Reworking Mindsets

I hit a milestone earlier this week.

I surpassed my 3,000th 1:1 coaching session. 🎉

That’s not counting groups, teams, workshops, or speaking events. Just me and a client, 1-on-1.

Whether our main focus was mindset, career, life, health, mental performance, or something else, every single session taught me something.

If you’re looking for someone who puts in the reps, I’m not hard to find.

If you’d asked me back then, I’d have told you I was mentally tough. 😤

I wasn’t. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

A lot of athletes, like me, hear that they need to be “mentally tough”, but no one really explains what that means or how.

There are way more than just 5 things I wish I knew back then about Mental Performance, but these would have made the biggest impact.

1️⃣ I lived and breathed baseball. It’s all I did and cared about. While I was incredibly committed and that’s great, I also made it my whole identity not just something I did.

That meant if we lost or if I played poorly, I took it personally. I felt like something was wrong with ME, and terrible performance meant I was a failure as a person.

2️⃣ I had so many thoughts and they were loud, constant, and mostly negative.

📢 Play harder! That’s not good enough! This game’s on you! 📢

I listened to all of them, never responded, and didn’t even know what self-talk was, let alone positive self-talk. The ability to get ahead of those thoughts? I didn’t know that was possible.

3️⃣ I loved winning and really wanted to win every game. So much that I would try to do too much or carry the team myself.

I was impatient, and if we were down 2 I wanted to score 3 with 1 swing so we could take the lead back right away. Because I was trying too hard, that often had the opposite outcome.

4️⃣ I took mistakes really hard. I basically punished myself and thought my terrible body language and throwing things showed my coaches and teammates that I cared and felt bad. 😳

5️⃣ Either I would try to control something that was completely out of my control, or I’d point blame. 🫵🏻

Umpires, the field, the coach, whatever I could.

I wonder how many different outcomes there would have been if I focused more on what I could control, myself and my response.

TL;DR

I’ve been there. I’ve struggled with a lot of the same things I coach on now. 🧠

That’s why I wanted to become a coach, and I love this work, specifically Mental Performance.

These games, and even life, are much easier than we tend to make them.

If you’re not enjoying the game, the presentation, the moment that matters, it’s going to show in how you perform.

Research backs this up. A review of 97 studies found that people who genuinely enjoy what they’re doing perform better, stay committed longer, and push harder than those who don’t.

It’s not just the big moments. It’s the prep too.

The routines, the habits, the daily work that gets you ready.

Make a game out of checking off your list. ✅

Track your habits and celebrate streaks. 🎉

Come up with fun names for your routines. 😜

Find ways to enjoy the process, not just the results.

Enjoying what you do isn’t soft. It’s the fuel that a lot of people are missing. ⛽️

Structure, routines, and habits are all designed to help you be the best version of you. Why not have some fun while you become that?

If things are really difficult to enjoy, that might be a sign that something isn’t aligned somewhere. Let’s work together to figure out where and how to change that.

I’m excited to officially be on Athletes Untapped as a Mental Performance Coach. 🎉

Athletes Untapped has a rigorous vetting process and accepts less than 10% of coaches who apply.

Every coach goes through a background check, experience verification, and full review by their coaching support team before being approved.

If you’re an athlete or a parent of an athlete looking to level up mentally, you can now find me on their platform. 📈

Confidence, focus under pressure, handling mistakes, performing consistently, whatever you’re working through on the mental side, that’s what I help with. 🧠

DM me if you want a direct link.

Scores change. Results fluctuate. Numbers go up and down.

If you measure yourself by the outcome alone, you’ll always be chasing something that moves.

The outcome is just one moment. ☝🏻

One game. One quarter. One conversation. One attempt.

It tells you what happened, not what you’re capable of. Not how hard you worked to get there and the growth you made along the way.

Your effort is the part you control. It’s the reps nobody sees, the days you showed up when you didn’t want to, the work you put in before the moment even arrived.

That’s the real story.

Not the outcome or end result.

Confidence isn’t just a feeling you wait for. 😬

If you’re waiting to FEEL confident before you do the thing, you might be waiting forever.

Confidence starts with a choice. You make a decision that you’re going to do it and then act.

There are going to be nerves. There might even be fear.

That’s not a sign that you’re not ready. That’s just what comes with doing something new that matters and you care about.

You have two choices:
1 - Wait until those feelings go away (they probably won’t)
2 - Take action anyway, ideally using the feelings as energy

When you decide to go for it you’ll either learn something that gets you closer next time, or you’ll show yourself that you were capable of doing it all along.

Both of those are wins! 🙌🏻

From there, you repeat. Make the decision again. Take the action again. Learn more or build more evidence that you can do it.

Over time, that track record you built through choices and actions proves to yourself that you’re more and more capable.

You don’t find confidence, you build it. One decision, one action, one rep at a time. 😤

The journey back to your true self is the most powerful transformation you will ever make. 🪷

If you are not sure who that version of you is, or how to find your way back, I can help you get there.

You don’t have to figure it out alone. 🫶🏻

Send me a DM and let’s talk.