You Don’t Lose Confidence in One At-Bat
Why the mental game is trained one rep at a time.
A player goes 0-for-4.
He gets in the car and plays the game again.
The fastball he was late on.
The breaking ball he chased.
The pitch he should have crushed.
By the time he goes to sleep, four bad at-bats have become 40 mental reps.
Then he wakes up the next morning wondering where his confidence went.
This week in The Class, Blake McDonald gave us a better way to handle it:
Edit the film.
Change the Next Rep
The at-bat happened.
Learn from it.
But over the next 24 hours, don’t keep practicing the failure in your head.
Go back through the at-bat.
See the pitch.
See yourself recognize it.
See yourself on time.
See the barrel get there.
Change the ending.
The goal isn’t to pretend the failure never happened.
It’s to decide what gets the next mental rep.
The at-bat is over. The training isn’t.
▶️ Watch the Full Class with Blake McDonald
Can You Be Confident at .220?
Blake knows the feeling.
During one season, he was playing every day and hitting around .220.
There wasn’t much evidence in the box score suggesting a breakthrough was coming.
But he believed he was going to hit.
Not hoped.
Believed.
That led to one of the best questions from Week 3:
Can you be confident without needing results to make you confident?
Going 3-for-4 makes confidence easy.
Hitting .220 tests something different.
Can the belief remain before the results provide the proof?
Confidence Is a Dimmer Switch
Maybe we’ve been thinking about confidence the wrong way.
It’s not a light switch.
ON: Three hits.
OFF: Three strikeouts.
Confidence works more like a dimmer switch.
A bad game can turn it down.
A mistake can turn it down.
A slump can turn it down.
But one bad day doesn’t make the room go dark.
And the most important part of the analogy:
Your hand is on the dial.
Preparation turns it up.
Keeping promises to yourself turns it up.
Visualization turns it up.
Positive self-talk turns it up.
Doing something uncomfortable turns it up.
Responding well to failure turns it up.
Each becomes another small piece of evidence:
We’ve been here before. We can handle this.
You don’t need enough light to see the entire staircase.
Just enough to see the next step.
Take it.
Then the next one gets a little clearer.
That’s how confidence gets built.
One rep at a time.
Mind Over Talent
At Arizona, Blake played alongside another catcher he described as one of the most naturally gifted players he’d ever seen.
Yet Blake was playing ahead of him.
The separator wasn’t physical.
It was mental.
Blake had learned how to manage his mind.
The other catcher eventually developed that part of his game too and went on to be drafted in the fifth round.
Talent matters.
Strength matters.
Speed matters.
Skill matters.
But those tools become harder to access when the mind gets in the way.
The mental game doesn’t replace talent.
It helps unlock it.
Your 14U Batting Average Isn’t Going With You
One bad at-bat can feel enormous at 14.
So can a batting average.
A tournament.
Playing time.
An error.
But ask a college player to remember his batting average from a random 14U tournament.
He probably can’t.
That’s perspective.
The result matters enough to learn from.
It doesn’t matter enough to become your identity.
Reflect.
Adjust.
Move forward.
We’re preparing players for the next pitch, but we’re also preparing them for everything that comes after baseball.
Learning to separate what happened from who you are is a skill worth training early.
Sometimes, Start With a Smile
Want to turn the dimmer up before the next at-bat?
Try something simple.
Smile walking to the plate.
Change the body language.
Walk differently.
Breathe differently.
Create an alter ego if it helps.
Picture the most confident version of yourself.
How does that player walk to the box?
What does he look at?
What does he tell himself?
How does he respond after striking out?
Then become that player for the next pitch.
Sometimes the feeling doesn’t create the behavior.
The behavior creates the feeling.
Own the Training
This brings us back to the theme we’ve been building throughout The Class.
There’s a difference between attendance and ownership.
Showing up isn’t the same as developing.
Intentional training begins with three questions:
Who am I becoming?
Where am I going?
How will I work?
Then remove the negotiation.
Sets.
Reps.
Schedule.
When it’s time to work, work.
Eliminate distractions.
Keep the intent high.
Then reflect.
Did the work match the intent?
Did we embody the mantra?
What’s the next adjustment?
That’s ownership.
And it doesn’t end when a player makes varsity, commits to college or gets drafted.
Intentional training is a lifelong pursuit.
Train Like You’ve Never Won. Compete Like You’ve Never Lost.
Olympic champion freestyle skier Eileen Gu has shared a line that captures the balance we’re trying to develop:
“I train like I’ve never won, and I compete like I’ve never lost.”
Think about the two halves.
Train like you’ve never won.
Stay hungry.
Stay curious.
Don’t let yesterday’s success excuse today’s preparation.
There is another rep to take, another adjustment to make and another level to reach.
Then it’s time to compete.
Compete like you’ve never lost.
Trust the work.
Walk to the plate believing you belong there.
Stop carrying yesterday’s strikeouts into today’s box.
Preparation and confidence aren’t opposites.
Preparation builds confidence.
Do the work when nobody is watching.
Then trust it when everybody is.
And when the light gets a little dim?
Don’t panic.
Don’t let one result become an identity.
Put your hand back on the dial.
Turn it up one rep at a time.
Blake’s Mental Game Bookshelf
Blake also shared the books that have helped shape his approach to the mental game.
Becoming Supernatural — Joe Dispenza
The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey
Getting to Neutral — Trevor Moawad
The Mental Game of Baseball — H.A. Dorfman
The Art of Impossible — Steven Kotler
Think Again — Adam Grant
The Power of Now — Eckhart Tolle
The Talent Code — Daniel Coyle
Can’t Hurt Me — David Goggins
Areté — Brian Johnson
Have some fun.
Pick one.
Read.
Find one idea.
Put it to work.
That’s another rep.
Connect with Blake McDonald
Want to learn more from Blake or continue the conversation? Reach out and follow him here:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebaseballmonk/
Mental Beast: https://www.mentalbeast.net/
Next in The Class: Give Reps
Week 4 • September 16
Next week, we’re moving from the reps we take to the reps we give.
We’re excited to welcome Giovanni Blanchette to The Class: Elite Mindset Training to share his journey from college baseball into financial services and the lessons in discipline, mindset and preparation that carried with him.
The bigger question: What are you doing with what you’ve learned?
That’s Give Reps.
1/3 Life Skills. 1/3 Mental Skills. 1/3 College Prep every Wednesday!
Join us live Wednesdays 6pmPDT / 9pm EDT:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85644389445
Bring a friend. Bring a notebook. Bring a question. Come hang with us and get better together.
On the Adventure,
The Thrive Notes Team
Josh Hammer & Greg Moore