To me, it's training the skills that lead to performance enhancement and personal growth. No one plays their best ball all the time. To approach that takes maturity first, then specific tools and strategies for effectively communicating mind to muscle. A challenge, to be sure. Just like any skills, some kids are pretty good at mental skills as a whole, and others are pretty poor. This often, IMHO, doesn't correlate at all to their talent. It does correlate to experience, but I firmly believe we can accelerate this learning curve. In baseball today, there is great training in the mechanics of the game, but mental skills training is, in some cases, pretty sketchy.
My point: if you think a large part of the game is mental skills, you should be spending a large part of your training time (and even money) on these skills. If you don't use me as a resource, use someone! Brian Cain, Ken Ravizza, Tom Hanson, Harvey Dorfman, Robert Neff, others? If you're interested, I do Mental Skills Training every Sunday that I'm home for 90 minutes at my apartment (Dallas), up to 8 student-athletes MAX. Also, I want to let you know that my book is freshly re-printed, updated with illustrations and user-friendly exercises and ideas. The published version is coming out in a few months (Coaches Choice), but that's written to coaches; my version is written to athletes. Check my website CoachTraub.com for details.
I love your thoughts and feedback about this topic, generally, or my work, specifically. I even like to hear (believe it or not) direct criticisms of my work!
Thank you.
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