The Championship Program: Relationships

Fourth of six, after Mindset, Movement and Nutrition.

How you treat people is a habit. Not a personality trait you were issued at birth — a habit, which means it's trainable, and which means it decays if you stop.

Your actions speak so loud nobody can hear what you say

I say a version of this to every team I've coached. Talk with your bat, your glove, your arm, your legs.

Adults get the same rule with different equipment. What you actually do — whether you show up, whether you follow through, whether you're the same person on a bad day — is the only message anyone receives. Everything else is noise you're generating about yourself.

Pick your team up even when you feel down

This is the whole pillar in one line, and it's the hardest one on the list.

It's easy to be generous when you're winning. The habit only means anything on the day you're hurt, frustrated, and would rather say nothing. That's the rep. That's when it counts, and that's when people remember.

How a champion greets people

Two small mechanics I actually teach, and they sound trivial until you run them for a month.

How you greet someone. Present, looking at them, using their name. Not performed — just fully there for four seconds.

How you answer "how are you?" Most people answer that on autopilot with something faintly negative. Try answering it deliberately, and honestly, and watch what it does to the next sixty seconds of the conversation. You are training your own default emotion as much as theirs.

Stay together

The best year of my career was 2007. We went 68–28 and won the Frontier League championship, and I've thought a lot about why that team was different.

It wasn't talent. Independent ball is full of talent that never wins anything. It was that nobody was managing their own résumé. Everybody picked everybody up.

We are all in this together and it only just keeps getting better. I've said that so often it's practically a signature, and I mean it structurally rather than sentimentally: your growth multiplies when you invest in other people, and it stalls when you don't.

The part that applies after surgery

If you're coming back from a replacement, this is the pillar you'll be tempted to skip. Recovery is isolating and it turns you inward — you're tracking your own pain, your own range, your own slow progress.

Reach out anyway. Tell someone what you're actually doing. Say the commitment where a person can hear it. A thing you said out loud to somebody is much harder to quietly abandon than a thing you only thought.

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Next: Daily Ops. The small things done consistently are the big things.

Use it as a reason. Not as an excuse.