Foreward
This post is the first in a series of posts I plan to do throughout this year all related to lessons I learned while growing up playing competitive sports. Sports have been an integral part of human culture for centuries, providing not only physical exercise and entertainment, but also valuable life lessons. From teamwork and perseverance to determination and resilience, I believe sports can teach us skills and values that can be applied to our personal and professional lives. Whether you’re an avid athlete or simply a fan, there are countless parallels between the lessons learned through sports and the challenges we face in our daily lives. A lot of the success I have found and continue to find in my life, I attribute to growing up as a competitive athlete. With this series of posts throughout the year, I hope to effectively relay these lessons I learned on the field to people who may not have had the same experiences as me or to people who will be able to digest the concepts easier because of their ability to resonate with sports.
Background
First, I will give you a little background to this post and how I learned this lesson while playing sports. Growing up, I played pretty much all sports but baseball was always my main sport. I played baseball from the time I was ~4 years old until my sophomore year of college. Baseball, in general, is filled with a multitude of life lessons but this one I learned because I was a catcher. Throughout the years, I was fortunate enough to catch a ton of extremely talented pitchers. Several of them are still playing ball in the big leagues, and some of them stopped playing in college. Some of them were 6′ 5″ and threw 98 mph, and some were 150 pounds and could place 5 different pitches. Not only were they all physically different, but a majority of them were also mentally different. Because the pitcher-catcher combination, sometimes referred to as ‘the battery’, is so important in baseball, I had to learn to be able to resonate with all of them. I had to learn to know my pitcher.
Everyone who has ever been around sports, or especially taught something in the realm of sports as a coach or an instructor, knows that the way athletes respond to various situations and coaching styles varies greatly. This is especially true for pitchers, and anyone who has dealt with pitchers consistently knows this to be true. Typically, during baseball games, if you are talking to a pitcher, it is not for a good reason. Typically, there is some sort of adversity or tension present, and you are trying to work with them to get through it. How you go about this is extremely dependent on which pitcher is on the mound at the time and being able to adjust your approach to whoever is on the mound at the time is crucial for success.
I played with pitchers all across the mental spectrum. Some pitchers needed a more aggressive & blunt intervention. These were typically my favorite to catch. These pitchers would need me to call a time-out, walk out to the mound, look them in the eyes, and tell them they need to focus and get their shit together. If they spiked too many balls in the dirt, I would spike it even harder on the throwback out to them. They needed to get fired up to get back on track and once they got that fire back, there was no putting it out. Other types of pitchers, however, would use their gloves to wipe their tears if you talked to them like that. They would fold up, tuck their tail, and eventually spiral out of the inning. These types of pitchers needed a more comforting approach. They needed a positive intervention. They needed me to walk out there, give them some positive words of encouragement, help build their confidence back up, and then help them find their way back. Now, these are two ends of the spectrum and most pitchers fell somewhere in between… but there was a wide variance between pitchers and there were plenty on the outer ends of the spectrum.
The way that you handled these different pitchers was extremely critical. If you walked out to the first pitcher and told him everything was going to be okay and that you had faith in him, he would remain without that fire and nothing would get fixed. If you went out to the second pitcher and told him that you were getting tired of his crap and that he needed to get it together… he would fold and the inning would just get worse. The best part is that sometimes you had to deal with pitchers on different ends of the spectrum in the same game or even in the same inning. I had to learn how to adapt and react to whoever I was working with at the time if I wanted to make things work and improve the situation. This is where I learned the importance of knowing your pitcher. Though this lesson was learned in sports, it applies to all relationships in life whether it be personal, professional, romantic, etc.
In a romantic setting, most people describe this as ‘knowing your partner’s love language’. This is a newish trend in society recently that essentially means that in order to make your relationship stronger with your significant other, you need to understand the best way(s) to make them personally feel loved. Some people respond best to physical touch, some to quality time, and some to acts of service. If you buy someone who needs words of affirmation a nice gift, they may not think too much of it… but if you tell them that you are proud of them after they worked hard at something, they won’t forget it. Knowing these things about your partner is essential to happy, successful relationships but you don’t know these things until you get to know them on a personal level. Similarly, personal (non-romantic) relationships only grow stronger with a deeper understanding of how that person operates. Being able to connect with people on a personal level and knowing what type of encouragement they could use in a time of need, or what best way to push them if they need to be pushed, only deepens the foundation of that relationship and increases trust, communication, and respect.
In a professional environment, understanding who you are dealing with is oftentimes critical whether you are working with them as teammates to work toward a common goal, working on them as a client to win their business, or managing a group of people from a leadership position. When working with a client, understanding what makes them tick or how they respond to different approaches can not only help you get through to them, but it can also help to facilitate effective communication and increase trust. In terms of a team setting, being able to understand your teammates and how they respond to different forms of collaboration can only increase cohesion and synergy within the team. Understanding each other’s strengths, weaknesses, communication styles, and decision-making processes can help the team work together efficiently and achieve common goals. From a leadership perspective, I somewhat touched on this topic in a recent post of mine discussing the attributes of Rooster & Hangman from the new Top Gun movie. Being able to lead a group effectively means knowing how the team members want and/or need to be led and adjusting your approach accordingly. In the aforementioned post, I refer to this as being able to ‘slide the scale’. People have different communication styles, motivations, and needs, and a leader who can slide the scale and adapt their approach to meet those needs is better equipped to engage and inspire their team.
Getting to know people better, understanding what makes them individually tick, and being able to connect with people all across the personality spectrum are some of the many tangible superpowers in life. By understanding people better and being able to resonate with them, you are able to communicate more effectively, facilitate positive change and build more trusting and strong relationships. Whether it is with your significant other, a good friend, or a teammate in business, learn how to know your pitcher.
