Winning the Mental Game

What's the Mental Game?

Baseball great Yogi Berra said, "Baseball is 90 percent mental, the other half is physical."

What Yogi probably meant, in his own way, is that there are two games to every sport.

The first game, the physical game, deals with learning the skills a player needs, getting the level of fitness or conditioning for their sport and making the most of their abilities. To win the physical game a player needs to learn, practice and perform.

The second game is the mental game. The mental game is how a person performs under pressure.

Golfing great Bobby Jones once said, “golf is played on a five-inch course, the distance between your ears.” That's the mental game, the game that deals with pressure. That's the game that lets a player do great in practice but not as good in competition. That's the game that, when there's a problem with pressure, shows itself as slumps, choking, yips, hitches and all of the way to burnout.

Winning the Mental Game means a player is performing their best under pressure, being free of slumps and reaching their potential in competition.

Winning the Mental Game is the secret to peak performance.

It's all about pressure

There are many reasons people play baseball, golf and other sports. They may enjoy the physical challenge of learning and performing skills (and doing them well). They may like the mental challenge of learning strategy or outthinking their opponent. They may have an intense drive to win. If they play professionally, they have the potential of earning a lot of money and becoming famous.

But, if a player wants to succeed, if they want to win, they must be able to perform their best under pressure.

What gets in the way?

Everyone is different when it comes to the mental game. Some people perform well in practice but not under pressure. Some are the other way around. There can be a "trigger" that sets people off and ruins their performance. This can be a specific person, team, place. It can be a past experience, an accident or injury or a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. It can be worry, a fear or a phobia. It can get to the point where their sport stops being fun and they don't want to play. Or to the point where the opportunity to play is taken away.

- TOP -

How does this happen?

It starts with why we react to pressure the way we do. Our reactions are all about what we've learned and how we deal with it. It all comes down to expectation and imagination, which leads to habits, beliefs and behaviors. These interrelate: we get into habits - we form beliefs - we live behaviors.

Our brain acts like there are two parts of our mind. One is the analytical part, which stores willpower and short term memory. Remember learning to drive a car, ride a bicycle or learn some other skill? It was hard because you had think about and keep track of everything. You were using the analytical part of your mind. Then, one day, it transferred into the other part of your mind, the imagination part, which stores habits, beliefs and behaviors. You could do that skill without thinking about it.

This works great when the information that's transferred is good for you.

But what if it's not?

Here's an example. A baseball player drops a easy fly ball during a game. Someone the player admires loses their temper and yells at them, tells them that they are an idiot, a loser, they'll never be able to be counted on to catch fly balls and have no business being on the team. The player is upset at themselves, being yelled at makes it worse and those destructive statements are taken in and become part of the player's beliefs.

The next time the player is getting ready to catch a fly ball, the player thinks "I know I'm going to drop it" or, worse still, "I hope I don't drop it," because they now believe they are a loser, an idiot, and more. And they drop the ball. Now they are forming a habit. They get yelled at again, they get more stressed, they drop more balls and it keeps getting worse and worse. They may do well in practice because it doesn't count, but in competition, under pressure, they fall apart. Now, having problems with pressure is part of their behavior. And with this example it all started with forming a belief.

Many people try to overcome these problems with pressure through willpower.

They try talking it out, they read articles and books, watch videos, go to the sports psychologist and just about everything else to try to figure out analytically what's going wrong and fix it. But remember, willpower is stored in the analytical part of our mind.

Habits, beliefs and behaviors are stored in the imagination part of the mind.

In the long run, imagination wins over willpower.

For example, if there was a two-foot wide, 24-foot-long plank on the ground, would someone walk the length of it for $500? Of course they would, it's a safe and easy thing to do.

But, if that plank was between the top floors of two 100-story buildings, would they still walk that plank? Suddenly, it's different. Even if it's a nice, calm day, it can be almost as if there is a voice is whispering into their ear, "What if..."

That's the power of imagination.

When willpower can't fix it