BRUCE BOLT BLOG

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...

   * * *   Meet the little leaguer who got burned out, only to come back with a fierce love of the game that has propelled him to professional baseball: Kevin Parada - 1st round draft pick out of Georgia Tech, BRUCE BOLT athlete, and current minor league catcher. "In my early childhood, I got burned out from playing so much baseball. So I took a step away from the game and found something else to play. And then all of a sudden I actually went to a Cubs game with my brother and sister...and it just sparked that want...

  * * *  "Sitting in my locker is a pair of BRUCE BOLT batting gloves. I took 'em back with me to Nashville and I think I, I hit every single day. And I used the same pair for like two and a half months. Didn't get a blister, didn't get anything. I was. Yeah, I kind of like these, right? In the past, like in school, I'd tear up my hands in half a second with Nike batting gloves or rip a hole in my EvoShield I had, or Franklin's— literally my hands would bleed.But with Bruce Bolt, none of those problems. I'm...

 * * *   "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 seven out of 10 times...

  * * *   Meet the man who committed to play college baseball at Vanderbilt before he even played one inning in high school: Spencer Jones - 1st round draft pick, BRUCE BOLT Pro, and current minor league standout. "Season's been good so far. Early on I've had some success and I've been looking forward to playing a full season of pro baseball my whole life. Now that it's here, it's more than I could have asked for." Subscribe and listen to today's episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, too!

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.  What is Assertiveness? We teach our kids to be nice, share, and put other people first. As...