The Fearless Warrior Podcast

[Mentally Stronger Challenge] Help her bounce back FASTER after mistakes.

• Amanda Schaefer

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MENTAL TRAINING REPLAY - DAY 1 CHALLENGE

I’ll be explaining the WHY behind this challenge and HOW it relates to your mental game.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the fearless warrior podcast, a place for athletes, coaches and parents who know the value of a strong mindset. I'm your host, coach AB, a mental performance coach on a mission, former softball coach, wife and mom of three. Each episode, we will dive deep into all things mental performance, mindset tools and how to rewire the brain for success. So, if your goal is to gain the mental edge and learn the secrets of mental performance, mindset tools and how to rewire the brain for success, so if your goal is to gain the mental edge and learn the secrets of mental performance, you're in the right place. Let's tune in to today's episode. All right, they're coming in. What's up? All right, as everyone gets in here, we are going to start here in just a second. Uh, real quick. Uh, this is for parents and players, so parents don't run off. This is for both. This is day one and I can see a lot. Hi guys, some of you guys are at the field. I love it. Okay, welcome to the mentally stronger challenge. Can you guys hear me? Okay, can I get some thumbs up? All right, I will ask.

Speaker 1:

Since we are recording this, I will ask that you guys stay muted for the sake of recording. There will not be a whole lot of time for you guys to unmute, so everyone can take a deep breath. I'm not going to force you to unmute. You won't be on the hot seat, you don't have to have all the right answers, but we will be using the chat. So, as we get started here, let's fire up the chat. As I say I don't remember your calls. Let's fire up the chat. Let's fire up the chat as I say I'm going to refer your calls. Let's fire up the chat. Say hey, I would love to hear where are you guys from. We did this in the Facebook group, where I got to see all the different States, and so, uh, let's, let's try it in the chat. Move. Michigan, arizona. Oh my gosh, I should probably have the chat open. Florida, niles, california oh my gosh, it's going so fast. Tennessee, tennessee, ohio, wisconsin, virginia, kearney, nebraska. All right, as you guys are doing that I'm so glad that you're here I would love for all of you guys to be on camera so that I can see your wonderful faces. It also brings up the energy and we're going to have fun. This is about 15 to 20 minutes and it's already 7.02.

Speaker 1:

So I am a woman of my word as a coach If you're late or if you're early, you're on time Is that the same? It's like ingrained in our brains. A little bit about me. I'm coach AB. I'm a mama to three beautiful babies, I'm a wife, I'm from Nebraska and I'm a mental performance coach for the past I don't know 16 years. I have been ingrained in the softball world either, giving pitching lessons, coaching at the high school level, helping with colleges doing mental training, and for the past six years, I get to be a mental performance coach full-time. This is what I get to do. A mental performance coach full-time this is what I get to do, and my goal is to make mental performance training accessible to all ages, and I wish I would have had these skills when I played in college.

Speaker 1:

And so for you guys to be here from all over I love the Go Bills in Buffalo, as you see these spaces and as you see all of these people in your community this is something that can be fun, and so I want you all to take a deep breath and let it out. Raise your hand if you're feeling a little nervous. You're like what did my parents sign me up for? Anybody? There's some honest people. Some of you are honest. So now that you guys have said hey in the chat, I told you a little bit about who I am. It's not just me Shout out to my team. We are small but mighty. We have coach Kara, we have coach Sarah, who's on the call tonight, coach Mara and coach Shelly, who you'll see on coaching calls throughout the week. So a few housekeeping items, as I like to call them. I see some of my warrior girls Housekeeping. I'm going to roll through these really quickly because I want you guys to have the best experience this week. Yes, some of you guys are already diving in and you're good and you're set to go. So this might be a review for a lot of you.

Speaker 1:

So, number one each day you have three things to do. One, you're going to do the challenge and you might notice that those emails are going out at 5 am. I do that for my East Coast people, especially if you guys want to do these before school. So look for that email. Make sure you star your emails from me Fearless, fast Pitch and then those challenge instructions will be in your email. If you don't get an email from me, all of our information is on the challenge landing page. So coach Sarah is going to pop that in the chat for you guys. Um, if, for some reason, you don't get our emails or you need a quick place to grab a link and you can't find something, I guarantee it's probably on that landing page, um, that you have access to, and then every day, you're going gonna post your results in the Facebook group or on Instagram. This is the first time we've done it on Instagram to win prizes.

Speaker 1:

So, speaking of prizes, you guys wanna see them. Do you guys even know what you can win? Well, first off, we're giving away a ghost bat, which I've also never done. I thought that would be really cool. Raise your hand if you all know what a ghost bat is or you know what. If you win, you can pick whatever bat you want. It's about $450 right now, so how about that? We'll just up the Emmy. How cool is that?

Speaker 1:

Second thing is over Christmas break, these puppies were on sale, so I bought a pair of AirPod Pros. You can win those. We're going to give away some stickers tonight. And then we've got lots of fearless gear. Now these are from my closet, so you guys can't have these, but the cool thing is is, I'll send you a virtual gift card. You can pick out your own design, your own size, and I'll ship you guys that. So we're going to do that at the end of tonight's call. And uh, yeah, that's. I thought prizes would make it really fun. We've given away some pretty cool prizes in the past.

Speaker 1:

And lastly, three is what you're doing right now. We're here doing mini. I'm calling these mini mental trainings via zoom. I'm going to be explaining why I had you do this challenge with your socks and your shoes today and how it relates to your mental game. So why, why would I have you do these and why is it so important and so, again, these are super, super helpful that you guys are doing these as a family, because I can give your daughter all the tools in the world, but if her support system isn't rallying around her parents, we sometimes unknowingly unravel some of their mindset work that we're doing together. So it's really important that we're all on the same page, and I see a lot of parents on the call tonight. So parents wait for Thursday. Thursday is going to be awesome for you. And then we also have parent challenges in the Facebook group as well. We do this because we want you to challenges in the Facebook group as well. We do this because we want you to be involved in our community as well. So we have an amazing podcast. We're coming up on our two year anniversary of the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Dig around there and some other fun challenges that you guys can also win prizes. All right, you guys ready to dig in? What Fire up the chat? What did you think about today's challenge? Now, if you haven't done it yet, it's okay, you can do it later tonight. So if you have done it, what did you think? Did you like it? Did you love it? Did you hate it? You are not going to hurt my feelings. What did you think of today's challenge? It was fun, challenging. It was very hard. Yes, it was pretty hard. Doing it after this. I love it. It was okay, but hard. It was fun and complicated. I'm seeing a lot of fun, fun, fun, fun, challenging. Still working on it. Fun but hard. We thought it was really fun, but challenging. I'm seeing a lot of fun. I love that. Now, a good friend of mine always says life is 50-50. So it can be fun and frustrating at the same time. Right, and it's hard. How many of you guys think that tonight I'm going to award a prize for whoever had the fastest Type. Yes, if you think that's who wins the prize, anyone think that Like, ooh, I'm competitive, I got to be fastest. Yeah, some of you guys are saying yes and the answer is no. The goal of today is that you did challenge one. So one of the things that we do on all of our trainings, I want you guys all to put your hands up. Put your hands up. This is called a whoop whoop in our world. In the fearless fan. I see some of my warrior girls on the call. We're going to say whoop, whoop and we're all going to do it together, ready, one, two, three. Like. I want the other people in the rooms of your houses to be jealous of the zoom call that you're on. That's how much fun we have. Okay, so now that we got that out of the way, we're going to do some prizes at the end of this. But again, I have to explain why I had you do this. This was something that I invented during the pandemic, which is wild that we're now in 2025. And so the point is this I wanted to make you do something hard on purpose. Did you know that, according to a Harvard professor, gerald Zaltman, 95% of our decisions are subconscious. Subconscious meaning that it's on autopilot. We don't really think about it. It becomes a routine or a habit. Okay, and so how often do you think about tying your shoes? Now, I have my oldest is seven and I have a three-year-old and a two-year-old. I haven't I've yet to buy them shoes with laces in it. So how many of you guys have shoes that you're like? Oh, I have to find a pair of shoes with actual laces. Which Chucks, chucks? Who? Who raised your hand? Who has a pair of Chuck Taylors? You guys call them Chucks. They're like in style again. I saw so many Chucks in the Facebook group. So cool. But what I want you to think about is how many times do you actually slow down and think about how to tie your shoes or eat your breakfast, or brush your teeth or run out to the car? Right, we don't. Those are so many of our subconscious decisions throughout the day. So how does this relate to softball? Why am I pointing this out to you? This means that a majority of our choices, our behaviors and even our emotions are driven by these subconscious thoughts. These are unconscious patterns and if we can bring them into our conscious mind. This is the power of mental training. So, now that you've met me, you are in on the secret on how to make things into your conscious mind, which means we are aware of it. Step one is awareness, and step two is we take action, either with mental skills training or coaching. Right to talk about emotions, and I saw the word frustrated, so we're going to use frustrated as that. Give me a scale of one to 10 on how frustrated you got 10 being like, oh yeah, super frustrating. One being like nah, I'm good, coach, ab, ooh, six, four, seven, three, seven, 10, seven, zero four, three, one, seven. Oh my gosh, too fast. Okay, do you guys see how powerful this is? Look at all the numbers and so what may be a seven for somebody else, maybe you're three. But guess what? Almost all of you experienced some level of frustration. I think I can't remember whose video it was because I don't want to call them out, but I think they were like, oh easy, this is easy. And then, halfway through the video, they were like bro, ok, this is actually challenging. How many of you guys experienced that? The roller coaster of like, oh my God, like socks, I got this and then, as soon as you got to, the laces was like you know, yeah, some of you guys. Ok, see, when we experience these emotions, guess what, you're human. The goal is not to get rid of the frustration, it's what you do with it that matters. Okay. So guess what else our subconscious does? Let's apply this to softball. How many of you guys you can type yes or me in theball? How many of you guys you can type yes or me in the chat? How many of you guys have watched the most glorious, meaty, fatty fastball down the middle of the plate and you knew you should have swung at it and you watched it go by and you struck out looking already getting some yeses in the chats yeah, all day, baby Me. Yes. If you've played softball, even for just a couple of games, you've probably had that happen to you and you knew you wanted to swing it logically. Logically, you wanted to swing right. If it was easy as just making decisions with our logical mind, then we'd all be batting a thousand, we'd be 10 for 10, right, if it was really just as easy as making that decision. So why do we not bat a thousand? Okay, so, parents, do you see now how her emotional rollercoaster and our subconscious thoughts and her mindset make this a really, really tough sport. Now there are some non-softball peeps Type this in the chat what other sports do you guys play? Because this isn't just for softball. Like mental skills can be applied to all sports. Let's see it. Powerlifting yes, let's go. Gymnastics, dance, volleyball Ooh, lots of volleyball. Bowling, bowling, basketball, cheer, flag football yes, flag football, baton dance, gymnastics oh my gosh, you guys, this goes so fast. So if you're a multi-sport athlete, this also applies. I just happened to be giving you some examples from the softball world. Makes sense, okay. So when we think about this, if you've found yourself saying things like and this is more to parents I want to bring this to your attention. Some of the things that I wrote down that are pretty common, that I've had parents submit before, is if you've told your athlete to calm down, I parents, I want you guys to hop in the chat, say yes, if you've caught yourself saying this calm down, trust your stuff, breathe, just just breathe, relax, just be confident. I see some giggles. Why are you guys giggling? What are you starting to realize? Some of you guys might be starting to realize that if you. You have said these things as a parent, or maybe you even said these things to yourself as an athlete, but maybe you've never been taught how. Now there's some athletes on the call that have been in trainings with me, so you guys have the competitive advantage. You've already started in this work. But it's also not just a magic trick. It doesn't. You don't just wake up one day and decide all right, I'm going to work on my mindset and it's magically fixed. What I want to point out to you is that you're human, okay, but coach AB, we can just work harder on the physical skills. I get it. It's tempting, right. Parents type, yes, or me in the chat. How many of you guys have kind of stayed awake at night Like, oh man, maybe she needs a new hitting coach, or maybe we just got to find her a pitching coach, or maybe we just need to work harder. Or what if I printed out a calendar and, like begged her to practice? She just needs to be more motivated. Oh my gosh, look at the giggles and see the giggles. We, we fall into this trap right Of like, if we just work harder. Now I'm I'm not here to tell you that you can just sit on the couch and then magically be a great softball player. What I'm telling you is that it can be both, and if I can make a case for this this week and show you what to do when she starts overthinking what tools that she needs to get her off that emotional rollercoaster with real tools. This isn't just pep talks. This isn't just motivational quotes yes, we post lots of motivational quotes on our social media, but that's not what this is about. I want to show you that when she has the right science-backed, researched and proven methods to give her what she needs to be regulated, confident and composed. This is when your physical and your mental come together to help you reach your full potential. I think one of the biggest things that we hear from parents all the time is we might get some giggles on this is I just want her to see what I see on. This is I just want her to see what I see. Ooh, I saw some head nods. I just want her to believe in herself, like I believe in her. Look at your daughter, don't look at me. Look at your daughter and tell her like dude, you're good, you are good at softball If you would just play right. Okay, I love this. Coach AB is corny, I'm cheesy and I'm okay with that. So all the things that you guys have been doing are awesome and I am by no means here to point a finger and say what you're doing is wrong, but the fact that you guys are here learning this now is really exciting, because five years ago this was like crickets and now UCLA had a mental performance coach in the dugout. Ou is focusing on this, like my alma mater and all of these other schools are really starting to to get on board with this and have these resources available. And so, if I can make this available to you guys now, game over, baby, like I want this for you guys. So, parents, do you guys have a pen and paper or you could do some mental math, but it's kind of powerful to see this on paper. This is kind of like a bonus activity tonight. I have something that I want you to write down. Okay, how many hours a week does she spend at practice with her team? Just a quick guess. You don't have to put it in the chat. Just scratch paper or mental math. How many hours a week do you spend at practice with her team? Just a quick guess you don't have to put it in the chat just scratch paper or mental math. How many hours a week do you spend at practice? How many hours a week does she spend at lessons hitting lessons, pitching lessons, slapping, catching, outfield lesson, any, any type of position, specific lesson and bonus, if you count all of those other sports that you guys mentioned, right? So, like, if you play basketball, do you like shoot the extra reps in the gym, you know? Next one how many hours does she spend at lifting speed, agility, anything strength related? How many hours a week? This could be through her school, this could be on your own or something else. That would fall into this category is, like if you send her to a chiropractor or a PT, how many hours a week? Add that up. And then the next one is how many hours a week do you spend getting reps at home? Or, if you don't practice at home, do you go to like, a cage or facility? These are like reps that you do on your own outside of team practice. How many hours a week do you spend doing that or playing catch in the backyard? It's getting warmer here in Nebraska. I love that. See, you guys are. You guys are in it. Half of you guys probably just got home from the chiropractor or the PT or practice or lessons. Some of you might be going later tonight and then how many of you are in season right now? So go ahead and write down how many hours she's playing in games and then go ahead and total that up. I know we got to do some math. Oh my gosh, and it's 20. We still have to do prizes. I promise after this we're going to do prizes. Okay, go ahead and type it in the chat. Oh, yeah, you, you guys in Arizona and California and Florida and Texas, you guys can just play year round. Okay, just pop that number in the chat. Roughly how many hours a week Seven, 12, 46. Yeah, if you count like Friday, saturday, sunday for tournaments 20, 15, 28, 13. Yeah, and sometimes this number might be different depending on if it's off season versus in season. Right, okay, so we got those numbers. Has anyone ever like stopped to think about this? Some of you guys are like, oh my gosh, and I'm not even doing dollar amounts, like we're not even going to go there, Cause I don't, I don't want to faint tonight to know how much you guys spent, so we're just doing? We're just doing hours. So now my next thing for you is how many hours a week are you actively doing mindset training or mental skills training? Yeah, but you're here, right. So this week, no, no, no. This week you could at least total up mental skills challenge week. Right, but I'm seeing a lot of zeros. Now we do have some warrior members on the call. So if you do your skills training with me or you're a one-on-one client of mine, then yeah, you're going to put some hours in there and you might be realizing oh man, we do spend a lot of time on the physical side of the game. And what if I could just show you that, with just 15 minutes a week, we can unlock a whole new level of confidence for your daughter? Who's in? Who wants that? And what if it didn't have to be weird or hard, right, like this isn't. I'm not asking you to like get out a box of Kleenexes and I'm not telling you like I told you you were mentally weak, told you you had negative thoughts. Everybody has negative thoughts, everybody is going to experience frustration this week, and that's my goal to show you. Yeah, I'm seeing some me's. Yes, please, let's go, okay. So now that you've kind of like seen this and I've drawn this to your attention. I just want to kind of like help bust some of these myths for you this week. So, um, I would love for you guys to type in the chat what was your biggest takeaway from today's mini session. Like, what was one thing that you're like oh man, I want to remember this that I either shifted for you or that you realized and some of you guys are in mental training with me and you're still learning and you're here and you're doing the dang thing, which is awesome, yes, I love it. Haley, taking the time, confidence Everyone has different frustration levels frustrating levels that I'm human. It's okay to be frustrated. I want to get mental training in. Yeah, so many people have the same issues. That's the number one thing that we hear all the time when we get these trainings together, right, okay? So, speaking of bats bats break. Confidence is forever. It's like my favorite, favorite little buzzword. So, at the end of each training and I'm trusting me, I'm going to go back and read all of these takeaways because I love them so much we're going to award prizes. Okay, so I already talked about what prizes. As a reminder in order to win those. All you have to do is submit your challenge results. Whether you feel like you failed, whether you feel like your time was fast or slow, like, all you have to do is say, yes, coach, I did it, and you're entered to win prizes. So for tonight's prizes, I'm going to be doing something I've also never done before is we are going to give away five sticker packs live on the call. So these are our self-talk stickers. I designed these to where you don't have to use all of these stickers, but you can like build a statement. A lot of these are waterproof. You can put them on your helmet, you can put them on your water bottle, um and so this is. These are $5 on our website. We're going to give away five of these tonight, and what we did was coach Sarah uh, took all of you guys sneaky, sneaky while you guys were on the call. We did a random number generator and it looks like oh, do we have a fifth? Coach Sarah, looks like we have four. Do we have a fifth one in there? Tessa Wells, chloe G, kelly and Danny. I love that. You guys love stickers and Heath, all right. So here's what I need you guys to do If you are the winner and we called your name for these. You need you guys to do. If you are the winner and we called your name for these, you have to DM us either at Facebook or at Instagram and say, hey, I want a sticker pack for tonight, and then we just need your mailing address and who you want us, who you want me, to write my little note to. Um, I'll be sending those five out and we're gonna be doing this um on every zoom. Don't worry If you are not live on the zoom, we are going to be posting these on YouTube and on our podcast. So if you can't make it live, there will be more chances on other days to win stickers. You do not have to be live, however, to win the other challenges. So tonight's first prize, after the stickers, is for the referrers. So we pulled the top 10 refers at that invite link. The parent challenge was to invite your team. Now, by the way, when you guys invite your team and they say yes and then they sign up with your link, you can also win stickers, t-shirts and even a hoodie. So our top 10 refers Tori, you edged past Ashley Ashley's in second, deb, patricia, kim, chelsea, ashley, chloe, maddie and Alyssa you guys were our top 10. We put that in a random number generator before the call and the winner is number eight, which is Chloe. Chloe Gazdik, you are the winner of a I guess I didn't say the price a $25 Amazon gift card. Did I say that? So we've got some gift cards to give away. You guys can fight over who wants to spend that, if it's mom or the athlete. However, you guys want to divvy that up, we will also send that digital Amazon gift card to you as well. And then the last one is for the player challenge. So anyone that posted their time for the socks and shoes this prize is a fearless t-shirt. Where did I put those? And, as a reminder, we have lots of different designs on our other. I have like a Shopify website. That's a different. We have some really cool t-shirts that you guys can pick out, um, and then it's just easier. You can pick out your size and what you want. And what we do for that is anyone that posted on the socks and shoes challenge anyone that did additional entries, like when you share this to your stories and you tag us or you post on your own. We're tallying all of those and the winner for that tonight is Jenny Quick Mark. That's your Facebook name, jenny Quick Mark. It's like a tongue twister. So if you're with us, live. Uh, you guys can all DM us. We can celebrate with you. Um, you can, we'll. We'll figure out how to get those to you guys in the DMS, but that's it. That's a wrap. You guys hung out with me for 27 minutes. We did go a little bit long today. Tomorrow will not be as long. I did already unlock tomorrow's challenge. So if you go to that landing page where coach Sarah just posted, I've already unlocked challenge number two. You can get a headstart and I'll see you right back here for the next mental, mini mental training. Sound good, you guys are awesome. All right, I'll see you guys tomorrow. Bye.

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