I recently interviewed former MLB Star Ben Zobrist on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today helped change how people think about value in baseball. Ben Zobrist was a three-time All-Star, two-time World Series champion, World Series MVP, and one of baseball’s first super utility players. Ben is also the author of the new book, Prepare for the Pressure. Ben, thank you for joining us.
Ben: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Adam. Looking forward to the conversation.
Adam: I’m looking forward to it. You grew up in Eureka, Illinois, and growing up, you loved playing baseball, but you were anything but ticketed to the big leagues. You graduated from high school without a single offer to play in college or professionally, and even you assumed that your baseball career wasn’t going to go past playing high school baseball. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Ben: Yeah, well, it sounds like I didn’t have a lot of prospects when you speak like that, but that is the truth. I wasn’t really thinking that way as a kid, because I grew up in a small town in Illinois that really was a great place to grow up. Americana, great safe place, great teachers, great coaches, family. We went to church every Sunday. My dad’s a pastor in this small town, and Eureka is just well known for having excellence in the way they go about their small-town life.
It’s blue collar, so I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of wealthy people there, but there are just people that want to live good, simple lives, and they want to raise their families in a great place. That’s what I grew up in, and I gravitated to sports at a young age. That was the thing that grabbed my attention. I’m watching the ’90s sports movies, like the Rocky movies that came out of the ’80s into the ’90s, and then you’ve got Rudy and Hoosiers and The Natural, all these movies that were coming into the ’90s. Then you get The Sandlot. I mean, I could just keep going on about baseball movies that are in the back of my mind.
But that’s the stuff that made me think, oh, okay, you can be the underdog. You don’t have to be from a big city. You don’t have to be the one that’s well thought of, and everybody thinks you’re going to make it to the major leagues to be great. In our small town, I felt like I was great, even though I probably wasn’t that good. I felt like I was pretty good, and that confidence level made me believe that I was capable of greatness on the athletic field.
That being said, still after high school, I had zero scholarship offers. That really wasn’t my focus, to be honest. My focus became following God. To be honest, it was, how do I follow God in this life after high school? I mean, I’m going out of what I’ve grown up in, what I knew. Now I’ve got to forge my own path. My high school baseball coach, Coach Bob Gold, called me up after I graduated, after our season was over. He called me up and he said, “Hey, there’s a scout day happening near Peoria,” which was the big city in Illinois near our town. “It costs 50 bucks, but I think it might be worth it.”
He said, “I think maybe God might have something more for you in sports, or in baseball, if you go there.” I thought about it and prayed about it a little bit, and I thought, okay. I went over to the scout day. We did a lot of standing around, but then you showcase your skills for a few minutes, and the rest of the time you’re standing around watching everybody else do their thing. Just from that small scout day, a coach named Elliot Johnson from Olivet Nazarene University, an NAIA school near Chicago, talked to me afterwards. He said, “Hey, I might be giving you a call. We may be able to help you get to play college baseball.” He called about a week later, and he figured out with academics and athletics to offer me a full ride. That was really the beginning of my journey of, wow, okay, this is kind of my job. I’m going to jump full-fledged into baseball from that point on.
Adam: I love it, and you mentioned a couple of coaches who had a game-changing impact on your life. Bob Gold, your high school baseball coach, Elliot Johnson, your college baseball coach, not household names, not people who anyone would really know. I did an interview with a coach of yours who everyone knows, Joe Maddon, who we’ll talk about later on in the podcast, but your high school baseball coach giving you that little push, your college coach figuring out how to make something work, and that’s all it took.
Ben: Yeah, sounds very simple, and it sounds like I just needed a little nudge. That being said, with Coach Gold, particularly, he had earned trust in that relationship over four years of coaching me and teaching me in school. This is a guy who we trusted. Especially with this younger generation, it seems like you really have to build their trust first before they really want to listen.
He had built that trust with me over a number of years, and so when he called and kind of gave me that nudge, it was a little bit more of a nudge than just somebody saying, “Hey, there’s an opportunity if you want to do it. Go ahead and do it.” I didn’t want to let him down if he was right, to be truthful. It was just borrowed belief. I didn’t really necessarily believe that I was supposed to do anything with baseball at that point. I was focused on doing something with God, and I didn’t know that God may want to use that.
But I trusted Coach Gold’s connection to God as well, and his belief that he had made me start to believe there may be something more for me in this sport. Man, I loved it. It wasn’t like he was pulling my teeth to get me to go play another day of baseball. I was like, one more day. As I thought, one more day of putting the uniform on, putting the metal spikes on. After that, it’ll be rec league softball and molded spikes for the rest of my life if I’m going to do something. The reality was, it was just the beginning. It was just the beginning, but I needed that borrowed belief at that moment.
Adam: You had confidence because you knew you were good relative to your competition, but you also had confidence because you had leaders around you who instilled confidence in you, and so much of success comes from developing confidence. So much of developing confidence comes from having great leaders around you who can help you build up that sense of confidence.
Ben: Absolutely. You have to have that support system, and people that are being more positive than they are negative about what you need to work on. Because when you’re young, you’ve got a lot to work on. Let’s be honest, we all have a lot to work on, so we can pick at any of the weaknesses that we have and get negative if we want to, but if you focus on where you want to go and the process that’s going to get you there, that’s the other piece here that they instilled from a very young age, the importance of consistency.
I think I had a natural level of courage that I would step into a challenge if somebody challenged me enough. I wanted to see if I could do it. That was in my heart from a very young age. I kind of had that heart of a lion. I don’t care how big somebody else is, I’m a lion. I’ll go out and compete with anybody. So I did. But you still have to develop a level of consistency in your practices, in the things that you believe are going to lead to success.
I had had a measure of success on a small-town high school team, and ran some cross country, played some football. Basketball was actually my first love, and ultimately baseball into college. But you have to develop those habits, those routines, and I do think those coaches and where I grew up also helped me develop that. It was very consistent. Our lifestyle was very consistent. It wasn’t like, hey, we’re going on vacation every few weeks because we have the money to, and we want to go to our timeshare or go to this country. My family, we didn’t have that. We didn’t have the money to be able to do that.
A vacation for us was going a day or two to a baseball tournament two hours north. That was a vacation for everybody, to say, oh, we get to go stay in a hotel. Now my kids have grown up with more privilege. It’s harder to maintain a level of consistent approach when there are all these fun things to do, and now we’ve got screens in front of our faces at all times. It’s hard to develop the consistency that I developed at a young age due to the lifestyle that my whole town led. That’s something that we don’t really talk about, the fact that the screens, or the vacations, or just fun activities that are available sometimes to all of us, kind of pull us out of those processes that actually drive the long-term success. That process has to be both positive and supported by coaches and people like that, but also self-driven. There has to be some self-drive to stay consistent and stay simple when there’s lots of fun going on around you.
Adam: You mentioned the habits that allowed you to become successful and the habits that allowed you to go from really good high school player, but not necessarily good enough to get scouted for college or for the pros, to becoming a sixth-round pick, and then ultimately becoming a major leaguer, and ultimately becoming a really, really good major leaguer. What were those habits? What are the habits that differentiate okay from good, good from great?
Ben: A few of those habits, one of them has to do with your level of focus, especially when you’re doing the activity that you’re practicing. I do believe that from a young age I developed a level of focus in my practice that was similar to the game. Games didn’t bother me that much, usually the nervousness of the game, because I practiced with that level of intensity. If you’re only raising your level of intensity when the lights are the brightest, then you’re not really preparing for the level of pressure that you’re going to face when you get out on the field in the big-game situation.
So I practiced, and it was just as important to me to practice without error and challenge myself to succeed in practice as it was in the game. I think it’s harder to do that nowadays, because if there’s not a camera on, if you’re not performing for the crowd or the bright lights, or if it’s not a big scout situation where you have a chance to make a big splash, it’s harder for people to find that level of focus. That’s one thing that I developed at a young age.
Another thing is just the ability to stay present, stay in that place where I was. Things that happened early in the game, things that happened earlier in the day, for whatever reason, I was pretty good at forgetting all of that and just being everywhere I was at all times. I mean, even now I struggle sometimes to remember things because I’m so very present. I like to say the positive side of that, as opposed to, well, you don’t remember things very well. But I am very, very present. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than right here saying this to you. There’s nothing else I’m thinking about.
That’s something that some athletes struggle with, because they’re always being pulled into the past or pulled into the future. They’re either worried about what’s about to take place. Whenever you’re doing that, you’re missing right now. Whenever you’re thinking about what already did take place, whether it’s good or bad, you’re not where you are right now. Joe Maddon was a guy, my former manager, that I know we’ll talk about. He was a guy that was really big on staying present, and so I think I did that pretty well as a young player regardless.
But another piece that was very important to being consistent was actually versatility. I was versatile in the way that I took instruction before I was versatile in changing positions, before a coach asked me to change a position and be uncomfortable on a major league baseball field, which was the first time I really got asked to do that. I was already pretty versatile at being coached in different ways. That’s a struggle for younger players now too, or younger people. When something throws you off or makes you uncomfortable, can you just keep going in the right direction? Can you take it, move on, and do the best you can in the next thing?
Something that changes, and we all want to be consistent, but part of consistency is not just creating a perfect environment. I do think there is a level to silencing what’s going on in the outside and staying focused on your process and your routine. But when that process gets thrown off and interrupted, or you have a coach that you don’t necessarily love all that much in that season, can you still take instruction and learn and make the best out of it? That’s what I’m talking about in regard to versatility. Can you adjust quickly and get into a place where you’re helping everybody around you, regardless of how comfortable you feel as an athlete? I was able to do that pretty quickly.
Adam: And for listeners who are not hardcore baseball fans, you were arguably the most versatile player in baseball, in that you were not only able to play a number of different positions on the field, but able to excel at a number of different positions on the field. You played second, you played the outfield, you played short, and you played every position really well. And in addition to playing a number of different positions, you were able to draw a walk, you were able to steal a base, you were able to hit for power, you were able to hit for average. How can anyone become truly versatile in what they do?
Ben: You have to have a mindset, a bounce-back mindset. It doesn’t matter how bad it looks, how much shame I feel, how hurt I feel, or how afraid I might be. You have to lean into that for a second to understand that you’re not just moving past it, you’re moving through it. When things aren’t going well, Joe Maddon had this belief that if you were like 0 for 10, 0 for 12, he was more likely to play you. Why? You would say, he’s in a slump, why would you play him? He’s 0 for 12. Because if I’m actually playing the odds, I know that he’s not a .000 hitter, so he’s more likely to get a hit now because he’s been struggling than he was yesterday.
When you have that mindset that even though things have not been going well, that actually means it’s going to be my turn soon, that is a mindset shift. It’s a paradigm shift to think that way, when everything around you says, well, maybe you should just give up. Maybe you just stink. That’s why you’re 0 for 12. That’s not necessarily the case. It might mean that you’re about to learn something and unlock something that you’ve never unlocked before. You do have to have a mindset shift in regard to that, and that’s why I say faith and belief and confidence is a big part of that, and finding that borrowed belief from people around you that can do it, that can help pull you out of that negative pattern of thought, that’s a big piece.
I also think just a relative level of toughness, we’ll just call it toughness, mental toughness, the ability to be resilient when it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good right now. It doesn’t look good, but I’m going to keep going. I’m going to get back up and face this next challenge again, again, again. If I get knocked down 10 times, 12 times, 20 times, can I get up with the same level of consistency? Doesn’t mean that you have to get up with a smile on your face and have this fake positivity to it. It just means you won’t kill me. You won’t beat me. I will keep coming back. I will keep coming back.
That was something my dad taught me. My dad was a military guy before he was a pastor, and so he taught me that mental toughness as an athlete. Now it’s really hard for kids or young people to build that, because life throws so many dopamine hits at these kids at such a young age. You have to allow yourself to have a limited level of dopamine in order to start to learn that, and when you feel like there’s somebody else forcing you to do that, you buck against that trend. Any kid does. But when you start to learn to do that for yourself, create limits for yourself, a limited level of dopamine, and that could be snack foods, that could be just comfort stuff. There’s a lot of things that make us feel comfortable that we have to limit.
Those were things I do think I was doing, even in college as a young athlete, that I saw other people not doing on a Friday or Saturday night. I saw those nights as an opportunity to get better when nobody else was, or very few people were, because I saw the majority of the college athlete was going to take that Friday and Saturday night and use it for social experience. I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t. I mean, you need to find ways to unwind. But for me, I wanted to keep getting better during those moments, and so, if it was a little uncomfortable, I wasn’t leaving a wife and kids at home by themselves doing that for work. I was by myself, so I was like, well, this is what I want. I want to try to get there in these moments, and I believe this is a way that I can get there a little quicker.
I was a late bloomer, so I felt like I had a long ways to catch up to other people. Having that mindset always, that there are always better, more talented players, so I have to work that much harder if I want to be at that same level. That mindset is what enables you to say whatever it takes. Throw me in right field. Make me a pitcher for an inning. Put me behind the plate. Make me uncomfortable, and I’ll show you I can do that too, so I can get more opportunities, and eventually the more opportunities I get, the more I’m going to learn, and I’m going to find ways to succeed. But if you’re sitting on the bench and you’re staying away from it, you’re avoiding the challenging moments and the challenging situations, you can’t grow. You can’t grow. You have to sit in those moments and feel those moments before you’re going to be able to be versatile in different ways.
Adam: Ben, I love it. Growth takes place outside of your comfort zone, and you shared some very concrete examples of pushing your comfort zone. When your friends are going out on Friday night and Saturday night, you’re working on getting better. When everyone around you is chasing dopamine, you’re finding ways to get better. When everyone around you is worried about how they look, how they feel, you’re concerned about one thing, and that is getting better. Growth comes down to mindset, having a winning mindset, and so much of having a winning mindset is having that can-do attitude, the power of positivity. I know I can do it, even if I didn’t get on base in my last 10 at bats, even if I didn’t get on base in my last 20 at-bats. I know I’m going to get on base. It starts with having that belief, and the belief comes from putting the work in, practicing with the same level of intensity as you know you are going to face during game time. You played in two World Series, you won two World Series, and you were the MVP of one of those two World Series. You’re not going to play in any higher-stakes, higher-pressure moments than that. How do you prepare for those moments? By preparing with the same level of intensity, so that when those moments arrive, they don’t feel any different.
Ben: Yeah, that’s right. They have to be kind of built into you before you get there. Failure in those moments sometimes has to be felt first. I mean, I wouldn’t say the first time I experienced a World Series, I felt comfortable, or I felt like I could stay focused. The bigger the situation, the more distractions, and the louder the exterior around the situation gets. It’s like if you’re speaking, if it’s a crowd of 10 or 15, it seems a little bit easier. Seems like, oh, there’s not that much to work through in nerves. If it’s a crowd of 1,500, for some reason, the energy in the room, it feels like if I make a mistake, it could be a bigger mistake, because more people are watching it.
Anytime kids believe there’s more exterior going on around you, then that means the fear level, the shame level, the ability, if I make a mistake, it raises, and so the pressure feels greater, even though your job is the same. There’s no difference in the job between 15 people or 1,500, but the challenge to focus is a little bit different, because we naturally, as human beings, experience those moments as one is more important than the other. I don’t know how you feel about this, but I like to believe that this one-on-one conversation is just as important as a one-on-1,000 conversation, because you’re transferring your energy, your knowledge, your wisdom, or your fear, pain, shame, or anything else. You’re transferring it in that conversation.
If we want to transfer something positive from our lives into other people, it’s really about focusing on the energy that we are bringing to the situation, not any energy that’s coming in from the outside. What are you bringing? So when I’m in a situation like a big clutch situation, I want to think about what kind of energy am I entering this with. Do I have confidence? Am I positive? Am I ready? Am I enjoying the fact that this is going to be a challenge, or am I thinking all about, oh no, I don’t want to make a mistake? I don’t want to make another mistake.
If you’re thinking about what you don’t want, that is not going to help you with bringing the right energy into the situation to have success. So the more I failed and realized it wasn’t the end of the world, some of that noise went away, because I was like, oh, people actually don’t care. I mean, they do, but they don’t. They care in the moment, and it sounds like it’s the biggest deal if we lost a big game in the World Series, and it feels like it to your fan base, but I promise a few weeks later, everybody’s moved on. They’re moved on to the next situation that they get all excited about.
For us to realize that in 50 years, the stats and the success isn’t going to matter. The energy that you bring will, because that carries you into your family life, into your next job, into your next role, into the next impact that you want to make in the people around you. Then that gets transferred, and hopefully that confidence level, that faith, and that belief that something good is going to happen continues with that person, regardless of whether you won or lost.
Adam: I love the analogy you gave about speaking to audiences, speaking to a small group versus speaking to a really large group, and if you’re focused on making a mistake, you’re going to be nervous, you’re going to get out of your game. If you’re focused on making a mistake, you probably are going to make a mistake, but if you’re focused on having fun, if you’re focused on why you’re there, which is because you’re doing what you love to do, you’re going to have fun. It’s really no different if you’re playing baseball. If you’re at the plate and you’re worried about the pitcher who you’re facing, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re not going to have a lot of success. But if you’re up there excited and having fun, you’re likely to be more successful, and that holds true, whether you’re a keynote speaker, a major league baseball player, or doing anything else.
Ben: Yeah. Let me just say this: fear is one of the toughest things for any high performer to try to get over, especially in a big moment. But a little trick that I learned, probably a couple years into my career, was just to reframe fear. Instead of this idea that athletes or great performers are fearless, I don’t believe that. I just think that that’s avoidance. I don’t think that’s actually using the fear for what it’s made for.
Healthy fear actually brings a sense of wisdom to any situation, because if you’re afraid, there is a chance that you make a big mistake and that you feel shame over that mistake. That’s a reality. So we’re not going to avoid reality. What we are going to do is reframe that, because what happens when there is a little bit of fear there that says, hey, I could make a big mistake and it could not go well? You can reframe that and say what that means is when I bring my full self into this, when I do what I’m capable of, that means I have the ability. Now, there’s something really great I can achieve.
Without any risk, you can’t get into flow. There’s a guy named Steven Kotler who talks a lot about the flow state. You really can’t get into flow unless you get into a little bit of risk. There has to be a fear factor there. If there’s no fear factor there at all, you’re not actually going to perform at your best. So a little bit of fear drives that adrenaline, drives that ability to access the greatness that you can bring to something.
I started thinking of it that way. Hey, actually, if I feel like this is a big game, wow, if I do something cool in this game, it’s going to matter more than just if it’s a regular game. So I started reframing things like that. That fear was actually, that just meant that it was a good thing. Something really great can happen today.
Adam: I love that. Instead of thinking about fear as something that is paralyzing and crippling and potentially catastrophic, which it can be, recognizing that fear can be a source of ownership. The same reason that I’m afraid is the same reason that I have the ability to show up and make significant impact.
Ben: Yeah, we always do. We have that ability, and we play it small oftentimes, and I’ve played it small plenty of times in my life too. But in those moments, you have to realize it’s not a time to play small. It’s really not. The only time to play small is when you’re thinking in the details of the moment, what you’re trying to focus on. That’s one thing I try to help people with. As big as the moment is before it, you get to be excited about that, and trust that something great is going to happen. But once you actually get into the moment, it is about finite focus.
It’s about, okay, what do I really want to say? What do I really want to convey? What do I really want to do in this moment? If I’m going to do one thing, I’m going to do this really well. I can’t think about in the third inning hitting a walk-off home run and winning it for my team. That’s not going to happen. And likewise, if I’m in the ninth inning and I do have a chance to hit a walk-off home run, do you do it by thinking about doing that? I don’t think you do that. I think you do that by thinking about the pitcher, seams of the baseball coming out and what I’m trying to do with the bat. It’s smaller details that lead to success of hitting the ball on the barrel and getting it to go where you want it to go.
You can try to apply that in other realms, where, man, if I just feel like I really want something great to happen here, well, make something small happen. If you can make the small things happen and stack those small things in that moment, eventually it turns into something great. Kind of a story of my career is I would not have said in any point in my career, I’m having a great career. I didn’t think that. I was thinking, I need to be consistent. I could be better. I need to work on this. I need to work on that. I could focus more on this. I could focus more on that.
I was always just trying to get a little bit better, and then you start looking back and compiling all the data, and compiling the seasons, and the consistency, and I can look back now, and I can honestly say, wow, God really blessed me. I did have a great career. It was way better than I thought it was at the time. That’s what you want to be able to do, is go, wow, I was so locked in that I just felt like I’m just doing as best as I can do, and then you look back and you’re not regretting anything. You’re just like, I’m looking back, going, wow, I know I maximized what I was capable of at the time. That’s what I want to be able to say with my physical makeup and the ability that I had on the field. I do feel like I maximized it to my best ability.
Adam: Over the course of your career, you played on some great teams, you played on some bad teams, to say the least, and one of those really bad teams turned into a great team. What are the differences between winning teams and losing teams, winning cultures and losing cultures, and what are the keys to turning a losing team and a losing culture into a winning team and a winning culture?
Ben: That’s a big question. That’s a big question that every losing team or losing business or even struggling culture is trying to figure out: What do we need to start turning things around? I mean, I believe it starts at the top. It’s got to start at the top with the leadership. If the leadership doesn’t have the same mindset as some of the, you know, you could have a clubhouse leader really change the feel inside of a clubhouse, a manager change the feel of a clubhouse, but if you don’t change some things on the front-office side, eventually that will wear down that manager’s ability to do what they brought him in to do. Anytime you’re trying to steer a ship in a different direction, it starts with everybody at the top. The leadership at the very top has to be on board with the other leaders within an organization or within a team.
What I do believe about, let’s say, the worst-to-first Tampa Bay Rays team that I was on, from going from 2007 to 2008, there were a number of leaders, a number of guys that we brought in that were winning players or had a winning mindset that came in that particular year, in 2008. There was a mindset shift. There was actually a uniform shift that year. We went from the Devil Rays to the Sunshine Rays of Tampa Bay, and the burst of light, and the fan base all grabbed onto it. There were a number of young players that were ready to push the ball in a different direction.
One of those guys that we had just drafted, I believe the year before, was Evan Longoria, and Evan’s a winner. He came from a winning program in college at the time. We had some older guys that came over from winners, and we had some young guys that were winners. You put all those people together, and you combine with the attitude of a guy like Joe Maddon, you’ve got Andrew Friedman at the helm, who’s been a winner everywhere he goes, and they changed the culture. So the leaders have to change. That’s number one.
But attitude-wise, when you get into the nitty-gritty of the attitude, it has to turn from, hey guys, we’ve kind of gotten beat up by all this opposition, and if we want to focus on the opposition, then we’re always going to believe the Yankees and the Red Sox are better than us. But we had to come up with an identity within ourselves that overcame the mindset that we are the doormat of this division. At the time, we had to create our own identity, and it was this scrappy, young, we don’t really care, kind of, we’re going to be crazy, we’re not wearing suits on planes, we’re going to be the fun team to be on. He had barely any rules on our team. We were having fun. It was just some goofy things taking place.
Carlos Peña, my gosh, one of my favorite teammates ever, once hired a mariachi band to come in and play after a Cinco de Mayo game. We lost in extra innings, and Joe let it happen. He had a petting zoo. I walked into the clubhouse one time, and there was a boa constrictor in my face. Things that you would not expect to be happening around a ballclub were happening, keeping it light, keeping it fun, keeping it crazy. On the field, we had this mindset that if you think you’re just going to beat us up, we’re not the little brother anymore. You know, like the little brother when he gets old enough to kind of fight back with the big brother, and then all of a sudden it’s actually an equal fight. That’s what was happening, and we punched back.
It was the first time the Yankees and the Red Sox saw us punch back. Literally, there was a brawl in spring training between the Rays and the Yankees. I’m not saying people should go out there and create brawls to find equality, but what I am saying is we did have to find a level of fight in us that we did not have prior to that. Whenever you’re trying to change a culture, change an attitude, change something big, you have to show some fight. You have to show some ability to win or be positive and think you’re a winner before you’re actually a winner.
And keep it fun. It has to be fun. It can’t be so serious, especially in sports, right? Joe was really good at taking pressure off players, and taking media pressure off players, answering the tough questions, making it fun, like dress-up trips, where you lose a game, but you’re still going to dress up in a stupid costume, and you’re like, what am I doing, you know? Even though you’re adults, keeping that kid mindset at times is really important. I mean, life should be fun. Not only should work be fun, sometimes life should be fun. If everything becomes serious all the time, you’re eventually going to lose steam in that fight. But if you can find times to pull back and just have a good time with each other, while not interrupting that progress that you still need to continue to be making, that’s why I really thrived with Joe, because I’m kind of a serious player.
I was a serious player, and I took my work seriously, and my routine seriously, and I was mentally tough. But Joe kept it light. He kept it light. I kind of felt like just a puzzle piece that he could just throw me anywhere, and I would find a way to fit, and it would always work out. He would tell me to do crazy things, and I would say, okay, I guess I’ll do it, because you’re the coach, you’re the manager. It worked. It worked more often than not. It worked. I was like, all right, whatever you say, Joe. From here on out, there were some multiple things. He came up with some crazy ideas. One of them, batting, I was a switch hitter, and I hadn’t batted right-handed since high school against a right-handed pitcher, or college. We’re talking like five or six years, and he wanted me to go up against the Yankees’ Mike Mussina. He’s like, “Trust me.” And I’m like, “Joe, it’s going to feel like I’m standing on my head. I haven’t practiced this.” It was that day. I was like, “I haven’t practiced this for years.” He goes, “Just trust me. Just give it a shot. I bet you can do it.” So I go up there, and everyone’s like, he’s a switch-hitter. What is he doing right now? Sure enough, I got a hit, and so I was like, all right, Joe, you’re the man. You understand things that I don’t in the baseball world.
Adam: Ben, what do you believe are the keys to successful leadership? What can anyone do to become a better leader?
Ben: Wow. I think the first key to being a successful leader is that you’re always looking to grow. You don’t feel like you have arrived. You realize that you have a level of humility, that you not only know what you know, but you also know what you don’t know. If you can recognize that you don’t know certain things, and you can always be a sponge at learning those things, especially learning from people that are working for you, even learning from children, that’s a great mark of a leader.
Besides that humility and that level of growth mindset, you have to be able to be flexible. You can’t be so rigid that it has to be your way. Your way or the highway doesn’t get you where you want to go the fastest. You get where you want to go the fastest when you realize that the path could take a few turns you didn’t expect, and just let them go in that direction. If you let them go in that direction, and you stay versatile and flexible, we’re still going in the same direction eventually, even if we have to take a right or a left turn.
Great leaders recognize that it doesn’t have to be the way they mapped it out. Yeah, great, have your mind map, have your five-year plan, but what if it happens in seven and some other really great things happen in years four and five? That’s where people get rigid and they get upset because things aren’t happening on their timeline or happening in the way that they thought that they should happen. I do think you have to stay versatile in the way that you mind map things.
There are other things too, but those are two really important ones that come off the top of my head. Ultimately, if you’re not modeling the things you’re asking the people that work for you or work with you to do, especially when it comes to emotional intelligence or emotional resilience, you’re not getting very far. I struggle at times, and probably my kids could tell you, people that work for me could tell you, I’m working hard on my emotional intelligence, but it is a work in progress. It’s one of those things that I have to stop myself and be like, all right, get back to the things you know how to do. You’ve got to keep practicing these things, because just because you can practice doing something on the outward world, physically, baseball, swing, or whatever, doesn’t mean that you can fully fix or control some of the emotional challenges that you might be carrying into a situation or the triggers that come up for you.
Every great leader learns to start to try to model the things they’re asking other people to do. So if you’re asking someone else to be a leader on the field for you and you’re a manager, but yet you don’t manage yourself very well, it’s going to be hard for that to translate. That’s why the great managers are great emotional regulators without even realizing it. They’re regulating their own emotions, but they’re also regulating the room and the feel of the clubhouse or the feel of the dugout, and they kind of understand what emotionally the team needs before other people notice it.
I’m still learning that. Work in progress, and I want to do better at it. But that awareness piece, and then being connected ultimately to yourself when you look in the mirror in a healthy way, to the people around you that you love the most, and then a faith belief in God in a way that is soul-enriching. If I see leaders that are doing those things, I’ll follow you. Where are we going? You just tell me where we’re going, because I see it in you. I can feel it in you and see it in you as a leader. I’m watching you handle things, and I’m going, that’s what I want to learn. I want to learn how to do that. How do I get around you more? Tell me where we’re going.
Those leaders have also learned how to be followers, so they’re not just leaders. They have forged their own path, but they also understand enough about what a follower is doing that they can sense how you feel, and they’re empathetic to it. So it feels like a leader is saying, we are doing this. Great leaders take all the blame, and none of the credit, and I really believe that it feels like a we thing when a great leader is moving the room or moving the team in a certain direction. It can be really felt by everybody on the team.
Adam: Ben, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Ben: Well, it starts with figuring out what you’re really passionate about, what you really want. People sometimes are moving so fast in so many different directions that they don’t slow down and take enough solitude to kind of figure out what they actually want. So what are you really passionate about? Where’s the energy really there for you? If we’re honest, a lot of times we do a lot of things because we feel like it’s going to help the bottom line or because it’s what everybody else wants us to be doing, but I don’t think we spend enough time really figuring out our passion, and then going after that.
What I’m saying is, you may not be able to feel that necessarily in your job, but you have to find it in a hobby or something else that gives you that level of passion, that when you step away from your job, you’re still very productive when you go back into your job, because everything you’re doing when you step away is giving you energy to go back in and fight that fight. I do believe that passion is a big part of being a great leader and very successful in whatever you do.
What I realized for me as a player is I didn’t necessarily love playing 162 baseball games a year. It wasn’t performing in front of the crowd that I loved, but what I did love that I never, never didn’t want to do is I loved going in the batting cage, feeling where my body was that day, and trying to figure out what do I need to do with it today to get my swing right to meet the challenge. That was like a mini whiteboard session every game before I went to face the pitcher. It was almost like you’re in a lab. Let’s go in the lab, let’s mix a few chemicals together and see if we can create a concoction that will go and poof, it’s magic today. Look at what happened.
In a way, I was like a tinkerer or an inventor. I was inventing a new swing, and so some people looked at my swing and were like, “Oh my gosh, that looks terrible.” But for me, it was just all about what was I feeling that I needed to feel to take it into the at bat and feel a level of confidence that I was going to go in and do something really good, right? So I felt like a tinkerer, and I get to do that with my nonprofit. I get to do that with speaking stuff. It’s like, what can I work on to get better at and play around with on the whiteboard, and then go try it out, go try it out, and see what happens.
If you find out what is the thing within the thing that you really love, you may not love everything about the game, but what do you love that you get to do that you can keep doing, and then transfer that, translate that to whatever role or realm you want to take it in? So there’s that passion that has to be there. You want to have that passion to practice those things.
And then a final thing I’ll say about success is, if you’re lacking confidence, it’s going to be a real hard sell. People need to focus on their confidence level more than they do, because everybody notices how quickly the room gravitates to people that are confident. You could be all alone walking into a room full of people, and if you are confident, people will find you. They will want to talk to you. They will feel it in the way that you walk around, in the conversation you begin to have, the way you enter a conversation. I’m just saying, we don’t spend enough time thinking about how confident we are before we go to do something.
If we spend more time working on that level of confidence, and by confidence, let me say this: another word for confidence is faith. Now, when we say the word faith, I do believe you have to say confidence in God, but also we have to have confidence in ourselves and what God put inside of you. Faith in God is not just, okay, God’s going to do everything for me, and I got to do nothing. It’s also His belief in you. If He gave you an ability or gave you a role or a stewardship, then it’s our job to make the most of it and believe that we have that for a reason.
If you have an opportunity to breathe today and go do something that is a challenge for you, that means He believed you could handle it. You could do it. So you have to have that faith and that confidence when you walk into that thing, so that whatever comes out the other side, if you fail that day, if it doesn’t go well, or if it does go really well, it doesn’t change your level of confidence. Well, if today didn’t go well, that just means tomorrow is probably going to go well. It’s not about confidence in the result. I’m confident in my process. I’m confident in what I’m going to think, what I’m going to feel about this at the end of the day. Who I am walking into this is confidence. It’s not what happens at the end of the day. Those are some big markers for being successful.
Adam: Ben, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Ben: Appreciate that. Thanks for having me, Adam.
