How to View Your At Bats

As hitters we have a tendency to only view our at bats in the terms of success or failure. When we get hits we feel as though we had success and that everything is okay and we don’t get hits we feel like we failed and that something must be wrong and need to be fixed. Unfortunately viewing our at bats in this way doesn’t allow us to grow and develop as hitters. If, for whatever reason, we are consistently getting hits we get easily lulled into a sense of false confidence. We take the hits at face value and assume that everything must be working. Our swing and mental approach must be sound since we are having success. We aren’t motivated then to look deeper at our performance and as a result don’t learn, grow, and fix minor flaws that could come back and bite us in the future.

The flip side is viewing our inability to get hits as failures. With each at bat that we don’t achieve the goal of getting a hit we place more and more pressure on ourselves and as a result become more and more mentally blocked which takes us further and further away from achieving the success we desire. As frustration builds it negatively effects our confidence until we simply assume that our lack of success is a direct reflection of our level of skill. As a result we are not in a position to learn and make the simple adjustments we need to make to create the results we desire.

It’s important to understand that success and failure don’t exist. They are nothing more then labels we place on the results that we produce. Every at bat, wether it’s a home run or strike out is nothing more then a result you produced. They’re nothing more then an opportunity to learn, adjust, and grow. In order to become the hitter you desire to become it’s imperative that you resist the urge to label your at bats as successes or failures. See your at bats as opportunities to learn more about your opponent and yourself. Viewing your at bats in this way will eliminate the emotional fluctuation that comes with success and failure. This will allow you to develop as a hitter at a much faster rate. Remember that there are millions of reasons as to why you could be getting hits or not getting hits. None of which are directly linked to your current skill level. Seeing you at bats as an opportunity to learn will allow you to increase your level of performance and become a far greater hitter then you could ever imagine.