The Competitor’s Brain: Why does the off-season matter?
Why does the off-season matter more than the in-season? It is the chance to define who you are.
If you think about the sentence, it’s a simple one. How you define yourself. I am a? Am I a baseball player? Am I a football player? What defines you?
Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame leftfielder for the Boston Red Sox, said that when he walked down the street, he wanted people to look at him and say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.” He also said, “I feel in my heart that nobody in this game ever devoted more concentration in the batter’s box than I did.” A guy who practiced until his blisters bled, and then practiced more, and loved doing it.
By Dan Gaken from Mt. Pleasant, MI, United States – Ted Williams Batting Average Chart – National Baseball Hall of Fame, CC BY 2.0, Link
Every action you take casts a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Ted Williams wanted to be the best hitter of all-time, and now a lot of people would say he probably is. His lifetime average was .344, 521 home runs, and he’s the last guy to hit .400.
The off-season is a chance to do a little a lot, rather than a lot a little. If you do the math, 1% better a day means that over the course of a year, you’ll wind up 37 times better. 1% of your day is 14 minutes, 24 seconds, and while it’s not a completely accurate measure, and you should be doing more than 15 minutes a day, it’s better than nothing. A question you need to ask yourself now is, “What do you do every day to get 1% better?” And “What will your process be?”
When you’re thinking about your process, you have to think about your process instead of your outcome. What are you doing every day to get 1% better? Who you want to be is going to define your habits. That’s up to you, not up to someone else. The true hang-up is thinking you need to do big things. A workout doesn’t need to be three hours long, it can be 30 minutes.
The Way of Baseball
In the book, The Way of Baseball, by Shawn Green, he talks about the All-Star shortstop Tony Fernandez who used to step into the batting cage to get one swing, just to get the feel, and if the feel was good, he got out. He didn’t want to waste it. Make sure you have deliberate practice. Don’t just take swings. Honestly think about your pitches, think about your swings, think about the things that need to be done correctly. You can’t just go through the motions of trying to do something right. You need to make sure that you are focusing on trying to become that image you have of yourself.
John Wooden, a guy who won 10 NCAA championships at UCLA, including seven in a row, in the first practice of every season, he took the best recruits from the country, including guys like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and what did they learn to do? They learned to tie their shoes the right way. He had reasons for it – he didn’t want guys being out because they had blisters on their feet; he didn’t want practices being interrupted because the guy had to stop and tie his shoes. Games being interrupted, momentum being lost. So he had a reason for that.
The other reason was how you do anything is how you do everything. If you are mindful about everything that you do, it will have a very big impact on everything that you do.
