The Person Behind
the Performance
I spent fourteen years playing professional baseball. Seven of those in the big leagues. And for most of that time — if I'm being completely honest — I had a clear picture of my stats, my mechanics, my competition, my ceiling. What I did not have was a clear picture of who I was while I was doing all of it.
That's not unusual. It's the norm. The work is loud. The performance demands attention. Identity stuff — the quiet, harder questions — tends to get crowded out. We optimize what we can measure and leave the rest to chance.
The Ontological Performance Reset starts where most performance programs don't: at the level of being, not doing. Not what you need to fix or add, but who you are — and whether who you are under pressure is actually consistent with who you intend to be.
That gap — between the person you aspire to be and the person who actually shows up when things get hard — is where this work lives. We're going to close it. Not perfectly, not overnight. But we're going to close it. Start here.
Your Values —
The Actual Ones
There are two kinds of values. The ones you aspire to and the ones you actually live. I'm not interested in the aspirational list — the integrity, excellence, family, growth you'd write on an application. I want the ones revealed by behavior.
Below is a values library. Browse it. Take your time. You're looking for the ones that feel true — not impressive, not aspirational. True. The ones where you read the definition and something in you says yes, that's it.
Select 3 to 5. No more. Constraint is the point — if everything is a value, nothing is. Once you've locked in your selection, you'll work through each one in depth.
The Gap
You just named your values. Now here's the harder question: what happens to them under pressure?
What pressure actually does is narrow you. It shrinks your attention, accelerates your thinking, and pulls you toward old patterns. The person who shows up in high-stakes moments isn't always the person you've spent the rest of your time trying to become. That's not a character flaw. That's a training problem.
The gap is simply this: where does who you intend to be diverge from who you actually are when things get hard? When you're fatigued. When you're being evaluated. When you've failed in front of people who matter to you. This is a diagnostic, not a sentencing. Seeing the gap is the whole point. You can't close what you can't see.
Your Identity Statement
This is not a mission statement. Not a vision board affirmation. It's a statement of identity — present tense, grounded in the values you just excavated. One paragraph. Who you are. What you stand for. How you intend to show up.
Start with who you are at your best — not who you want to be someday, but who you recognize yourself to be when you're living your values. Include what you stand for in specific terms. End with how you intend to show up — not a goal, a posture. A way of being in any given situation.
You'll return to this statement at the end of Module 5. It may change. That's the point.
This Week's Practice
Insight without action is just interesting. We're not here to be interesting — we're here to change something.
The gap you named in Section 3 is where we start. Not the whole gap — one small piece of it. Ten percent smaller. A behavioral commitment that closes the gap even slightly. It has to be small — if it's impressive, it's too big. Specific — name the situation, the behavior, the moment. And values-aligned — it should connect directly to one of the values you named.
Focused Attention
Here's what I need you to understand before you press play on anything: this is not meditation for stress reduction. I'm not asking you to relax. I'm asking you to train.
Attention is a skill. Like any physical skill, it can be trained deliberately — or it can remain whatever it happened to become through years of undirected experience. Most performers are working with the second version. Their attention goes where it's always gone: to the last mistake, to what the coach is thinking, to the result that isn't here yet. That's not a personality type. That's an untrained attentional system.
Week 1 is Focused Attention — narrow external mode. One object: your breath. One task: place your attention on it. When it wanders — and it will, constantly, especially at the beginning — you notice it's wandered, and you return. That's the rep. Not the breath itself. The return.
Each return is a repetition of exactly the skill you need in competition: the ability to notice where your mind has gone and bring it back to what's in front of you. You're training that move in a low-stakes environment so it's available when the stakes are real.
Fifteen minutes. Five days this week. Same time if you can — same place, same chair, same corner. The environmental consistency becomes part of the cue. You're not just training attention. You're building the container that will hold this practice long after the 28 days are done.
How to Practice — Week 1
- Set up. Sit comfortably, upright but not rigid. Eyes closed or gaze soft on the floor a few feet ahead. Set a timer if you're not using the audio.
- Find the breath. Bring your attention to the physical sensation of breathing — the air at your nostrils, the rise and fall of your chest or belly. Pick one anchor point and stay with it.
- When your mind wanders — notice it. Don't label what happened or judge how long you were gone. Just: notice. Then return. Gently. Without commentary.
- That's the practice. Not stillness. Not an empty mind. The noticing and returning. More wandering means more reps. You're only failing if you don't come back.
- Close with one minute of open sitting. Let the structure go. Notice what's present without trying to direct it.
audio/ folder alongside this HTML file,
named mbat-week1-full.m4a. MP3 also supported — update the src attribute to match.
After each session, write one thing — not about whether the practice was "good," but about what you noticed about yourself. Your attention. Your resistance. The quality of the returning. One honest sentence is worth more than a paragraph of performance review.