How to Win Big with Habit-Formation
/In our pitching school, we give away pins every session to a select few students. They say, “Commit to the Process.” To earn one, a pitcher must do any sort of pitching practice every single day between lessons to earn a star for her team. Then, over the span of a 10-week off-season, if she’s able to accumulate all 70 days of consistent work, she earns the pin. This is quite a feat, to say the least.
We are trying to teach players how to form habits. As you know, if you’re able to form habits, you can accomplish pretty much anything in life! Think of the marathon you’re training for or the language you’re trying to learn. If you can do a little every day you’ll eventually do amazing things! A pitcher earns a star for doing anything from tossing balls to her team catcher in the backyard to watching Netflix while doing spins on the couch. We even count visualizing as practice. I know what you’re thinking, visualizing seems too easy, but go ahead and try to do anything with out skipping a day and you’ll start to understand why we accept it as practice. While it’s important to practice with a ball, full-distance 3-6 times per week depending upon a player, the other days pitchers must train their habit-making skills.
Robin Bimson, my former Ithaca College pitching coach, Hall-of-Famer, and teammate of mine used to say “commit to the process” to us all of the time (especially if we were running too slow). These 4 simple words really stuck with me over the years. To me it meant there’s a proven path to follow, one in which hundreds of young women have traveled before me. Coaches have the job of creating and developing these processes. It’s the players who have the choice to “buy in” to what has been laid out for them.
Pitching school isn’t college, though. We are only with our pitchers 75 minutes per per week. Parents, however, are with them 100% of the way. That’s why we need you to buy into the process as well. We’d like you to be her instructor the other 167 hours of the week in which she isn’t getting lessons. If we ask her “have you done your practice?” and you defend her lack of completion, you have not bought in, and we have not done our job of inspiring your thought process.
The pin displays the phrase, “Commit to the Process” for a reason - it’s controllable. When pitchers focus on other daily goal besides this, they get discouraged and un-coachable. Pitchers need to be focused on the present.
We have each player create three levels of goals every season. Committing to the process is the base. It’s the bedrock on top of which all other goals will be achieved.
Big Goals (long term) - What do you want to have accomplished by the end of your softball career?
Little Goals (short term) - What do you want to have accomplished by the end of this season?
Process goals (present) - What are you going to do every day that you can mark in a calendar to achieve your little goal?
If a pitcher creates these, then you encourage her (ahem, go out and catch), she will create a foundation of dedication, commitment, and habit formation skills which will serve her for the rest of her life.
