Baseball and other team sports teach us many valuable lessons. With opening day for many professional baseball teams just around the corner, it’s a perfect time to think about those lessons. How to win and lose with grace, how to be competitive and give your all to the goal, how to play by the rules and as a team; sports teach us some of the most important skills we’ll need in life. These valuable lessons follow us and provide a framework for how to perform and succeed as adults. Coaches teach us these skills, and provide valuable feedback and motivating support. By looking at how coaches motivate their teams to become better athletes, we can learn a lot about how to use that motivation to become more successful business owners.

One of the most important lessons we can learn from a coach is how to focus on the future. When you’re playing baseball, or any sport, you can’t get discouraged with past mistakes. If you throw a bad pitch or strike out, you don’t just give up. It’s easy to be overly critical of our failures, especially the first time playing a new sport. Running a business has the same challenges…problems arise when you start to obsess over perceived failures. You could stay mired down in the past on plays already made. But the game isn’t over! You can’t undo what’s already happened, but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost the game. Get your mind away from negative thoughts and stop obsessing over past mishaps. Keep your mind on the next play.

Baseball coaches keep their team focused on what’s happening in the present, rather than what happened during the last inning. When a player focuses on past mistakes, he’s not going to truly have his mind in the present moment.  That can result in more errors, foul balls and more strikes. The same can be true running a business. When a business owner is only concerned with lamenting over poor decisions made in the past, the future will only yield more poor results.

If your head is stuck in the past rather than the here and now, use this blog as a wake-up call. Use your past failures as lessons learned but don’t obsess over them. Stop wasting time and energy worrying about what’s past. There’s nothing you can do to change what’s already happened so why concern yourself? Move on and let go of the past. Your focus should always be on the next play. Even if you’re at bat with two strikes, think positively, clear your mind and turn your next hit into a home run.