become better fielders, and we have bullpen routines to help us become better pitchers, and we have batting practice to help us become better hitters... we now have a routine that strengthens our minds and our focus while performing those physical skills of the game.
But just like bullpens, batting practice and ground balls... the mental routines we have are just as important to implement into our practice plans and drills. If we truly believe that as much as 50% of the game is mental, meaning that it requires mental strength in order to succeed, then we should probably devote at least 10% or so of our practice plan to mental reps and building mental skills, don't you think?
We used a couple different methods in our practice plans to rep our mental routines. During live BP, we implemented the "red light" routine as one of our stations, and also our pre at-bat routine as another of the stations. We had our pitchers throw shadow bullpens, to imagine various situations that could (or would) come up, which they would need to be ready to respond to. They would practice their pre-pitch routines and their "red light" routines in those bullpens.
The "mental" reps in our practices were taken seriously. We wanted every player to recognize how valuable it was for them to be able to instinctively respond to frustrating things with their mental strength routine. In the same way they had learned to instinctively respond to every other "physical" aspect of the game, they would now have the tools to be able to practice and grow in their mental game.
I will write more posts about how to instill the value of the mental game in your players and how to teach it and rep it with them. If you were to ask me, "What was the biggest focus of your coaching this past season? What hitting advice, pitching advice, or fielding advice did you give more than anything else?" I would say without hesitation that it was mental preparation and mental approach.
So many players have a picture-perfect swing, but their approach during the at-bat, their mental preparation while in the hole and on-deck, and their responses after missed pitches or bad calls, are weak and unprepared. They think hitting is only about swinging the bat.
Put it this way, if you go to a hitting instructor and all the coaching is solely on your swing and mechanics, you are only getting half your money's worth, because that coach is only teaching you 50% of how to be a great hitter.
Do you want to have a great swing? Or do you want to be a great hitter? Being a great hitter involves being mentally prepared, mentally strong, understanding "approach," etc. I could go on forever on this topic. More to come!
By the way, this is not just important for players. Coaches, dads, moms are also wise to create routines for how you will press pause, release the bad stuff (deep breath), and refocus... BEFORE we give way to default, autopilot reactions and say, shout or do something that we will likely regret later. Pass it on... 😉