Short coaching video by Alex Swenson (former Division 1 baseball coach, scout and recruiter) that explains how stress and anxiety hurt baseball performance and gives a simple mental framework to reduce it: set realistic expectations and build a tolerance for failure. Swenson recommends expecting mistakes (bad at-bats, bad innings, umpire errors) so they feel less catastrophic, illustrates this with a haunted-house thought experiment and the example that professional golfers expect ~8 bad shots per round, and encourages viewers to adopt the mindset to play looser and respond better to failure.
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Hey, how you doing, Alex here. Thanks for joining me. And in today's video, it is going to be short and sweet, but the goal is to be the most impactful video that you've seen from me up to this point. And I don't know why it's taken me so long to talk about this topic because it is such a big area in the game of baseball and really any sport and just in life in general. And that is dealing with stress and anxiety. Because the stress and anxiety in baseball specific specifically, that's what we're talking about, can be crippling. I remember playing and getting so stiff, right. And so in my head that my game performance went way, way down. If you have, have you ever thought about, you know, why you can't translate your practice or training into the game? Well, hopefully this video is going to help you because the stuff of stress and anxiety really makes a big impact on that because you have it within you, you just got to pull it out of you. And this right here is usually the main stopper, but it can also be the main just release of your potential, the release of what you do in practice and training. So we're going to dive into that. And if you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm a former Division 1 college baseball coach, scout and recruiter. And now what I is I help student athletes in high school go through this recruiting process and I also make these videos as well to help you go through that. So if you get anything from this video, please smash that like button that thumbs up right down here and subscribe to my channel. I put out a weekly video on recruiting and how to just improve on and off the field. All right, let's dive in. Baseball and life can constantly toy with our emotions, so swaying us from side to side, up and down. And the thing is, emotions are going to happen. It's the beautiful thing of human beings, our emotional side. But it's also, as I'm sure you know, a double edged sword. Too far on this side, it can be a negative. Too far on this side, it can also be a negative as well. We want to kind of really stay in the middle and the game is not to be so moved by our emotions. Understanding our emotions are going to happen, but not to let it take it too far. And of course in this context we're talking about baseball. So let's get into stress and fear and how to best beat this. And one of the biggest contributors of stress and fear in the game of Baseball, but also in the game of life, is having the incorrect expectations. So in the game of baseball, if I'm expecting to be perfect, am I. If I'm expecting to go five for five every game, or throw a perfect game or just be absolutely dominant, I am setting myself up for failure. And I'm setting myself up for also stress and fear to not meet those expectations. But you also just start thinking about, well, if I don't do that, right, if I'm not perfect, you're creating a lot of that stress and fear. And so when things start to go wrong, that stress and fear really starts to boil up. Rather, if you have the expectation going into a game, that going into a season, going into a practice, whatever it may be, that you are going to have errors, you're going to swing at bad pitches, the umpires are going to make bad calls, right? There's a lot of things that are going to go wrong, and you can even write a list out of this. Now, expecting these things to happen can really minimize your stress and your fear and understand when it does happen, hey, chalk it up. It's happened and you're going to be able to respond to it better. But you have to focus on it. The thing is, we've all heard this thing as far as the game of baseball is all about failure, but we don't ever really implement it in our minds the best way. And that's through expectations, expecting that these things are going to happen. Yes, you're going to have a bad at bat, you're going to walk people, you're going to have a bad outing, you're going to have a bad game. And let me give you another thought, Experian. If I were to tell you that you were going to walk into a house and you have no idea what this house is all about, and you walk in and it's actually a haunted house, but you don't really know that. So you got people jumping out of the walls and scaring you and all this stuff, you're going to be freaked out. Absolutely. But before I give you a different scenario and I say, hey, you're going to have to walk into a house. This house is haunted. There are people in certain rooms that are going to jump out of you. Well, you're going to go in there expecting certain people that are going to jump out. You might still get scared, right? Kind of. But you're not going to be nearly as scared as you were going into the house without expecting this stuff. So, again, I'm just trying to Use a different framework to help you think about this in going into a game, in a season. Now, another kind of thought experiment is professional golfers, usually on average, like the very, very good players that do this for a living, all right? They expect themselves to have about eight bad shots in a round. A round is about 18 holes. So when they hit a bad shot, it's like, hey, chalk it up, there's one, okay? And as they get to eight, they want to. And as they get closer to eight, they want to obviously minimize that and minimize the risk of hitting a bad shot. But they understand that they're going to have bad shots. As a baseball player, you need to understand that you're going to have bad at bats, you're going to have a bad pitching inning, you're going to walk a batter, you'll walk two batters, you're going to have a bad fielding. When you start expecting those things, okay, and they happen, failure is not as bad or you're not going to respond to that. And your stress and fear of those things happening kind of subconsciously is not going to be bad. You're going to be able to play looser, you're going to be able to respond to failure better, and you're going to create a tolerance to failure. That is the key factor. Create a tolerance to failure. And how you do that is through your expectations, understanding that you are going to fail, you are going to have bad at bats again, all those things that I mentioned. So really try to change your mindset as far as your expectation and change your expectations to help your stress and anxiety, because it's going to help, hey, if I were to tell you, hey, Johnny, you're gonna have a bad at bat, you're going to have a bad inning, you're going to have a bad era. So when it does happen, are you thinking about it prior to that? It's like, hey, I'm not so stressed out because I know it's also going to happen. I'm still trying to do my best, but it's not in the mindset of being like, hey, I can't make a mistake because nobody's expecting me to make a mistake. No, not at all. These coaches and these college coaches and your high school coaches understand that you're going to make mistakes, or they should, but the most important person is you need to understand also different framework of looking at this. Stress and fear is all through imagination, usually fear based. You think into the future of something bad happening, right? Something is bad. Bad is going to dramatically bad happen. Well, if you understand that, hey, you kind of take that away like, hey, this could happen, that's okay. And telling yourself that is okay, right? In the fear, if you're just putting yourself into the fear base of imagining bad things to happen, but not saying that's going that that's actually okay, then you are again creating all that tension. So think of when, when you have fear and anxiety from this aspect of like, hey, this stuff could happen, it's going to happen at some point, but that's okay. That should loosen you up. This is a framework that honestly I wish I had and it's one of those things that people hear like, hey, failure is part of the sport, but they don't really tell you how to deal with it, right? So I want to talk about that today. Please comment down below of anything that's helped you or anything that maybe you're struggling with. But I would love to hear anything that you guys are working on and anything else that you want to hear from me. Maybe in this landscape or anything recruiting world, baseball world, I'd be happy to dive into again. I hope this was impactful for you. Hopefully there's something you take away that you can bring to the field and it's all up here, changing your mental framework and your mindset. Alright, I'll see you in the next video.
