Have you ever noticed that the best ballplayers often appear to be the cockiest? At the same time, many of them can be the sweetest, most humble people outside the lines.
First of all, the best have usually earned the right to be cocky. It’s not by chance that folks get good. They’ve put the time in. They’ve put A LOT of time in. Sometimes they’ve sacrificed different aspects of their lives in order to get good. There’s identity wrapped up in being good for a lot of ballplayers. That’s who they’ve decided to be, and the work speaks for itself. The results provide good reason to be cocky.
Affirming your own ability is an important part of any activity. This is true for school, music, talking to someone we’re interested in, competitive sports or any other endeavor. If we affirm that we can do ‘the thing’, amazing things happen in our brains that eliminates doubt, anxiety and stress.
When we affirm our own confidence, something happens in our brains. We come to associate our confidence with the task. This is called the Hebbian Principle. This is something that I’ve talked about before when I explained how I’ve ‘brainwashed’ my kids to associate baseball/softball with getting ice cream. When they were little, and they were less enthusiastic about practice or games, we’d stop to get ‘bad’ ice cream after practice. They came to associate practice with something they already enjoyed (Dad! – and ice cream). What fires together, wires together. This brings us back to affirming our own ability.
What does this have to do with sports performance? A lot. Being self-critical or having low confidence affects performance negatively. Self-affirming or having high confidence also affects performance!
We need to find ways to change our current mindset into something that will be positive. Here are several tactics we teach, and anyone can implement today.
Using these techniques, and several others, we can actually rewire the brain. We can put it into a state that is ready to focus on the task at hand, and put ourselves into an emotional place to have success. To the outsider it might look cocky, but we’ll know what it is – you’re hitting the reset button to give yourself the best opportunity to compete.
First of all, the best have usually earned the right to be cocky. It’s not by chance that folks get good. They’ve put the time in. They’ve put A LOT of time in. Sometimes they’ve sacrificed different aspects of their lives in order to get good. There’s identity wrapped up in being good for a lot of ballplayers. That’s who they’ve decided to be, and the work speaks for itself. The results provide good reason to be cocky.
Affirming your own ability is an important part of any activity. This is true for school, music, talking to someone we’re interested in, competitive sports or any other endeavor. If we affirm that we can do ‘the thing’, amazing things happen in our brains that eliminates doubt, anxiety and stress.
When we affirm our own confidence, something happens in our brains. We come to associate our confidence with the task. This is called the Hebbian Principle. This is something that I’ve talked about before when I explained how I’ve ‘brainwashed’ my kids to associate baseball/softball with getting ice cream. When they were little, and they were less enthusiastic about practice or games, we’d stop to get ‘bad’ ice cream after practice. They came to associate practice with something they already enjoyed (Dad! – and ice cream). What fires together, wires together. This brings us back to affirming our own ability.
What does this have to do with sports performance? A lot. Being self-critical or having low confidence affects performance negatively. Self-affirming or having high confidence also affects performance!
We need to find ways to change our current mindset into something that will be positive. Here are several tactics we teach, and anyone can implement today.
- Create a growth mindset or internal locus of control. This starts with understanding that we are the ones who will control our actions and reactions. Taking accountability for our successes and failures is critical. We also have to be honest with our own input, and what we can expect of our output. If we’re naturally less athletic than athletes we’re competing with, and putting in less time than they are, can we reasonably expect to have more success than them over the long-term? But how would we know how much effort others are putting in? We don’t! Control your input, focus on what you are working to achieve, take satisfaction in your growth. Keep building. That’s a growth mindset.
- Establish routines. We are trying to eliminate distractions, both external and internal. Routines are the “turn it off and turn it on again” for people. When we do that with a computer, it works because ‘places’ the computer at the start line, a place it knows. Then the computer can perform the task pretty easily in most cases. A routine puts us mentally, physically and emotionally in the same, known place. So no matter what else, what other programs we’ve mentally got running, we can start where we recognize what to do if we use our routines well. We breathe, we swagger, we visualize. It’s all part of the routine.
- Visualize. This is the act of putting ourselves into practice or situations through our imagination. Our brains don’t really know the difference between visualized events and reality. This works because the same neurons are used for both activities. Since we use these same neurons whether we’re actually doing a task or visualizing, we can tap into a super power to entirely change our state of mind. Try for a second to visualize hitting pitches in several different locations far off into the distance. You're happy, confident, and ready to crush. Just by taking a few moments and using your imagination, you’ve entirely changed your state of mind!
- Affirmation. Verbalize your intent. It works better when you involve others. Right before completing a task, tell someone what you’re going to do. Make it aspirational, positive and awesome. Watch how your frame of mind changes. This can be handled a whole bunch of ways – at the start of an inning, tell a teammate that you’ll hit them in when they get on; declare that you’re going to get 3 hits today; generalize by saying this pitcher doesn’t have anything to get you out. For the meekest of us, saying it out-loud to ourselves works. Finding a trusted teammate to tell it to is better. To have a whole team who freely affirms each other no matter what is definitely the most powerful. Bonus technique: Have a ritual where teammates give physical affirmations – handshakes, hand slaps, pats, boops, swats on the back of the helmet, etc.
Using these techniques, and several others, we can actually rewire the brain. We can put it into a state that is ready to focus on the task at hand, and put ourselves into an emotional place to have success. To the outsider it might look cocky, but we’ll know what it is – you’re hitting the reset button to give yourself the best opportunity to compete.
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