Players – How Your Phone Can Help You Play Better

Cindy Bristow - Softball Excellence

Do you ever have so many things in your head that you struggle with what to tell yourself and what to leave out? If so, that's normal – but not helpful. Let your phone help you simplify things. Knowing what to think and when to think it is critical for softball success, and yet too many of us have too much in our heads. Find out how your cell phone just might be your solution.

The players I work with try really hard not to fail, and yet most of them do. They also try really hard to do all the things they're told, and yet most of them don't. The question is why? What keeps you from doing all the things you've been taught to do when you're pitching, hitting, fielding or throwing?

I've found that the answer is simple – literally. Here's what I mean. Let's take pitching as an example. I work with pitchers every single day and every single one of them wants to get faster. And yet not one of them can tell me the most important thing they need to do to pitch faster. Instead, they start listing ALL the things they need to do to pitch.

While that might not sound unusual to you, especially if you're not a pitcher, I think it will if I talk cell phones instead of pitching. Here's a look at the Fastpitch Softball Free Article on How Your Phone Can Help You Play Better homepage (or whatever you call it on a phone) of my cell phone. It's nothing too unusual, right? Basically, my homepage hits the highlights that are important to me – and I'm guessing yours does as well. (I might do it looking a little cooler since my home page is customized for softball!)

But, while it shows me 9 different apps (one is just the Apps button), I actually counted and discovered that I have 102 total apps! Now to me, that's nuts! There is NO WAY I'd ever use that many, and while some just came with my phone, I must have felt the others were important enough to download them. However it happened, I've ended up with 102 different apps on my phone!!

What does this have to do with our example of pitching, or your softball playing? Well, what if I didn't have a homepage that allowed me to list the most important apps, and instead, I had to flip through all 102 apps every time I wanted to find one? It would be a huge pain, wouldn't it?

In fact, here's a list of the things that flipping through all 102 of my apps would do to me:

• Make Me Less Effective (I couldn't find what I was looking for)

• Make Me Less Efficient (I couldn't find it very fast)

• Make Me Frustrated

• Slow Me Down

• Maybe End Up With the Wrong One

While none of these are good when you're using your phone, imagine these same problems happening to you when you're trying to find the most important thing you need to do to pitch fast! In fact, this list of things might perfectly describe what you feel like when you're struggling with a skill.

If so, it means that in order for you to find the 2 or 3 most important things to do right now to be successful at pitching faster, getting the bunt down, hitting the outside pitch, sliding to avoid the tag – you're first having to access ALL the information you've ever been told about it. In other words, you're flipping through all 102 apps in your mind before finding the one you need.

On a phone – that's nuts! That's why phones, and computers, have Home Pages. They let us separate the MOST IMPORTANT things from ALL THE THINGS, to help us be more efficient, more effective, faster and work better.

So you've got to use your brain the same way you use your cell phone. The next time you're doing a skill and you either fail or get frustrated, remind yourself that your brain is now searching for the app that will solve the problem. So help your brain by only listing the 2-3 MOST IMPORTANT things you need to do to make that skill happen instead of ALL THE THINGS you know about that skill!