58 | Mastering the Mindset: FROM Victim to Warrior Mindset

[00:00:00] But when I got to college freshman year, that was something that I was told, you need to be faster. And then we took those steps in order for me to get faster. When you get to college and you're in the weight room three, four times a week, you're automatically going to start getting stronger. So that was something that's given to you in the routine of a college pitcher.

[00:00:23] And so you should take advantage of it if you're in on the other side of it, if you're in the weight room and you're not increasing your weight when you're doing squats, deadlifts, any sort of bench press, any sort of lifts that you can increase your weight on and trying to reach a certain weight goal or you keep doing the same weight. Say I say I'm doing 25 on each side for squat every single time I squat for months. I am not going to improve at whatsoever.

[00:00:50] Hello and welcome to Catching You, a Dad and Daughters softball journey. I'm Rusty, a dad who's been in the dugout and on the sidelines. And I'm Lacie, the daughter whose journey through softball has been filled with incredible wins, tough losses, and so many lessons both on and off the field. For the past 16 years, we've navigated the highs and lows of softball together, from the local fields to national tournaments and everything in between.

[00:01:16] From the challenges of recruitment during COVID to the mental and emotional rollercoaster that comes with being a student athlete, we'll be sharing the perspectives of both the parent and athlete and first-hand experience of the impact of sports on mental health and the importance of support from the sidelines. Welcome back, everybody, to Catching You. And here goes Rusty Hannah with me by beautiful Dr. Lacie. Lacie, how are you? I'm good. Don't lie, you have a cold.

[00:01:44] I do, but it's not as bad as my one that I had in San Jose where I was bedridden. Yeah, Jesse gave you this cold, right? He did. Yeah, so we just got back from driving down the coast, right, in Monterey. You went to the aquarium? Yeah. How was that? I've always wanted to go because of finding Dory. Yeah, right.

[00:02:09] And my favorite animal is a shark, so I was looking forward to seeing some sharks, but they don't have as much as I thought they would. They only have the leopard sharks and the safe ones, you would say. And then, but they have lots of jellyfish, which was the coolest part, I think. The safe sharks, meaning you can swim with them and they're not going to bite you? They could still bite you, but they would have to be provoked.

[00:02:35] And what's the significance of a shark? Why a shark? You know, a couple of reasons, I think. One of the first ones was like, they're always swimming forwards, they never swim backwards type thing. And I think I thought about this is just like the power that they have. And I always envision what if a shark was like a human?

[00:02:59] Well, they act as a human and they're, they only attack when provoked really, or you seem like you look like prey or whatever. So they're not always intentionally out to hurt you, which everyone thinks they are. And I think there's some lessons that can go along with that. Also, when they smell blood, they go after it. Meaning, you can relate it to sports.

[00:03:24] You feel like you're in the driver's seat in a game and you smell blood and then you just, you go after it. Yeah. Also, I think you said this in the past, sharks, if they do swim backwards, I don't think it would swim backwards on their own. But they would die, right? They would. Yeah. Or you're always moving forward. Awesome stuff. So on that note, on that type of mindset, let's get into some mindset. Oh, so I've been doing this on my other podcasts.

[00:03:52] At least you know, I have an, I have another podcast called real estate junkies coast to coast. And I'm a part of a community and not only in business, you gotta have the right mindset, but also in sports. Right. I think they go on hand in hand. Right. I think there was a stat that 90%, 95% of female athletes become like a CEO or an entrepreneur.

[00:04:21] Because what you do in your sporting life translates into the real world and you're able to become a good leader. You work hard. You're, you have a schedule. You're always on time. So those are all the qualities that companies love. You know, what we've been doing and we talked about it off air was some mindset that could be harmful to your growth or some other mindsets that can be beneficial. Right.

[00:04:51] So that maybe you can speak on each one of them. The first one I've been working on, not working on, but talking about is the victim mindset. So, uh, you know, if you want to speak on the, what a victim mindset looks like or cause you are in psychology. It's very, yeah, it's common, right? It's more of the terminology that I've heard is victim complex.

[00:05:16] You, you have a victim complex and there are, there's levels to it. I feel like having, sometimes having the victim mindset, like you said, just blaming outside variables for your actions, performance, et cetera, and not looking internally and seeing what you could have done to prevent something from happening or for you to perform better. Yeah.

[00:05:45] Cause there's two different types of victims, right? There's a victim of a crime that is, you have no control over. Right. And then there's the victim mindset, which is what you just said is hypothetically, you had a bad pitching outing and all you did is you blame the umpire for the strike zone. We have done, which you and I have done in the past. We're like, Hey, that umpire was squeezing you. There's that type of victim mindset.

[00:06:12] There's also, you know, if you go over five and the batter blames other people for why they went over five. And you have batters that go over five and they'll, they'll blame the outside, right? They'll blame their hitting coach or the, the hitting lesson. They had a horrible hitting lesson. They blame their hitting coach or they blame a practice. They had light practice and they, they, they blame that the pitcher for not toss enough cookies for them. So they'll blame that.

[00:06:41] So having that victim mindset, especially in softball, we're talking softball specifically. Other sports, they can blame the referee. They can blame whoever the coach for not giving them the ball in the right situation, right? Having that victim mindset. So that's probably at the bottom of the barrel. Having that victim mindset is probably the, the worst positioning. There is zero growth there because if you're constantly blaming others, you're not going to have that growth mindset.

[00:07:09] You're not going to be growing as a person or as a player, right? The second one is the pessimist. So the pessimist is nothing goes right for them. And it's not necessarily you're blaming others. It's just, you just, I knew this was going to happen. This always happens to me. Well, how would you, how would a pessimist be in softball or in sports? I think of it as from like a pitcher's perspective, say I go in and have a bad game or they're just teeing off me.

[00:07:39] And I come out and my thoughts are like, I mean, they always hit off me or like, they always do that. And they're just going to keep doing that. And I'm just a pitcher that it's very hit. I'm very hittable. I'm just always very hittable. And yeah, or I knew that was going to happen during my bullpen. I had a terrible bullpen. I knew this was going to happen. Or a hitter, right? They had a bad batting practice and then they go into the game.

[00:08:08] They're like, oh, I'm going to do horrible. Right? So it's just like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right? I do it in golf when I'm a hundred yards away. I would say this is the worst yardage for me because I don't have a club. I'm not going to do well. And then I get up there and I chunk it. I don't do very well. It's so it's having that self-fulfilling prophecy in a negative way. Telling yourself that it's never going to happen. It doesn't happen. This always happens to me.

[00:08:37] Why does it always happen to me? That type of thing. So then we get into optimist. Now, optimist obviously is better than being a pessimist, right? So you have victim mindset, the pessimist, and then you have the optimist. And the optimist obviously is good because everything's, you're positive, right? If things are always positive. But that's the problem is that everything is positive. Yeah. Right. Everything's going to work out. You have a bad inning.

[00:09:07] It's okay. I had the next inning, right? Rather than figuring out what happened, trying to figure what was, what were the pitches of working? What were the pitches of working? You go to talk to your pitching coach and try to figure something out. You don't talk to anybody. You're just like, it's okay. I have the next inning. It's okay. It's not. It should not ever be like that. Because every time that I've had a bad inning, I instantly, I want to figure out what was wrong and what I need to do the next inning in order to fix it.

[00:09:37] Because I don't know how anyone would be like that. So nonchalant. That's what I kind of correlate the optimist mindset with is being nonchalant and being like, okay, whatever. It's not whatever. Or have you heard of type A and type B? So there's type A. They lose their wallet. They need to find it. Where's my wallet? I need my wallet. I'm going to go find it. Where was the last place I left it?

[00:10:06] Type B? Yeah, I'll find it. It's somewhere. I don't know how you do it. Type B people. I don't know. Somehow they end up finding their wallet. I don't know how. But that's how I assimilate optimist mindset with. Yeah, your cousin Jesse, an optimist. Yes. He loses his wallet or he doesn't have a place to stay. And he's like, that's all right. I'll find a place to stay. And a lot of times he does.

[00:10:35] But I think sometimes in life, obviously being an optimist is good. Right? Sometimes it hurts you in the business, right? And because if you have blinders on and I'm speaking on the business side, if you have blinders on and everything's just going to work out, you're going to get railroaded. Right? Because if you're not looking for, and we're going to talk about the warrior mindset, you're not looking out for, that's not growth.

[00:11:01] You're just, everything's, yes, you're optimist and you're positive, but there's no growth there. Right? Because you just think everything's going to work out. And the pessimist in the business world could be better than the optimist because at least you're, you're looking at the negatives and you're like. You're actually seeing things that are wrong. Yeah. You're seeing things that are wrong. However, you're just saying these things are wrong. However, they always happen to me anyway. Right?

[00:11:29] So sometimes pessimists in, in certain aspects is good because you're worried, you're wary of things and you're understanding that things aren't going well. And optimist is a bad thing because you're just oblivious of things that are going around or that are happening around you. You don't do anything about it. So yeah, pessimist is a negative, but could be a positive in certain points in your life. Optimist obviously is a positive.

[00:11:55] You're always positive, but it could be a negative because you're not seeing, you know, fully seeing, you're putting blinders on, which is not a good thing, especially in sports. Right? Yeah. You need to find, if things are going wrong and you're going 0 for 4 and you're, you have a really high ERA, obviously there's something wrong going on. And if you don't internalize that or see that's going on, then nothing's going to come.

[00:12:23] Nothing's going to be fixed. Yeah. You go for 4 and you walk back to the dugout. You're like, it's okay. I got another at bat. And then all of a sudden you're 0 for 8. Right. Okay. Which is fine. There's, there, there is some times where you're like, all right, I have another at bat, but you have to also think, what do I need to do better next? You can't just say, I have another at bat. What are you going to go up there and do the same thing? And swing at all the same pitches. If you do that, you're going to fail again. It's going to keep happening over and over again. Yeah.

[00:12:54] It's insane. Right? Yeah. It's insane. Doing the same thing over and over. We're expecting a different result. Yeah. So that's the optimist. Those three things. Those are, I would say those bottom three, there's a lack of growth there. I think. Especially in sports and specifically for you and softball and me and business. Right? If you're one of those three at the bottom, your success rate drops considerably. Right? And then your growth obviously goes along with it. You're not going to grow as well.

[00:13:22] So the next one lays next mindset is the realist, which is good because you're recognizing that there's a problem. Right? And you do make adjustments. Right? You change things in life. If someone used the alcoholic analogy the other day. I'm not. I am rusty and I'm an alcoholic. So I'm recognizing I have a problem. I'm a real, I'm real about it. And I'm going to try and do things. I'm going to take steps in order to correct that.

[00:13:53] So describe what a realist would be. Maybe in sports. Because we're going to get into the last one, which is a warrior mindset. Let's take a quick break. If you want to leave us a message, use the link in the show notes. And if you want us to respond, leave your name and email address. Also, please rate us and or leave a review as we're trying to grow the show every day.

[00:14:22] Finally, Lacey and I both love coffee. We would greatly appreciate any contribution to the show. That link is also in the show notes. Thank you. Take care. Yeah, I would say in sports, being real with yourself, like try to be more softball because that's what I know. Just being realistic about where you're at, who you are as a player.

[00:14:49] Like you said, it's just, it's recognizing your faults and take and actually taking those steps in order to improve it. Or try and improve those faults. There's something different about recognizing your faults and not doing anything about it like we talked about before. That's a whole other level of like, I was telling you before, I've, would you, I think you could consider that some sort of pessimistic mindset where they're like, they're seeing that something wrong, but nothing's doing nothing.

[00:15:18] Nothing's being done about it. Where the realist is, okay, I need to get faster if I want to go to a mid-major power five school. I need to get faster. I need to at least be 60, 61. So are you just going to keep saying that and just keep pitching the way that you are? Or are you going to take those steps in order to get faster? Are you going to go to the weight room and work on your leg strength? Are you going to do long toss, what, three times a week? There are things that you could do to get faster as a pitcher.

[00:15:48] But if you don't do them, then you're not going to get faster and you're going to go into high school. And the, I was what, 8, 59 going into college. And thank God they saw something in me. But when I got to college freshman year, that was something that I was told, you need to be faster. And then we took those steps in order for me to get faster.

[00:16:16] When you get to college and you're in the weight room three, four times a week, you're automatically going to be, start getting stronger. So that was something that's given to you in the routine of a college pitcher. And so you need, you should take advantage of it.

[00:16:30] If you're in, on the other side of it, if you're in the weight room and you're not increasing your weight when you're doing squats, deadlifts, any sort of bench press, any sort of lifts that you can increase your weight on and trying to reach a certain weight goal or, and you keep doing the same weight. Say I, I say I'm doing 25s on each side for squat. Every single time I squat for months, I am not going to improve at whatsoever. You have to increase the weight that you're doing, especially for weightlifting.

[00:17:00] Here's the real, it's just, I know I need to increase the weight, but I'm, I refuse because this is a weight that I'm comfortable with. That you need to know that you realize that you need to increase your weight to get better, but you're not doing those, you're not doing those things to make you better. Right. That's a realist? Yeah. You realize that's what you need to do. Okay. So a realist is not a good mindset. But you're recognizing it as a problem. So that is a, that's the first step. Let's stick to one.

[00:17:31] Like we talked about off the air, right? It's, I recognize that I've gained weight this year. And I'm taking steps. So we're going to get into the next step, which is a warrior mindset. But I recognize it, but I didn't do anything about it. So that is a good thing because once you get into the next step, then you're going to take those opportunities to grow. Right. So yes, realistic is not, is the force.

[00:18:01] It's way better than the first three. Uh, cause the first three, you're not necessarily realizing or recognize that there's a problem, but this one, you are recognizing the problem. And then there's out, there's the opportunity, which we're going to talk about next is the opportunity to make those changes, which is the warrior mindset. Right. So the warrior mindset, and I want you to talk about with mine, Dan worth it and mine strong.

[00:18:25] I'm going to know you said earlier, before we were on the air that you're like, ah, I can't pick anything in as far as pitching. But there was a couple of opportunities last year. I think two years ago when you said that you had a bad outing and then you went to the outfield and you're visualizing, you just some visualization and meditating about visualizing yourself competing at the highest level.

[00:18:53] And then when you, and then the next day you came back and express the state and you did really well. Right. So a warrior mindset is okay. I recognize that I have a problem. And I, I, I'm using this problem and I'm creating an opportunity out of it. And I, what that opportunity was is I meditated on it. I went and I practiced on my spins all by myself and you created an opportunity to do other things. So describe a Dan worth it, the beginnings of it, what happened.

[00:19:23] And then now what are you doing? So Dan worth it is a company that originated in Oregon state for student athlete mental health. And they started branching off into different universities. And we decided to take on a branch at San Jose. And I joined that my freshman year of college. It's like second semester, I think. And I saw my sophomore year, obviously there is more influence for, or more push for like student athlete mental health awareness.

[00:19:50] And that's when I decided that's what I want to do as a career. So we, we were with Dan worth it until my junior year. And there were some things that we as a branch or a group didn't really align with. Like we, our goals were different than what this company wanted. So we all, I came together with two of my good friends and said, why don't we just make our own student athlete mental health organization here at San Jose?

[00:20:19] So it could be more personal to us and we have the right to do whatever we want basically. And we could make it part of our leadership program, which is the SAC program student athlete advisory committee, which me and another one, one of the girls is in currently. And we created Mind Strong Spartans. And now we get to personally do our own events and media. There's no restrictions to those. We have a budget, all of that stuff.

[00:20:48] And I'm glad to say that we were like the creators of that basically, because hopefully it continues. Like we're still trying to figure out how that will continue for years to come. Because since my sophomore year, honestly, the awareness for student athlete mental health has declined because it seems like people only pay attention when things go wrong. And that's a life thing in general, I feel like. So it always takes something bad happening in order to be like, oh, my gosh. I didn't. Yeah, let's raise awareness. Like.

[00:21:18] Yeah, there's a shooting, right? And let's gun control. So there is always an awareness after the fact when you're promoting. Hey, what's working on now? So there isn't. There has to be. There has to be continuous. Like resources have to be continuous in order for it to work. And that's what we're trying to push. It's just really hard for the incoming people that are coming into San Jose State. Obviously, they don't really know about it. They were too.

[00:21:45] They were young when the incidents happened my sophomore year. And it's you just have to educate. And you feel like. People think it's hard to educate. On areas, but. It's literally just word of mouth most of the time, just talking to each other. And now people go to social media in order to talk to each other. So that's awesome. So that's awesome. Yeah. So let's see. Let's use those five mindsets on.

[00:22:14] How it could have happened if you did those certain mindsets damn worth it. Obviously it's a plan worth because Oregon State is the Beavers and Beavers create, they create dams. And then, so they put it as a plan where so damn, and you're damn worth it. Right. I mean, mentally, mental health wise, you're worth it. Right. Cause the reason why people unlie themselves is they don't think they're worthy. That's a good point on words there.

[00:22:43] So victim mindset, you could have, you could have blamed that. You could just say, oh, there's whatever they're doing is horrible. I don't like, I don't like the way they run their organization. They did this wrong. They did this wrong. Did this wrong. And that's why we're not successful. That's why you're not successful. You're not taking any responsibility for what was going on. Pessimist is this always happens to me.

[00:23:10] I always try to do things like this and, and never works out. And they're right. Optimist is it's okay. Yeah. Things will work out in the end. I'm not worried. Realist is, Hey, this isn't working, but you don't do anything about it. I recognize there are some things we could have done. There's some things that we could have done better, but you didn't take the steps in order to do something.

[00:23:36] And then we're at the warrior mindset, which is, Hey, here's the problem. We didn't, there are some things we, we didn't do. There's some things like you just said, things weren't aligned. What we were trying to do wasn't aligned. What they were doing, what they were doing wasn't aligned. What we wanted to do. What we did is we created an opportunity and we did it on ourselves. And you created this mind strong thing using your situation there.

[00:24:02] You can tell those five steps you're, you created this growth. Right. And your legacy, hopefully you can hand down to future people, especially the incoming freshmen. Once you get the incoming freshmen on board, like with you, like you're the incoming freshmen for Dan worth it at San Jose state was big. Yeah. And then they could tweet it out. And then there's a small group that you guys continued. So hopefully you can educate, like you said.

[00:24:32] And again, you don't, it's a stigma, right? Mental health is a stigma. You don't necessarily want to talk about suicide a whole lot. Cause it is depressing. Right. But you, it has to be recognized like, Hey, this is why they unalived themselves because they didn't think they were worthy enough. And this is why we're here. We're going to help you out when you have those mental lapses in your life. Yeah.

[00:24:59] And when, but I'm in my psychology classes, COVID had probably the biggest impact on people my age, maybe like one to two years younger, one to two years older. And that's when a lot of things started happening within student athlete communities. And it's definitely getting better with people speaking out. Like social media is a good thing in some ways because people find somewhere to speak out

[00:25:26] about their experiences, which we're actually going to start doing within mind strong is start interviewing student athletes about their experience with mental health and posting about it. So we're going to use social media in that way and hopefully spread some good information. And people won't know about it unless you talk about it. And that's the whole thing that I've been pursuing this, these past four years. I didn't know.

[00:25:53] I had no idea that I was, why I was having panic attacks on the mound until I, we, people actually started talking about it. And then I started talking about it. So it's like, I'll have to speak up a little bit. Yeah. It's like what I said earlier, it's a stigma, right? A lot of times it's, if you speak up about it, you're weak, but if they hear somebody that

[00:26:17] is an equal appear to them that is having the same issues, they're like, Hey, I'm having those same issues. And then it allows you, it allows them to reach out to somebody and say, Hey, I'm having the same mindset issues. And again, it's not kumbaya, right? We've talked about that over and over again. We're not here to, you got to tough things out. There are things that you need to have a warrior mindset, which is find opportunity in the bad. Right.

[00:26:46] I'm doing that right now in my business. I'm finding an opportunity. It's going to be painful in the beginning, but it's going to be very rewarding in the end because I'm going to create an opportunity out of it. I'm not blaming anybody, but myself and I'm a realist. I'm the reality hit me. And now I want to create an opportunity out of that. Awesome stuff. Lace, you got to get out of here. I love you. We stay home as long as possible.

[00:27:14] We have, speaking of catching you, how many catching opportunities do we have left? Do you have your calendar? Like when's the last, like, when am I putting the glove in the shrine that you bought me? Friday. This coming Friday? Yeah, I leave Saturday morning. Oh my gosh. Yesterday was probably our last long cause. I don't know if you realize that. Oh my gosh. Okay.

[00:27:44] I'm going to start tearing up and it's... Anyway. All right. All right, everybody. We'll catch you guys in the other side. Lace, I love you. Love you. I'll see you in about 30 seconds. Okay. Bye. to spend this while walking apart. Bye. That's really great.