Total Reading Time: 5 minutes

Happy Monday! It’s softball season so let’s I’ll get right to it!!

So let’s Go!

Table of Contents

• 6 Key Takeaways from our Mental Game Zoom

• Getting Your Pitchers from Good to Great

6 Key Takeaways from our Mental Game Zoom

Last night we had another great zoom, this time with Zach Brandon (Arizona Diamondbacks) talking about “Lessons on the Mental Game I’ve Learned from Working with the World’s Best.” Here are some key takeaways:

1. There’s a difference between Expectations and Agreements - agreements are 2-way and expectations are one-way.

2. Training Your Player’s Attention is a Non-Negotiable

3. The Biggest Challenge that Coaches Solve (in one word)…Drift. We serve as the rumble strips for our player’s attention to keep it from drifting off the target or the intention or the path.

4. Our Brain Doesn’t Like Unanswered Questions. It wants to fill in the gap. So its important for us as coaches to clear up uncertainty on the part of our players.

5. When a Player Loses Confidence its Usually that They’ve Lost Sight of Why They Should Have It In The First Place. Work to help remind them why they’re good, and why they should believe in their skill.

6. Players are More Likely to Hold Themselves Accountable to Conditions they Created.

These are just a few of the things Zach covered. Listen to the entire zoom - and all past zooms - when you become a Zoom Member!

Getting Your Pitchers from Good to Great

In a book by Atul Gawande called Better he looks at how medical professionals strive to improve from good to great. As a surgeon he looks at the gap between good intentions and best performances in the high stake works of medicine.

There are 2 main takeaways in this book that we can definitely apply to Coaching:

1. Experience Does Not Reliably Lead to Improvement. Gawande talks about surgeons with decades of experience whose outcomes are not better, and often worse, than less experienced doctors. Not because they care less or lack skill, but because experience without feedback stabilizes performance rather than improves it.

2. Experience Only Improves Performance When 3 Things are Present:

   1. Clear Standards - What are the expectations?

   2. Regular Feedback - Improvement requires friction. Not confrontation. But comparison with a standard that is external, shared, and visible.

   3. Willingness to Adjust Practice - Think about your practices - it’s comfortable to run the same practice week after week. It’s familiar to you, but it won’t make your players better. Experience alone won’t improve performance. Only deliberate practice does that. And deliberate practice only exists where coaches design systems that make feedback routine but not personal.

Without each of these, people don’t get better. They just get used to what they already do.

The best players, or doctors, are the most coached. They want and invite observation. They compare outcomes. They adjust small details relentlessly.

Thanks for reading this week’s Curveball Chronicles. I hope you gained some insight, some encouragement, some knowledge or some grace.

Go make this a Great week!

Missed some previous issues? Don’t worry, I’ve got them all on my website: https://pitchingcoachcentral.com/curveball-newsletter/