There is one thing you can control. Your training!

Trust Your Training.  Forget about confidence for a moment.  Forget about talent, strength, size, or natural gifts.  There is one thing you can control.  Your training!

A lot of us may have been guilty of looking at things in the wrong way.  Here is an example.  If today, I became a professional fireman.  Wearing the uniform would not enable me to handle hundreds of things I would need to know to save someone’s life, to protect my own life, to safely rush into a burning building.  It takes specific skill development in every situation until confidence happens. 

An elite military outfit trains hundreds of hours so that, when called to action, they react instantly.  They are trained in every possible scenario.  They get into shape to handle the physical and mental stresses that come with the job.  They practice every possible situation over and over.  Confidence comes from doing something in a specific way until they do not know how to do it wrong.

Boxers do not fight everyday, but practice specific moves until they become automatic.  Football quarterbacks practice footwork, develop their muscles specifically, drill certain movements until those become automatic.  If done well, both of these athletes subconsciously do things under pressure that surprise even themselves.

My goal, with each student, is to understand how she thinks, what are her gifts, where do we need to strengthen the body and the movements, then design a specific plan to develop those.  We do not go to the internet and grab random drills simply because they might have worked for someone else.  You are just throwing things at the wall and hoping they will stick.

We start simple.  Eliminate wasted motion.  Become more efficient.  Then, and only then, can she start adding power to the moves.  Before leaving the lesson, she is always given four specific skills to develop until they are habit.  What are those skills?  It totally depends on the student. Some are correction, some are progression, but they are each focused on this individual student and where we believe she can excel.  As she grows, the training reaches new levels.

She needs to understand the training completely, buy into it, and realize that a failure does not happen because she is not good enough, but because the training was lacking.   That can be corrected.  Is it exhausting?  Absolutely, for Instructors more than students.  If we do not give them a clear picture of how they can progress, how can they buy into it?   Confidence suffers.  Confidence is normally a result, not the cause. 

This is what we mean by having a system.  It requires years of study on our part and that never ends.  If you work with pitchers and want to take your game to a different level, if you have a strong background in softball pitching at the highest level, we welcome you to consider our Certification Program.  We always want people who can help us raise our game.  Background is important.  See our website, under the “About” tab, for details.