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I have little doubt that you’ve heard the
advice, "practice makes perfect". Or, "perfect practice makes perfect". I do appreciate the
sentiment that those phrases are usually delivered with, however, perfect play is unattainable. I
realize this could pop your utopian bubble, but baseball is a game filled with failure. Therefore,
instead of working on baseball drills, and receiving baseball instruction with the mindset that one
day you’ll achieve perfection, I have a different suggestion. It is absolutely vital that athletes
understand the role of failure and be taught how to put in place a strategy to use failure as a
positive and not as a negative. It takes some mental rewiring in the mind of a competitive athlete,
but it is well worth the time spent to learn this mental
baseball skill.
I would like to explore briefly how failure can be utilized during
baseball drills, practice, and competition in order to create more fundamentally solid baseball
players.
For many youth athletes today, failure is uncomfortable at the least,
and terrifying at the most. This fear of failure isn’t isolated to baseball. Many youth are afraid
of messing up a speech in class, afraid of receiving an "F" on a piece of homework or test, and
afraid of being rejected in this or that. Failure is everywhere and; it is an integral part of our
daily lives. I have a problem with focusing on failures. The problem I have is that it tends to
paralyze many from attempting to achieve. Let me clearly state that I am not trying to do away with
things or scenarios that cause failure, or to shelter youth from experiencing it, I'm simply
pointing out that the lens in which we view failure needs to be cleaned from time to
time.
Looking through a different lens during youth baseball drills and
practice time is actually quite simple. I'll give you one solid example on just one part of the
game of baseball and let you apply the principle to the rest. If you’d like to explore this idea of
dealing with failure further, you can download my free ebook entitled, Toxic Baseball: Are you
polluting your game?
Batting Practice
When training hitters, I will watch closely how they approach their
batting practice sessions. Obviously during batting practice all hitters desire to do well. It's
their time to shine, to impress their coach, their teammates, and their own ego. However, it
usually only takes a few missed pitches, a few ground outs or fly outs before the hitter becomes
frustrated and loses focus. This frustration just compounds the problem and makes it significantly
worse.
The problem is never the missed pitches or the poor results the
hitter experienced while hitting a baseball. Instead, the problem is the perception of what the
poor hits mean to the hitter. The hitter sees the missed opportunities as a sign of inferiority,
weakness, and ineptitude. This feeling will eventually create a belief that the athlete himself is
a failure. Once this sets it, it’s near impossible for a hitter to maintain confidence in his
game.
Well-trained hitters view mistakes in batting practice far
differently. A few missed pitches, repeated ground outs or fly outs simply mean that there is
something not quite right with his swing. He will begin to problem solve with his understanding of
his own baseball swing until he finds the part that is out of wack. Instead of focusing on the
feeling of personal failure, a non-emotional response is used and the mistake is never
personalized.
The key differences between an emotional, untrained hitter, and a
mentally strong hitter is how each hitter deals with failure. In the first example the hitter
allowed the mistakes he made to be an end result and evaluation of his performance. The mentally
successful hitter viewed the mistakes in batting practice as a compartmentalized problem that
simply needed attention. This approach let him maintain composure and concentrate on a solution
rather than the problem.
In summary, I would highly encourage during your
youth baseball drills to teach and cultivate the following ideas within your athletes.
1. Failure is just an indicator of a small adjustment that needs to
change.
2. Failure should never be allowed to be related to athlete
himself.
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