Dealing With Failure In Baseball
I have no reservations saying that if you have an athlete involved in youth baseball today, hes been exposed to failure more than a few times. The good news is that failure is part of the deal as it will build important character traits that will pay off inside and outside of baseball in the long-run. The problem Id like to address is how the tiny game to game failures compound and begin to turn into longer struggles or slumps.
In general, short-term failures in performance are caused from a physical skill issue. There is one or multiple skill deficiencies that are causing a barrier to performance. Long-term slumps on the other hand, are a beast of a different nature. They are complex and a combination of physical skill problems and mental confidence lapses. This is why long-term slumps are so nasty and harm athletes so much.
Before I talk about how to solve a long-term slump, its important to understand how small game-to-game failures grow into full blown long-term slumps. Its really a simple concept to understand. Your mind records images of your performances, especially if the performance is accompanied by a strong emotion. If the performance is poor, the mind will save the image of your poor performance in your short-term memory allowing you to review it over and over again. The problem gets tough when the amount of negative images pile up in the short-term memory.
When a collection of small negative images flood the minds eye, it caused extreme emotions in the athlete. The longer the player experiences these emotions, the greater chance there is for a long-term slump to occur. There are a couple ways to tackle this problem. One is physical practice, and the other is mental practice. For now, Ill give you the mental skill set you need to avoid slumps.
The solution to fixing a struggling mental game is to avoid letting a negative image stay in your short-term memory for very long. Instead of allowing the image of the failure youve experienced to stay in your mind, we need to change the picture altogether. This will eliminate the negative emotion attached to that image. For example, instead of seeing the picture of you striking out looking, change the picture in your mind to you getting a base hit into the gap. Or, instead of seeing yourself boot the ground ball hit at you at short stop, see yourself instead making a great play and throwing the runner out at first. Changing the picture in your mind takes practice and time, just as it takes practice and time to become a physically good player. This skill is a bit tricky and strange at first since you are essentially lying to your brain. But, with time and frequent practice, youll be able to lessen the impact of failures and experience continued growth as an athlete.