I have had the privilege to train and play alongside some of the best baseball players in the entire world. A couple ways that I personally learn is through watching and listening. I would pay attention to how the best trained and thought, and when they spoke I listened to them and I would try and understand why they say certain things or why they thought a certain way. Here are a couple things that I think can help everyone in any walk of life (Collected from experience, videos, sports articles, and speeches).
At the highest levels of competition, physical gifts don’t determine success. Everyone has physical gifts, it is the ability to execute and anticipate that separates the best from the rest.
Deliberate Practice- the ability to focus and execute over and over again. Making small and achievable progress towards meaningful improvement.
Spreading your energy evenly- over working just causes burnout and injury, it isn't efficient for growth and is essentially a waste of time. Work, rest, review, and repeat.
While training, target areas that will specifically make you better to have the greatest returns. In baseball, I wanted to train for power, stability, and precision. That way I could maximize my body and skills for competition.
Mental Game leads to the Physical Game- visualizing success, planning out the game ahead of time, thinking about what might happen and how to adjust will prepare you for the real deal. Write down what you want to achieve and come back to it often while you are training and progressing down your path.
Adapt your training and mix it up- pivot when something just isn't working out. Some training strategies or tools aren't for everybody and being able to recognize when something isn't working for you personally is a gift. An example would be playing basketball before lifting heavy in the gym, some people might fatigue too much having fun on the court and won’t be able to maximize their time moving weights around. If it’s a day to lift heavy, cut the basketball out or shorten the time on the court so that it is solely a warm up.
Keep pushing through failures- no one wins every time, every day. You wont always be perfect. Learn from failure, make adjustments, keep striving to reach your goals and one day you will get there. Progress is progress, whether it‘s slow or fast, and that’s a win in itself.
Sometimes people try and explain what athletes are doing from a 3rd person perspective, but when the athlete speaks on what they were doing, it was totally different in how they explain what happened. Example, world class sprinters look like they are moving their legs really fast. So from an outside perspective, a coach or trainer may try and focus on the speed of the limbs in training. When you hear from the athlete, the athlete says that when they stride, their goal is to push off the ground and pull their leg through, applying a huge amount of force into the ground to propel them forward. (Usain Bolt can put 1000 lbs of force into the ground). That type of power is going to be trained differently compared to just trying to train to move your legs fast.
Controlling your emotions- the ability to control your mental fortitude is and will always be an advantage. Understanding yourself and how to use energy efficiently will help navigate emotional highs and lows of competition and training, so that you can make better decisions consistently.
Will Power- waking up every day and doing what needs to be done is hard. Having the will to succeed and do the “hard” stuff consistently separates the good from the great. Practicing that will is a skill. The more often you do it the easier it is to keep doing it.
Instinct vs Anticipation- the best players anticipate whats going to happen so when it is time to react they can make better decisions faster. Learning the environment, rules of the game, and opponent tendencies helps out a whole lot when it comes to competition. Always be a student of the game so you can perform inside of it to the best of your abilities.
One of the most important things I have experienced while playing professional baseball is that the best players minimize the moments they are in. They simplify the objective and focus on that. I believe we can all do that in any walk of life. Sometimes we can get stuck in the magnitude of whats going on around us when in reality all we can do is control ourselves and how we respond to what is happening. Do what we can do in the moment and move on to the next moment. Control what we can control. Being able to focus on the controllable helps minimize the moment and in turn helps you to perform or execute in that moment.
Building quality moments over and over again is mentally taxing… but worth it when the job is done, whatever that job may be.
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