The Baseball Observer - Mental Skills Issue
Coaching Guidelines for Simplexity
How can you, as a coach, leverage the term, simplexity, in your work with your players and team?
Consider the following guidelines, which may assist you with the task of keeping things simple and basic, while recognizing the complex and the uncontrollable:
1. Respect the sport: Work to make sure that your players understand and appreciate that baseball is larger than any one individual, including themselves. No matter what happens, there always is the next pitch, inning, and game. As such, each one of these experiences should be treated by the player with their due respect of attention, energy, and effort, and to value playing baseball as important experiences in their lives. As I frequently mention to our players: Baseball is what you do but it is not who you are.
2. Emphasize humility: Teach your players to recognize and appreciate that the more they learn about baseball, the more likely it is that they will understand that they do not know it all. In order to grow and develop as a baseball player, therefore, they need to learn how to seek coaching; listen to the advice provided them; talk with older and more experienced players; and not become cocky or anoint themselves with a “big head”. Players can benefit from appreciating that they cannot do it alone, no matter what their current skill set performance.
3. Take charge of the process: Teach your players how to deal with the daily things that are under their control in developing and improving themselves as a player and person, on and off the field. In this regard, teach your players to take charge of and focus on the process. Taking charge of the process encompasses: (a) preparing to compete in a purposeful and quality manner before the game; (b) maintaining contact with the present moment during competition, pitch to pitch; (c) being an accurate self-evaluator of performance and using that information to get better; and (d) living their lives in a healthful and passionate manner.
4. Be a good separator: Make sure that each player learns how to separate themselves as a performer and their results from themselves as a person and the rest of their daily lives. The task here is to recognize the plusses and minuses of their performance and to understand that, as a person, they are over and above these situations, no matter how well or not so well that they have performed.
5. Enjoy the process: Playing baseball is a privilege as well as a great opportunity to grow and develop mentally, physically, and technically. So, try to make sure that your players are enjoying what they are doing, both during the ups and downs of performance, as well as at other times during their lives.
32