Prep Baseball Report Minnesota is excited to team up with- The Mindstrong Project. Our goal in this endeavor is to continue to provide the most up-to-date pertinent information and resources to the baseball community in the state of Minnesota.

Periodically, The Mindstrong Project will be providing content for the Prep Baseball Report Minnesota website; as they continue to work to build human performance through education while building an awareness of how the mind and body work together to sustain a consistent confident approach to game performance.

In this month's installment; The MindStrong Project talks about- Comfort Zone.

Comfort Zone - Challenge Zone - Growth Zone

Hope everyone is doing well and off to strong starts this spring. The focus today is going to surround leaving your comfort zone. As we touched on in previous articles our brain is built to survive. We call this the negativity bias. The negativity bias of our brain gets triggered in many ways: uncertainty, attention, struggle and change. All of these triggers result in our immediate response to avoid. We are built to avoid barriers and adversity due to the need to survive. This keeps us inside our comfort zone. Everything we want is outside of this zone! 

Anything that sparks our interest or passion outside our comfort zone immediately becomes a challenge. With challenge you create the opportunity for growth. We end up attacking challenge with fear or excitement and commonly the result becomes based off our ability to avoid the avoidance. We call this concept the "Three Ring Circus".

The Three Ring Circus gives us the visual that everything around us is chaos. We are the rock in the middle, the eye of the storm. "YOU"- the individual, the one to control within the circus. This would be the comfort zone. Very often, we tend to think we just need to aimlessly leave comfort zones and run into the storm everyday and according to many philosophies and theories that we will inevitably come out the other end with successful growth. Rather than looking at it with an aggressive focus along those lines, spend time asking yourself questions and building an awareness and understanding each of your days within the circus of life. 

Three Ring Circus:

You vs. You

You vs. Loved One 

You vs. World

Every conversation, idea, thought, action starts with yourself. This is the importance of internal self-talk and confidence. You must first realize you are your own competition and all the experience in your life is experienced by you. So, if you're going to leave your comfort zone you must first know why. 

Once you have established an internal sense of fulfillment and willingness on your own to move past your instinctive survival traits of keeping you safe you will enter this arena where you meet your loved ones. Teammates, friends, parents, coaches etc...

They are built to protect you and keep you safe as well. Their own biology will want to keep you safe and avoid future failure or pain. We forget this opportunity of growth many times and find conversations with close ones that revolve around doubt, fear or nerves as a negative. We must see it as a chance to receive more questioning and a higher sense of understanding who we really are. Again, your dreams and experiences are your own. Not your loved ones, so you again believe in yourself to a level of sustainable action moving into the final ring. THE WORLD.

If we are not careful we will believe the world is against us. We will stay inside our comfort zone due to the opinions of the world, the critics and the naysayers. At this stage, have the awareness that they too are humans and they too have a negativity bias. You must stand firm in confidence and stand firm in your ability to keep moving out of your comfort zone to embrace challenge and ultimately grow. You can check out our website for a free copy to our Diamond Series where you will find a list of questions around your purpose, standards, systems and visions. You can also check out our podcast on iTunes "The Mindstrong Project" where we take every individual through their own Diamond Series. 

 

Keep growing folks! 

Harv

 

www.mindstrongproject.com

Instagram: @themindstrongproject

Twitter: @themindstrongp

Facebook: The Mindstrong Project

Linkedin: The Mindstrong Project