What You've Actually
Been Training
When I first started working with attention training in professional baseball, the question I heard most often from players was: how does sitting in a room breathing help me hit a fastball? It's a fair question. The transfer isn't obvious until you understand what the training is actually building.
MBAT — Mindfulness-Based Attention Training — is not about relaxation, or stress reduction, or becoming a more spiritual person. It's about developing a specific set of cognitive skills that performance research has consistently identified as central to elite execution. The name is slightly misleading. "Mindfulness" has accumulated a lot of associations it doesn't deserve. What we're actually training is the voluntary control of attention.
William James, writing in 1890, said that the faculty of returning a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. He called it education in the deepest sense. And he said that an education which could improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. We have that education now. It's what you've been doing for three weeks.
The four-week protocol maps to four distinct attentional modes — each one a different way your attention can be directed, each one directly applicable to performance. You didn't practice them in sequence by accident. The sequence is the point. Each week built on the last. The narrow modes gave you the ability to place attention precisely. The wide modes gave you the ability to hold it broadly. The internal mode gave you access to physiological information. The final mode — Connection — integrates all of them in the context of relationship. Together they constitute a complete attentional toolkit.
The Four Modes
Research on expert performance consistently shows that elite performers don't just pay attention better — they pay attention differently at different moments. They narrow when execution demands precision. They broaden when reading demands wide-field awareness. They access internal signals when physiological information is relevant. They tune into relational and emotional fields when the team demands it. The four MBAT modes correspond directly to these demands.
Your Attentional
Demand Profile
Not every performance environment demands the same attentional mix. A sprinter needs deep focused attention and body scan precision. A point guard needs open monitoring and connection in equal measure. A pitcher needs focused attention for execution and open monitoring for reading the hitter. A CEO presenting to a board needs connection and focused attention. Your specific context has a specific attentional fingerprint.
Rate how much each mode your performance actually demands. Be honest about your real context — not the ideal version of it, not what you wish it required. Then we'll look at where your three weeks of training has been most directly building toward what you need, and where the gap might be.
After the
28 Days
When you finish Week 4, the protocol ends. The container doesn't. That's the point of the whole thing.
You have a 15-minute daily practice window that is now established — same time, same place, neurologically associated with a certain quality of intentional attention. That window is yours permanently. What you put in it going forward is a choice you get to make based on what you actually need.
Some options: you could continue rotating through the four modes, keeping all of them fresh. You could focus on the mode your demand profile identified as most critical and most prone to failure. You could use the window for visualization — pre-performance rehearsal of specific high-demand scenarios. You could use it for values review — the identity work from Module 1 performed as a brief daily practice. You could use it for the reset sequence you built in Module 3. All of these benefit from the container. None of them work as well without it.
The final module — Module 5 — addresses this directly. The Prime/Perform/Learn framework is built around the container you've established here. Everything you've built in this course lives inside the structure Module 5 gives you. But the structure only works because the container is real.
Finish Week 4 first. Then go to Module 5.
Connection Practice
The final week moves into the broadest and most interior mode. Where Open Monitoring directed your attention outward to the environmental field, Connection directs it inward to the relational and affective field — your sense of connection to yourself, to others, and to something larger than the performance itself.
This is the mode that athletes describe when they talk about flow states. When the self gets small enough that you're no longer managing the performance from the outside but simply in it. When the team feels like a single organism. When you're playing for something beyond the outcome and that clarity paradoxically produces the outcome. These aren't mystical experiences. They're the natural result of a broad internal attentional field — what researchers call self-transcendent experience — and they can be trained.
The practice this week begins with yourself — with a quality of warmth and acceptance toward your own experience — and then expands outward. To people you're close to. To your teammates. To the broader context of why you do this. The research on compassion-based practices shows consistent effects on social connection, prosocial behavior, and emotional regulation — all of which transfer directly to how you perform in a team environment under pressure.
This is also the completion of something. Four weeks. The container is established. The four modes are trained. Whatever you've noticed about your attention over this month — how it works, where it goes, what it's capable of — that knowledge is yours. The protocol ends. The practice continues.
How to Practice — Week 4
- Begin with yourself. Settle in. Bring attention to your own experience — physical, emotional, mental — with a quality of openness and non-judgment. Not analyzing. Just present with whatever is here. Rest with yourself for two to three minutes.
- Expand to someone close. Bring to mind someone you care about. Not a relationship you're managing — someone you simply feel warmth toward. Hold them in your awareness without thinking about them analytically. Notice what it feels like to be in contact with that relationship.
- Expand to your team or group. Widen the field to include the people you perform with. Not evaluating them, not managing them — just holding awareness of them as the people you share this with.
- Expand to the purpose. Let the field open to include why this matters. Not in an abstract way — the specific reason this performance, this craft, this work has meaning for you. Let yourself feel the connection to that before you think about it.
- Return to yourself. Close by coming back to your own breath and body. Notice if anything has shifted in the quality of your experience. Rest there for a minute before finishing.
audio/ folder alongside this HTML file,
named mbat-week4-connection.m4a. MP3 also supported — update the src attribute to match.
The final week of the log. Write something after each session — not an evaluation of the practice, but a note about what contact with the relational and affective field actually felt like. Where did it land? What did it surface? This week's log is more personal than the previous three. Let it be.