Pirates Mental Skills Coach Bernie Holliday on How to Master Mindfulness

Mental conditioning coaches have become standard across MLB, but the techniques aren't reserved for baseball players. Here's how you too can beat stress and stay mindful in the moment.

This spring, with the 2020 MLB season on hold since March due to the coronavirus pandemic and uncertainties abound, baseball saw a shift to a new focus on one coach in particular: the mental skills coordinator. As players quarantined at home like the rest of us, coaches across the league stepped in to help them adjust to new routines.

For Pirates director of mental conditioning Bernie Holliday, that meant creating an online platform with short video lessons on themes such as mindfulness, composure, poise and concentration—tips and techniques that can be applied to both baseball and everyday life. Holliday joined the Pirates in 2010, after working as a performance coach with the U.S. Military Academy in West Point and earning his Ph.D. in sport psychology. In his decade with the franchise, he’s worked with players and coaches across the organization on mental skills to help them reach their potential, and on mental health more generally.

Here, Holliday talks about how his work can be used by people in everyday life, from dealing with stress and anxiety, to incorporating mindfulness into daily routines and much more.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Emma Baccellieri: How many connections do you see between the work you do in baseball and regular daily life outside of it?

Bernie Holliday: There are tremendous parallels. What we've learned in sports psychology is that performance is performance. The work I did in the military with soldiers and officers parallels the work we do with ballplayers. Performance is—you want to be at your best when your best is needed. I think baseball is basically a little microcosm of life in general.

EB: How do you approach coaching players through stress?

BH: I think stress has gotten a bad reputation in society. We tend to see it as the bad guy, when really, I like to view stress as mobilizing energy to accomplish something. And “something” could be the unknown, it could be something difficult, it could be something long-lasting like trying to get a four year degree. It could be something like trying to work your way and grind through this pandemic. But what stress does is motivate us and mobilizes us to be able to accomplish things. So stress in and of itself is a good thing in our lives, but a lot of times, we view it in a more negative way. However, stress also puts us into a high-burn rate mode. So while it's very helpful, because we're able to accomplish stuff, it's very costly as well on our system, because our systems are designed to go into this high-burn-rate mode for short periods of time. So where stress can become problematic is when we get in a high-burn-rate mode for long periods of time without ever being able to shut it down, and that's where what eventually happens is we deplete our resources, we deplete our systems, and we end up shutting ourselves down.

I don't want to eliminate stress from a person's life, because stress is valuable, but I do want them to recognize the value of balancing stress with recovery—intense stress requires intense recovery. If you have one in your life, you’ve got to prioritize the other as well. So there's a process that's very simple—stillness. It might have this sort of meditative quality or sound to it, but really, it's a very simple process. Just 10 to 15 minutes, once or twice a day, can help replenish brain chemistry, can help replenish your nervous system, can help replenish you physiologically, so that you can go into high-burn-rate mode longer and continue to grind through tough times.

And stillness is simply just reducing or eliminating sensory input. So to practice stillness for 10 minutes, it would be turning off your phone, shutting off your iPad screen, flipping down your your computer screen, and just going into a dark room—perhaps the bedroom, shutting off the lights—putting on one of those little eye blindfolds that help you sleep and just focus on your breathing for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. It's basically just shutting down sensory input, which is all around us, all the time. We're bombarded with it 24/7. So just practicing stillness once or twice a day can help combat the high burn rate that comes along with stress.

EB: That makes sense, because stress can be so physical.

BH: We tend to experience physical nervousness before something important, where we don't know what the outcome might be. We might have a big job interview, and when we're sitting out there in a waiting room, we feel our body going through this physical nervousness. Most people, when they feel this, they tend to view it in three ways. Number one: I must not be prepared enough. Because if I were more prepared, I wouldn't feel this nervousness. Now, we know that's false, but that's how our mind goes. The second one is: I must be weak. Because if I were stronger, I wouldn't feel this physical nervousness. And we know that's wrong, too, but that's where our mind goes. And the third one is: how can I possibly succeed and perform well, feeling this uncomfortable? And we know that's wrong, too. But those are the things that we're socialized to believe.

We see nervousness as the enemy, and we tend to worry ourselves into this really bad mental place. But what I want our athletes to know—and I think anybody that has high-stakes moments in their lives—is nervousness is actually performance-enhancing. Everything our body does for us actually gets us ready to perform better... We've been taught to try to suppress it or make it go away, when really, all of these things are basically our nervous system’s active warm-up to get us ready to go into something important and to be able to tackle it.

I've got this great picture of these two guys on a roller coaster, and they're right at the apex, about to go over the edge, and one guy looks super thrilled, he's got his hands in the air and a huge smile on his face. The other guy looks scared to death, pale, frightened and just looks like he's about to die. And I'll often ask my players—which of these individuals do you feel is nervous? And they’ll make arguments and go back and forth. But, in truth, they both are. I can guarantee both of them are experiencing adrenaline and cortisol. They have an elevated heart rate, both probably have some sweaty palms, both of them probably have elevated blood pressure. They're probably breathing more quickly, sort of going through this nervous reaction. However, one guy has learned to interpret it as excitement. The other guy has learned to interpret it as a threat. So nervousness is just our body getting ready. It's the interpretation that makes all the difference in the world. If we can learn to interpret that nervous experience as a performance enhancer, you get excited about it.

So that's the message I share with our athletes all the time, and I think it’s a tremendous message to share with anybody that has to go into these high-stakes moments in their lives and in their careers, where they feel their body starts to speed up in that nervous experience—recognize really what it is and why it's there to help.

EB: I know that one of the other concepts that you preach to your athletes is mindfulness. Does this idea of stillness to counter stress tie into that at all?

BH: It does. I think there's a value in scheduling it once or twice in your day, to develop a little stillness program where you spend 10 or 15 minutes, and you just shut down sensory input and focus on breathing and on being in that moment with you and your breath. I think once in the morning, once in the afternoon—I think there's also value to looking at your schedule and trying to plan where you think those high burn rate moments might be in your day, and trying to plan a little stillness session right before or right after those. You might know that you’ve got a really busy period from 3:00 to 4:30 in the afternoon, so maybe try to put a session in there at 2:15. or one at 4:45, so that you can balance out in that moment. But really what mindfulness is—it’s being present in the moment, not too far ahead of yourself, not too far in the past. I think there's a lot of similarities but also some differences to it. Mindfulness is more about focus, whereas stillness is I think more about rejuvenation and recovery.

EB: What does it mean to activate that sense of mindfulness and tap into that focus?

BH: Mindfulness really is a daily travel. Being mindful is being present in this moment, attending to what's right in front of us. And that's a skill that gets better with practice. There's a process that's known as a mindfulness practice, and it basically involves two things. One, focusing on something in the present moment. That could be your breath. That could be a word. That could be a sound or sensory input around you, what you hear, what you see. And it's recognizing when your mind wanders—and your mind will wander, but bring it back in a gentle and non-judgmental way.

The simplest exercise would be to start at 100, and with every breath, you count backwards by one, so you inhale 99, exhale, 98, inhale, 97 exhale 96, and you work your way back down to zero. And what's going to happen is, inevitably, you're going to wander. At 85 or 78 or 69, you're going to lose track of something, you're going to slip into your to-do list, thinking about what you have to do, or maybe a fight you had with your son or your daughter or your spouse, and you're gonna lose track of the count. And the practice of mindfulness is recognizing when your mind wanders and bringing it back to that count—back to that moment. That's really what mindfulness is all about in everyday life. It's recognizing when you get too far ahead of yourself, and then bringing it back, without judgment, to what's right in front of you in the task at hand. And I would say with this pandemic, a lot of us are forecasting way out in front of us. What is this going to do to our finances, what's this going to do to our job stability, what's it going to do to our child's reading and writing and mathematics ability?

Mindfulness is being able to recognize when we get so far ahead into these uncontrollables, into these unknowns, that we’re no longer present in this moment, attending to what needs to be attended to. What might be my job right now? It’s the task I'm doing right now—maybe I'm just spending time with my wife and my daughter. And it's funny because we want to attach judgment to all these things. We want to be able to judge our focus as right or wrong, we want to be able to judge our situation as good or bad, and really, mindfulness is about making that adjustment without judgment. It's about being able to bring it back to the moment without getting frustrated, without feeling discouraged, without beating ourselves up about having those worries. Just bringing it back to the present moment without that judgment attached to it. And that's the hard part, because we want to judge and we want to evaluate.

EB: What about how we talk about these moments, and how we talk about ourselves more broadly?

BH: In baseball, a lot of times we use instruction that has the word “don’t” in it. Don't swing at the ball in the dirt. Don't walk this guy. Don't make an error and let the run score. We're worried about a lot of these things happening and we try to instruct ourselves not to let it happen. And I think this happens in everyday life, too. If you have a job interview—don't screw up the job interview. If you've got a big deadline—hey, don't miss this deadline. Don't look stupid in front of your boss, don't let your wife down, don't disappoint your kids, don't blow the sales pitch….

There's a lot of places in everyday life where we can go into this mindset of what we're worried about happening and trying to avoid it. But from the self-talk stance—really, images and sensory information are our first language, so when we say, “Don't blow this job interview, don't look stupid,” there's no image for the word don't. So what does our brain picture to make sense of that? It pictures whatever comes out after don't. It pictures blowing the job interview. It pictures looking stupid in front of the board. And we start to see the very things we're hoping to avoid. As a result, we often get the very thing that we're trying not to let happen.

Any golfer knows this—if you step up to the tee box and there's a water hazard to your left, the first thing that comes to mind is don't hit it in the water, and what ultimately happens is because there's no word for don't, our brain flickers into this moment of seeing the ball under the water to make sense of that that false statement. And we either over-correct and hit the ball far out of bounds to the right, and in turn avoid the water, or we get tight and tense because we're worried about the water, and we hit the ball in the water. So I always encourage people to follow up with statements about what you do want. If you find yourself going into that don't mode—which is going to happen, because we're all human beings and that’s going to occur—don’t get frustrated. Again, make that adjustment without the judgment. But it's coming back to just getting the last word with yourself. Make sure that you follow up with what you do want. Instead of “don't hit the ball in the water,” what do you want? I want to hit the ball to the right side of the fairway, 230 yards out. “Don't screw up the job interview.” What do you want to do? I want to speak slowly. I want to clearly articulate why I want this job. And I think what that does is plant that image of what you do want in your head as you go into that big moment, whether it's job-related, personal or family-related, or performance-related in baseball..