Mental Skills Monday

Hello, Cadre. Happy Monday to you. I wanted to, for this, live today, share a little story of my work with a client that I work with right now, and I think it applies to a lot of us. So, for some of you that, for some of you that don't know, this hat that I wear, mental stride. It's for a business. I own a private consulting business for sports psychology, working with athletes and performers. And one of the recent clients that I just started working with is a high school baseball player. And one of the big things we talked about in our first session is he tries or he feels like he tries to impress his coaches a lot.

So that pressure weighs on him. He feels the pressure to perform. He's worried if he makes a mistake, he's going to lose playing time, or maybe his coaches won't, you know, promote him or recommend him to college coaches who are trying to recruit him. So he's constantly worried about his performance and how that affects his coaches opinions of him. Hi, Luke. Good afternoon to you, as well. So, with this athlete always trying to impress his coaches, it comes down to, how is that affecting your performance?

For him, it wasn't helping him to think about his coaches. For some people might be motivating for them. For him, it was just negatively affecting him. And I think this applies to a lot of us. And the things that I said to this athlete were that, look, and this is something I've mentioned on Cadre before, is that if our focus is so limited, our brain's ability to focus is so limited. I like to think about it as a point system in that we only have 100 total points that we can allocate our focus towards at any given moment.

If this athlete is thinking constantly about the coaches, that detracts his ability to focus on hitting the ball, on fielding the ball, and doing things necessary for him to be a successful baseball player, which will subsequently impress his coaches in the end, but it impacts his performance. So if he is letting those focus points go towards the coach, he's not maximizing the amount of focus points he can have towards his performance. All right, so all that to say is for. For you all out there, you don't need to be an athlete.

You don't need to be a high school baseball player to benefit from these. Try to maximize your focus. My question to you is, are there any people in your life that you're trying to impress, that you feel like you get distracted by trying to do right by them? Maybe you have a boss or maybe you have a friend that you're trying to impress or a coworker you're trying to impress or something like that. We're all social animals as human beings, so we all want to impress people. It's just natural part.

So it's not about not trying to impress people. It's all about how can you maximize your focus? How can you give 100 points out of your limited focus resources towards what is relevant for your performance? For that high school baseball player, it's focus on one keyword, one phrase that you use when you're at bat. Maybe it's let's look for my pitch. Or maybe as you know, he's a catcher, he can just focus on simply catching the ball that the pitcher is throwing at him. So trying to maximize those focus points, again, it applies not just to that high school baseball player and athletes, but it applies to all of us.

Who are you trying to impress and how can you impress them in the end? Well, you can maximize your focus. Focus on what you can control. Focus on what's relevant for you in the present moment. That's all I got for you all. So, happy Monday. Go out there, try to bring yourself awareness. Think about who you're trying to impress. And again, focus as much as you can on what's relevant and what's in your control. Hope that helps. Happy Monday. Have a great rest of your week.