BRUCE BOLT BLOG / BeBetter

As a mental skills coach, I hear frustrated parents, coaches, and athletes chalk failure up to a lack of mental toughness. Here’s the thing… mental toughness isn’t a line in the sand where failure happens or the ability to white knuckle through adversity until the wheels come off. Furthermore, mental toughness isn’t a fixed trait we are born with or born without. Further-furthermore, youth athletes are in the process of developing mental toughness, just like physical skills! Mental toughness is a constellation of trainable skills. These skills provide the ability to stay in control of the mental processes that drive...

 * * * Stay in the know   "When the world shut down, I was eight games into my senior year of baseball. I feel like I kind of gave my life to the sport. Everything I had worked for kind of got stripped away from me. I was sitting in my English class and my phone started to blow up with orders. BRUCE BOLT had just started to gain a little bit of traction and it, it really helped with taking my mind off of what was happening with high school baseball.Baseball's the only sport where you can fail...

The developmental years have a lot of built-in pressure. Kids contend with academics, physical and emotional changes, and jockeying for social position. Uncertainty, inexperience, and FOPO (fear of other people’s opinions) create choppy seas. Sports magnify these things. For some kids, staying under the radar is an effective survival mechanism, so resist the urge to perceive it as a failure of assertiveness. Passivity provides emotional, physical, and psychological safety. Don’t worry, assertiveness and passivity aren’t an either/or proposition and they aren’t fixed traits.  Stay in the know What is Assertiveness? We teach our kids to be nice, share, and put...

[Also featured in USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, and Sports Business Journal] Perhaps you’ve noticed that, every time Aledmys Diaz steps to the plate this season, he sports a pair of mismatched batting gloves—one blue, one red. They don’t integrate quite perfectly with the trademark green and gold of his new team, the Oakland Athletics. Aledmys’ teammates on the A’s have noticed. “They asked, ‘Are they Cuba colors?’” the utility man said with a smile in a recent conversation. While blue and red indeed adorn the flag of Aledmys’ native land, his sartorial choice speaks to something more personal than...

As parents, we want sports to help our kids learn teamwork, become leaders, build mental toughness, and develop social skills. We want sports to be fun. Sometimes this doesn’t align with the way we assess their performance. Instead, we measure by winning/losing, mistakes, and comparison to capabilities and expectations. Viewed from the bleachers and the folding chairs, repeated mistakes, bad decisions, and perceived subpar performance cause us to heat up. Threat sensors in the primitive part of the brain fixate on what’s upsetting us. This information becomes brighter, louder, and crisper than everything else. We dive headfirst into a negative thought/feeling loop, creating a...

As a mental skills coach, I define high performance this way: High performance is the ability to execute the task at hand when the situation requires it. This execution happens in the present moment, and the most valuable mental resource to make it happen is attention. The brain’s default is to SQUIRREL… wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, it’s the brain’s tendency to wander off. For an athlete, there are 3 unconscious processes that pull attention from the task at hand. Stay in the know Number 1: Assessing the Current Experience as Bad This is mindfulness 101, as I...