Softball Today Tips

1. Face your weaknesses. What has held you back from reaching your goals? Identify the stumbling blocks will move you a long way toward resolving them. What can you do to get better? Develop a plan to get rid of them. Facing our weaknesses is rarely fun but it is a necessary step toward becoming all you can be. You must attack your weaknesses relentlessly.

2. Have a plan for every workout or practice – the saying goes: “if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail”. One of the common traits of the most successful people in the world is that they have a plan. They know where they are going. Identify where you want to go, the obstacles you will face to get there and lay down a plan to get overcome the obstacles and get to your final destination as quickly as possible.

3. Build a success portfolio. Build a portfolio where you will collect all of the evidence of success you have achieved in the past and that you will achieve in the future. This will be a strong reminder of how exceptional and amazing you are when you feel a little down. Even more important, you will build the habit of focusing on the positives rather than the negatives. Focusing on the positives is a powerful confidence builder!

4. Visualize success. Visualization (a.k.a. mental imagery) is one of the most powerful mental skills. If you can visualize yourself being successful and control the thoughts in your head, your confidence will skyrocket and you performance will be much more consistent. Just like any physical skill, visualization takes time to learn, refine, and master. It must be practiced.

5. Take control of your little voice. Negative self-talk can be very destructive. It will take time before you take total control of it but it is definitely worth the effort. Try to catch yourself when you have negative self-talk and replace it by positive self-talk. Being positive is a common characteristic of highly successful people.

6. Spend time by yourself to relax. Elite softball players are passionate about softball. They sleep, breath and eat softball every day and that’s that the way it has to be to achieve high level success. However, take time off once in a while to rejuvenate. Do something totally unrelated to softball and enjoy it. Something well-planned little breaks do wonders for elite athletes. They go back to training and competition totally re-energized and fully motivated.

7. Overcome fear of failure. Fear of failure might be what is holding you back. Dare to be great by taking risks, chances. Nobody has ever achieved greatness without facing hardship first. Failing is a good thing if you learn from it. Instead of seeing problems or obstacles, see challenges to overcome. The most successful people on the planet are risk-takers. You will never achieve anything by risking nothing.

8. Make no excuses and take full responsibility for all your failures and all your successes. The world’s most successful people never make excuses and they hold themselves accountable. Achieving success and making excuses are mutually exclusive, wholly incompatible.

9. Accept the fact that you will fail, make a lot of mistakes and learn from them. Failing is a big part of the game. If you succeed only 30% of the time at the plate, it’s excellent. That means that you will be failing more often than you succeed. Failing is part of life and sport in general. You actually learn more by failing than by succeeding. The key point is to look at mistakes and failures as learning opportunities. Ask yourself: “What didn’t go well and how can I do things differently next time to be successful?”

10. Use music to energize your workouts. It is a powerful motivator. Get yourself a quality mp3 player or iPod and listen to your favorite music when you workout. Music is motivating and helps you stay focus by blocking outside distractions.

11. Focus on the controllable. Realize that you can’t control what happens around you, but you can control your response to it. You must be in control of yourself before you can control your performance. Don’t waste your time on things that you have no control over, focus on the things that you can change or control.

12. When you are unmotivated to exercise or practice, begin for 5 minutes, then decide. One of the big stumbling blocks to achieving success is staying motivated. There are days when we don’t feel like working out or practicing. The hardest thing is often just to get started. So, when you don’t feel like working out or practicing, just start doing it for 5 minutes and then decide whether or not you want to continue. You will see, most of the time, you will keep doing it.

13. Be here, now. Play one pitch at a time, confident and focused on each pitch as it is played with disregard for past or future pitches. Ignore the emotional baggage of scores, innings, and pitch counts; just focus on the next pitch. Playing a full game in the present is to ultimate goal and the best way to ensure that you perform at your best.

14. Focus on the process rather than the outcomes. You have much more control over the process than the outcome. For example, when hitting, focus on having a good at bat (proper mental approach to the plate, selecting the right pitches, using your best swing, hitting a line drive, etc.) rather than focusing on getting a hit or not striking out

15. Develop routines to help you get in the zone. The use of routine is one of the most widespread practices among elite softball players. They perform routines before games, between innings and between pitches at the plate and on the field. A routine integrates both the mental and the physical aspects. It is a specific way of doing things to stay focus, block distraction and put you in the ideal mindset. Routines are powerful and you should definitely use them.

Marc Dagenais, MHK, CSCS, is a softball peak performance coach. or for more FREE Tips on how to increase performance and develop talent, please visit www.softballperformance.com and sign-up for my “Softball Performance Secrets Journal”. You can also contact through the website.