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- Just swing | 5.4 minute read
Happy Sunday. It’s a beautiful day for baseball, right?
The weekends, for my son, are filled with baseball. He plays on two teams.
He wasn’t swinging.
He’s played baseball for three years, his team won the championship last year and this year he’s on two teams to get in more reps. If you want to improve at baseball, It’s all about the reps — more pitches, more ground balls, and more swings.
But he wasn’t swinging.
I asked my good friend, a triple A baseball coach, played baseball his whole life, was the president of a local club: What do I do?
“There are three strikes in every out,” he told me. “One’s the ump’s. One’s the pitcher’s. The third is yours. You can’t control the first two, but that last one? Make it count.
Swing at the first pitch by default. Expand your zone and just swing. Don’t wait for perfection.
Get him out of his head. It’s all in his head.
Nothing worked.
As parents, we put so much pressure on our kids to succeed — not necessarily so they make the big leagues and earn the big bucks, but to see their growth. To see them achieve something that’ll create core memories and give them confidence.
Turns out pressure doesn’t always make diamonds, it can transform into anxiety. They want to please us so badly, their pre-frontal cortex (i.e. logic) shuts down and all the brain activity goes to the amygdala where the physical response is to fight, flight, or freeze.
Freeze. He was frozen. He wasn’t swinging.
I woke him up on Saturday morning.
“Today’s the day.”
“What?”
“Today’s the day, bud. Say it with me. Today’s the day.”
He curled away. He hid under his pillow. I jumped on his bed.
“Today’s the day!”
“Why are you saying that?”
“Ben, today’s the day. Anything can happen if you believe it. Today’s the day you beat that video game. Today’s the day you clean up your room. Today’s the day I’m going to run 26 minutes. Today’s the day, Ben.”
“Ok, today’s the day.”
At baseball, he swung three times and struck out. His next at bat, he got a hit, his first one of the season. His final at bat, he earned a “run batted in” (RBI) to earn a sweet spot on his team’s stat sheet.
My friend, that baseball coach fella, also said this: “If you want to make the hall of fame, you need a .300 batting average. You need to hit the ball three times out of 10. If you do, you’re a legend.”
Baseball is a game of failure.
And with that, I’ll close with arguably one of baseball’s best known failures, Michael Jordan (you know, the basketball legend).
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Baseball is a game of failure. So is life. Swing anyway.
The pebble
The challenge
It’s Sunday. Pick one thing you’ve been scared to swing at. Don’t wait for perfect. Just get up and take a swing.
Because confidence doesn’t come before the swing, it comes after. Because sometimes, today’s the day.
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