HOW TO BE MORE CONFIDENT IN BASEBALL
In this post I'll be talking about how you can be more confident in baseball and play to your potential more consistently.
Confidence seems to be something that just comes and goes as it pleases, right?
It's like, you just never know when it's gonna show up and when you least expect it, it's going to just simply disappear off the face of the earth and you don't know what to do, or how to gain it back.
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We do know that when we are playing well and playing at our best, lack of confidence is NOT an issue. So from my experience and from the way I understand confidence, it's more tightly intertwined with your mindset.
How you think about things and where you place your focus. So for example, one of the common things or one of the mental skills is to think process over outcome. What does this mean?
Process Over Outcome is caring more about the process that produces the outcome than the outcome itself. We, of course, care what we want to achieve and the result that we want, but in order to get it, we gotta focus back on the process, right?
So, I believe that confidence is simply where you place your focus. If you're focusing too much on the result, then you're letting the result determine whether your confidence is up or down. So, if you're a results based thinker, results based mindset, poor result equals chipping away at the confidence, two poor results, three, 0 for 4, 0 for 5, 1 for 10, 1 for 20.
This type of thing chips away at your confidence until eventually you have none, and now you're in what you call a slump.
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Okay? So again, its results based thinking that takes your confidence on this roller coaster ride. So how do we master, how do we create more confidence for ourselves all the time?
Now, I hear some people out there talk about how confidence has gotta come from results. Confidence has to come from all these things. People have their theories. But I believe that as a human being, you have every right to walk out on that field, confident, no matter how good you were before, no matter how much experience you have, there's no reason why you shouldn't walk around on this earth being confident, okay?
DO NOT let anybody tell you otherwise.
There's a difference between walking around with arrogance, thinking that you deserve something, thinking that somebody owes you something that's different. But you have every right to walk around with the confidence in your ability to get better, your ability to improve, your ability to develop skills through hard work and effort.
That is where your confidence must exist in order for you to be able to be more confident on a regular basis. So, in other words, thing, focusing on the things that you can't control is going to really affect your confidence day in and day out by focusing on the things that you can control and then actually going out and controlling those things, that is going to give you a sense of confidence. So I was a player who was constantly on the ups and downs, okay?
I rode the highs were incredibly high, which is why I had the success that I had, and which is why I did as well as I did, uh, at the lower levels and even a little bit in pro ball. My lows were extremely low. And which would, you know, at the end of the year as it balances out, my batting average, for example, would be, obviously its somewhere in the middle.
So if I'm hitting, you know, .320 for one month, which I did several times, then the next month I could hit .150 and I'm gonna end up being somewhere in the middle, maybe .275, .250, .260, something like that.
So it's about minimizing those lows by understanding confidence where it comes from and how to place your focus in the right place to keep that confidence up. The way that I felt most confident was because of the way I prepared, Okay? So preparation is a big key to confidence.
If you prepare properly or the best way that you think, uh, you know, is gonna help you be ready for the game, then there's a lot of confidence that can come from that, right? So there's different types of confidence. Sure, you can go out and not have had a bad game yesterday and still come out and be confident.
Be confident in the process, be confident that you've controlled the things that you can control to prepare you for today. Okay? Then there's another type of confidence, the type of confidence that comes from when you actually produce results from that process and from that confidence. Okay? So there's different layers of it, I guess you could think, Uh, I guess we could say, Um, is that yes, once you've achieved results from having confidence in your ability, then that confidence grows to something greater, right?
It, if you think about it correctly, you know that, okay, because I have confidence in my ability, I create results, good results give me confidence that my initial process is working, therefore, stay with that process, Okay? Confidence in your ability. You may go, oh for three, oh for four, but your abilities stay the same on that day. We gotta understand that this is a game and games are meant to be lost and won. One doesn't exist without the other.
You can't win without the opportunity to lose. You can't lose without the opportunity to win. So this is what makes up, uh, you know, this great game of baseball. And the, the way this game is designed is, is designed to teach you life. It's truly what I believe. This game is designed to give you a crash course in life lessons. And boy did it do that for me. Of course, me being so stubborn didn't learn or realize this until my career.
Was already over. Uh, but once that happened, that's what led me to ultimately being a coach. Um, and I absolutely love, uh, being a coach and helping you guys develop and become the best player that you can possibly be and avoid the mistakes that I made. So, let's do a little recap. Um, you know, again, confidence comes from where you place your focus. If you're focusing on results, those results, cuz it's baseball, like I said, it's a game. It's a round ball, round bat. You're gonna miss your spot quite a bit. And if you're focused on every miss, then your confidence is gonna, is gonna fluctuate with that, with each miss, and there's gonna be a lot of misses, okay?
So understand that, that the swing, have confidence in your swing. Have confidence in your balance. Have confidence in your approach mentality, You know, have confidence and, and think back to all the times that you have had success.
You know, if you've played for a little while, you've probably had some success, even if it was just for a day or two, you know, or even if it was just one hit, one really good hit, you've all had it, it's all been there before, even for just a split second. You did it once. You can do it again. And it all comes down to being able to repeat the process and simply understanding that this is, there's a formula to all of this. If you can put the pieces of the formula together day in and day out, then you're gonna be more consistent and you're gonna get closer to reaching your potential.
Anyways, guys, I hope this was helpful. Let me know what you think, uh, about this confidence sharing with you some of the things, the thoughts that I have, and some of the things that I share with the players that I'm working with every single day in the cage.
So, uh, let me know what you think and the comments down below. If you have any questions or ideas for future blogs/video, go ahead and drop 'em down below.
All right guys. Take care. I'll see you in the next one.
