The Right Mindset: The Key To Achieving Your Goals with Jason Botts

by | Sep 10, 2019 | Podcasts | 0 comments

GCM 63 | Having The Right Mindset

 

As an athlete or entrepreneur, you have a clear vision of yourself of what it is you want to achieve. How do you maintain your focus and not allow pressures or failures to blur your vision? Jason Botts, a certified mindset coach to elite athletes and entrepreneurs and the Founder of Like a Beast, LLC, talks about how perseverance is key in achieving your goals. He also reveals the critical steps on how to train your mind to focus on your vision despite adversities. If you have the right mindset – the mindset of a beast – your body will follow. This episode also dives deep into living on purpose and being present in the moment of achievement.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Right Mindset: The Key To Achieving Your Goals with Jason Botts

I have a former Major League Baseball player with me and he’s now a mentor and mindset coach to elite athletes and entrepreneurs. He’s also a family man. Retiring after his 15th professional season, Jason Botts founded Peak State, a coaching and online training program that specialized in building success for athletes on and off the field. There are much more that we’re going to talk here about Mr. Jason Botts. Welcome to the show, Jason.

Thanks, Rodney. That hands down was the best introduction I’ve ever had.

Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re a busy guy. You stopped by to hang out with me for a while. I’m honored for you to be here. I’m grateful to spend some time with you.

I am too. I appreciate the patience.

Let’s dive right in. For fifteen years, you’re a Major League Baseball player. Congratulations on all the success that you’ve had during that time. I have a lot of readers that aspire to be athletes, some people that take that athletic mentality into the corporate spaces. Tell us about the mindset of an elite professional athlete like yourself.

The first thing that hits my mind is around perseverance. Achievers, whether it’s an athlete or outside the white lines of sports, we tend to be perfectionists. There is no perfection in life. It’s the ability to consistently go for it. You’re going to fail much more than you’re ever going to achieve. It’s the will, the perseverance and the ability to get back up and get your mindset going again on what you want to create, build, achieve, whatever it is and to keep going forward. Perseverance is the key factor in how we get there and build it.

Let’s talk about that a little bit because most people are afraid a failure. They don’t like the feeling of having failed. No one likes that feeling. Everyone wants to reach for the top, get to the top or stay at the top and never experienced what failure feels like. As an elite athlete, I know I’m an athlete myself. You know my story. As an athlete, most of the time you fail more than you succeed. That’s something that you have to get used to and you fail your way to success. Talk to us a little bit about that.

You make a great point because I still hate failure. It still hurts. It still and sucks, but it’s part of the journey. The shorter that you can move out of the hurt and the pain of it and get back to action, the more successful you’re going to be and the higher levels you’re going to go on and achieve and reach. Over the last couple of years, I’ve focused on the area of self-compassion and forgiveness. I can’t remember the book. The book was incredible. It’s like Barking Up the Wrong Tree or something like that. The author shared a lot about self-compassion being greater and more important on the journey than confidence even.

There is no perfection in life. You're going to fail much more than you're ever going to achieve. Click To Tweet

If you have the ability to give yourself credit for being okay and doing a good job, not great, fantastic or however you want it to be, give yourself credit for doing okay or good at this time, in this moment. You forgive the mistakes that you made and easy on yourself. That builds energy and momentum that’s going to keep you moving forward. Over time you’re going to build confidence. You’re going to have more opportunities where you do end up being successful. It’s only going to build greater and greater as time goes along. Self-compassion is a huge one and it’s something that I’ve been diving into a lot, not only with the coaching that I do, but in my own life in general. The idea of achieving and creating a better life or better business or a better family is a never-ending pursuit.

As an athlete, there’s a lot of pressure. I want to get into that mind space. As an athlete, you have your fans. You don’t want to disappoint the fans. They have expectations upon you. Your teammates have expectations upon you. Your coach has expectations upon you. Everyone is looking for you to hit the mark. When you don’t hit that mark, it’s not only that you let yourself down, but you let a lot of other people down. You feel the pressure. Give yourself compassion. You can pat yourself on the back. “I did a good job. I know you all don’t like it, but I did a good job. I forgive myself.” Your teammates are like, “What are you doing? You missed the mark.” Your coach is right in your back. That takes a lot of mental strength to get through that and give yourself that compassion. How do we do that in life?

You painted a pretty dark picture there. It’s funny because when I talk about my fifteen-year professional career, I always talk about how I felt like I never took a breath. At least over the course of my career, there are a handful of guys who are fortunate enough to get these mega contracts with millions and millions of dollars. I’ve never been one of them. They have a lot of expectations and a lot of pressures in their own stresses. They have a little bit of job security. There’s plenty of guys where they might have an off-year and they’re going to be back in the same position with the same amount of playing time for the next four or five years no matter what.

At least from the Major League Baseball world, there’s another 80% of guys in the major leagues where it’s day-to-day almost. You have to show up every single day because you have a chance of being sent down, released, gotten rid of and fallen off the face of the earth the next day. I was more in that group. The pressure is every single day of needing to perform, going and playing winter ball down in the Latin America countries and having that same pressure that I had to put up numbers or progress my skills and get better. It was fifteen years of what felt like I’ve never taken a breath. I don’t know how to give you a great direction or advice in terms of dealing with all those types of pressures.

Since I was eighteen years old, I did keep a journal. It was a diary. Do you know why I called it a performance journal? Does that make it sound cooler? It was really for writing out the pressures, the expectations, the stress that I was going through and brain dumping it all out. At the very end, what we played in our mind, it gets stuck in our mind and it seems so real. This is what’s going on. When we tend to write it out, it starts to look silly on paper. It’s like, “I sucked at the field. I went 0-4 and had three strikeouts. Now my teammates don’t like me. My teammates think I’m terrible. They think I let them down. The fans think I let them down. No one is going to like me anymore and no one is going to love me. I’m never going to be happy ever again.” When this stuff flows in our head and we put it down on a piece of paper, we go, “This is dumb.” This isn’t the truth. The truth is tomorrow is a new day. I’m going to get up. People know I care by the way I carry myself, by the hard work that I put in every single day. They know how I show up and tomorrow is going to be a much better day. I’m going to create that reality.

What gives you the strength to come back? Why keep going through that? Let’s face it, the next day you may suck again. It may not work out.

You would’ve been doing that day after day. It’s being clear on what you’re trying to do, what you want and what you’re looking to achieve. We take these dreams and we turn them into goals. We get detailed and specific. We make that big picture, that movie bright in our head. For me, that’s where the confidence to persevere, the resiliency, the motivation to get yourself back up. It all comes from that movie that’s playing in our head of what we’re trying to achieve and what we want and the life that we want to live. If we take the time to get detailed with it, get specific with it, put it in all five of our senses. What we see, hear, feel, touch, even taste someday with it all, I feel like that’s always going to be playing big and bright in our minds. No matter the struggles, no matter the failures, we’re going to be waking up with that picture again, that movie in our mind the next day. It’s going to pull us into action again.

As you’re talking, what’s coming up from me is that you’re saying to go back to that picture of what you want in your mind and that’s the truth. It seems and feels like at times whenever things in the outer environment happen that’s not conducive with the picture, they try to change that vision. If we can maintain that vision of what it is that we want and keep focusing on allowing the thoughts and the actions to be aligned with that vision of what you want, that’s how you make it through. That’s how you keep going. I’m going to try to put this in perspective for people because you have those images of doubt, those images of disbelief, those images of not enough, those images of the pain or the discomfort, whatever it is. It’s trying to take place of the image of what you want. What happens to a lot of people that don’t go as far as they want to go, don’t achieve what they want to achieve is that picture of all that doubt, images of disbelief and discomfort take over in the psyche. That’s the movie that you play. That’s the movie that you live out.

GCM 63 | Having The Right Mindset

Having The Right Mindset: Perseverance is the ability to consistently go for your goals even though you’re going to fail more than you can succeed.

 

You break it down well. It’s what I tend to say on my end, in the coaching that I do, whether I’m sharing with my sons. Anytime we don’t feel good, we could be in doubt. We could be in some type of upset, anger, sadness, frustration, overwhelm, whatever it is, any type of a negative feeling. I found over the last few years, there’s a negative movie in our head. It’s not compelling. It’s dark and small. It’s far away from us. It’s us in the struggles. We’re replaying the struggles over and over again in our mind, either the stuff that’s already been experienced, a memory or we’re projecting it into the future.

It’s simple to know that we’re doing it because it doesn’t feel good in our body. A lot of my work is teaching when you don’t feel good about something, you’re feeling unconfident, you’re feeling like you’re hesitant or in doubt, you’re procrastinating, you’re picturing and you’re focusing on the things that you don’t want to happen. Over time, people begin to play that movie more than the movie of what they want that’s inspiring and hopeful, that does make them feel alive or feel confident. It’s about building the awareness of that movie and the pictures of what we don’t want, deleting them, putting them off to the side, putting them behind us, whatever it is. Focusing big and bright on what we do want, that’s what’s going to keep us in action and keep us moving forward.

Tell me what some triggers that maybe some people can incorporate into their life. Sometimes this has to happen fast. The way we’re speaking about it now, you can go back and process off the field, in between games. You get yourself grounded in a position ready to go back on the field, but sometimes right in the middle of the game, in the heat of the game or the heat of performance and the heat of the day if you’re on the job or in business, you have to shift. What are some triggers that you have used, some game-changing triggers that allow you to get back into the space of high performance?

They go along with a lot of what you and I both have been talking about. You give a great example where I’m a big proponent of visualization and spend a little bit of time every morning before bed. You’re having your five, six, seven minutes, whatever it is and imagining the life for the next day. You bring up a great point where especially in most sports, you’ve sometimes got to shift your state and shift your mental focus in a matter of seconds. Baseball serves as a great example because there’s a pitch and another pitch every six, seven, eight seconds. Someone could get rattled from a terrible swing and a miss at a curveball in the dirt. They’ve got to shift everything in the next five seconds. One of the instructions that I do, I started doing this and it’s been one of the most effective is I have them imagine in their mind exactly what they want to happen the next play, the outcome, at least seeing themselves being strong, powerful, whatever it is.

You make a one-second movie. I have them breathe like they breathe when they know it’s true. They take a deep breath like that’s true. This picture in my mind is true. It’s already happened. It’s already real. That simple command shifts their entire state and aligns it with that picture. They step back in and they’re a completely different person. That’s something that it doesn’t have to be an athlete. That’s something that we can do in a matter of seconds in business, going into a meeting, being in a relationship situation where things aren’t working out, people aren’t on the same page. Those are very simple steps. Seeing what you want and breathing like you know what’s true is the way to change our state in a matter of seconds. I’ve used it personally in so much more than athletics.

You have your own coaching company now. You’re a mentor coaching other athletes. Tell us a little bit about this company.

Mindset was always an obsession of mine since I was fifteen years old. I was a big kid. I wasn’t a very good player at all at the time. I had these big dreams. The first night I wrote it out, I took this boyhood dream of being a Major League Baseball player. I wrote it out and turned it into an actual goal. I was like, “How can I make this happen?” For some weird reason, I call it divine action, it was this download of like the mental game mindset. You go and you master this stuff and it’s going to take you where you want to be like the books and the learning and any tapes in the mid to late ’90s. The internet wasn’t out there. Amazon wasn’t out there. Barnes & Nobles wasn’t even in my area. The next day I go into some rinky-dinky bookstore on the corner and having them look through the catalog. It comes to you ten to fourteen business days later. It was a whole different world and generation back then.

I got those books. I religiously read them and applied. In the next couple of years, everything came together for me. What I want to start the story with was halfway through my career, I met and hired a mental performance coach, Dave Austin of Extreme Focus. He was a mental performance coach. At the time, I didn’t even know that was a thing. This is in 2006, 2007. Right away, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I still had another seven, eight years of my career. As soon as I retired, I knew exactly what I wanted to do was to help other people achieve success and live their dreams.

Self-compassion is greater and more important on the journey than confidence. Click To Tweet

I reconnected with Dave and went through a lot of his training. I went and did a whole bunch of other courses as well too that put them all together. Back in late 2015, I created Peak State originally. I started the trial and error and the perseverance process of creating a business of coaching other athletes. That’s grown over the last few years. It’s evolved with Peak State along with Like a BEAST, which is a separate company. There were a lot of athletes over these years, professional, amateurs, sometimes kids as young as ten to twelve who I was teaching a lot around mindset. It’s gone more into coaching and things that were both on the field and off as well.

In the last couple of years, from time to time I started working with some of the parents and of the younger athletes. I’m doing a lot of work with men and some towards business, some towards creating a richer, more rewarding family experience. I’m very passionate when it comes to being a father. That was one of my biggest dreams as a kid too is to be a father someday. I have two boys, Lincoln and Lennox, who are seven and nine. Being present and being an incredible father for them was something I didn’t have when I was growing up, which was one of the reasons it’s a big passion. As the journeys continued, I’ve worked with a few different people here and there. It’s this mindset stuff. It’s not just for athletes, it’s for everybody. You tweak and change some of the words and the language around. It helps people get the results that they want.

What are some of the common challenges that you find on and off the field? What are some of the solutions that you provide to those challenges?

At this point, after a few years, pretty much when people aren’t getting the results that they want, they’re focusing too much on what they don’t want. We’ve touched on that movie in their mind. I don’t talk so much anymore about thinking. I started talking about movies in our head. That’s simpler. It’s faster to change the movie than to change to positive thinking. We all know how that voice in our head works. We can sit there and talk about, “I can do it.” The voice in the back goes like “No, you can’t.” It’s hard to change that voice sometimes, but it’s simple. It’s more effective for the brain to change the pictures in the movies.

Sometimes I’ll start working with athletes and maybe they’re sixteen, seventeen years old. I’m talking about the movie in their head right out the gate and they’re like, “I don’t have any movies in my mind that are going on.” I’m like, “You’re not aware of them yet.” They’re happening so fast. A couple of weeks later they’d be like, “I know what you’re talking about. They’re definitely there.” We start tweaking those to change how we feel and start focusing more and more on the things that we do want to create and happen. Anytime that we’re not getting the results that we want, we’re feeling stressed. We’re feeling anxious. We’re feeling doubtful and unconfident, whatever it is. I pretty much guarantee at this point that there is a movie or a picture in our head of what we don’t want to happen. For everybody, not just for athletes, that’s the number one mistake and the number one thing to start taking action on.

In a world of high performance because of a lot of people, especially in athletics, they think it’s more physical. The reason why I’m bringing this up is that with my injury, it was a spinal cord injury, you can physically see that there was a challenge. There was a physical challenge, a mobility challenge. In terms of performing, getting things done and creating outcomes, although there was a physical challenge, for me it was a mental thing. Recovering was a mental thing. I had to do a lot of physical things, but in order to get to that place of performing mental activities that will produce a result, I had to get beyond that mental challenge, the self-talk, the thoughts of how long it’s going to take, how hard it is, things like that. To package this for the audience, how much of a percentage is high performance and success a mental game?

I’ll keep it simple in general and go along with everybody else and say it’s 80%. I feel like it could be all of it in some way or form maybe. It’s taken a mechanical issue for an athlete. Since baseball is my background, maybe I can explain it best in baseball. If a baseball player’s swing is messed up and they need to get more practice, they need to get more lessons in, they do something where they need to fix and improve their swing. The thing of it is that until they see it clearly in their mind what they do want to be doing in their swing, it’s never going to happen. The normal process is for a baseball player to go in the batting cages and take 500 swings. Eventually, they get to a point where it starts to feel a little bit better and they start seeing that change in their mind and then it happens for them.

A lot of the work that I do is let’s see it in our mind first exactly how we want to swing the bat and let’s change our physiology. Let’s relax ourselves. Let’s get into a more confident body language. Let’s change our state first. We’re going to get to that instead of 500 swings, we get it all ironed out and get it back, it’s going to happen in a matter of ten or 25, who knows? It’s going to happen much faster. I feel the mindset is something that naturally happens, but when people aren’t aware of it, it takes them much longer to make their shifts on their own. You could be wasting 500 swings, 1,000 swings, 10,000 swings, doing the same mistakes over and over again because you keep focusing on those negative mistakes.

GCM 63 | Having The Right Mindset

Having The Right Mindset: Brain dump all your negativity and pain on paper. All the emotions seem real in your mind but when you write it out, it starts to look silly.

 

A great example would be a lot of the ballplayers that reached out to me, when they have mechanical issues, they’ll say something along the lines like, “I’m pulling my shoulder out early in my swing.” I’m going, “What are you telling yourselves when you’re hitting?” They go, “Don’t fly open. Don’t pull my shoulder out. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” They’re saying the words “Don’t do it,” but in their mind and in that picture of that move that we’re talking about, they’re still playing a movie of them flying open. It’s the whole don’t think of a pink elephant. Everyone starts thinking of a pink elephant. My new favorite one now is, “I will not climb a ladder.” I’ll have the athletes say, “I will not climb a ladder.” They’ll repeat it a bunch of times. I’ll ask them, “How many of you picture yourself climbing a ladder at some point of saying that phrase?”

That’s the way the brain works. If we’re telling ourselves don’t do something, we’re still creating that movie in our mind. That’s what the brain follows and gives the body direction is based on that movie. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question at all, but I know that if we want to improve something, whether it’s getting bigger, stronger, faster and increase our performance in the game, we have to see it. If it’s improved our mechanics, it has to happen in our mind first before our body follows. That’s the natural progression. Once you start to get involved in mindset, you’re able to start making those changes faster.

I think of one other thing. Towards the end of my career, I’m 31, 32 years old and my body was beaten up with nagging injuries. I was having shoulder problems, hip problems. I was a switch hitter. I hit left-handed and right-handed, but left-handed my swing was garbage. I couldn’t have a tight, quick, powerful swing with a natural uppercut that I had for the entire career that allowed me to drive the ball, hit home runs. Even when I accidentally got under the ball, I would still carry and be a home run. That wasn’t physically possible anymore with this nagging injury in my shoulder and my hip. It was 2012 and I sat there and spent the entire offseason. I wanted to reconstruct my swing. I wanted to change my swing so that somehow I’ll find a way to hit the ball in the air and hit more home runs again.

At 31, 32, you don’t change your swing at that point. You change your swing when you’re a high school kid. Maybe when you’re early in pro ball at 21, 22. When you’re 32, you’ve been playing professionally for full thirteen, fourteen years. That’s not the time to start changing your swing. I had this offseason. I went in and I was like, “Using visualization for ten years, I know that it works. It’s getting me ready for the games.” I want to see if I can change my swing through it because I’ve started reading a lot of resource study around visualization for skills and technique development. I spent twenty minutes every morning and twenty minutes before bed every night seeing the swing. I modeled a guy that I played against him when I was in Japan. He was a great power hitter.

I was modeling his swing, seeing him swing, see myself swing the same way, doing it over and over again for twenty minutes in my mind. I’m seeing all the success, all the home runs, the life that I wanted to create, the opportunities I wanted to get. I’ve seen them all real, all achieved. At the very end of the twenty-minute session at night, I would do the swings in slow motion. I had this tee in the middle of my living room. I want to take the full swing. In slow motion, I would try to practice that swing. You know some of the stories, the next year I went on to hit 38 home runs in 120 games in the couple different leagues in the US, in the other country. I hadn’t done that in three or four years. I felt like power-wise, I was even better than I was four years before that. It takes place in the mind first and the body follows. Amazing things can happen when we sit there to train and condition our mind to focus on what we want. If someone’s new, they’re not getting the results they want and they’re focusing too much on what they don’t want to happen consistently.

We gave this great example of, “Create this picture in your mind. Believe it’s true. That’s going to change how we feel going into this next play, this next pitch, this next meeting.” The way that we get that strength, control of our mind and our movie in a matter of seconds, we have to build that muscle first. I spent in five, six, seven minutes of visualizing. I always call them the seven-minute visualizations. They are like the strength workout. As athletes, we go to the weight room for 45 minutes. It’s not so that we can lift for fifteen minutes the next time or do it in the game. We spend 45 minutes there doing squats, bench press, everything so that in one play in the game, we’re as explosive and as strong as we powerfully can be. That’s how I see the seven-minute visualization as a strength training so that when you need it the most, you’re strong and powerful to make one big, great, clear, bright picture of a movie and step right into the next play.

I want you to tell us about your Like a BEAST training. What do you mean by Like a BEAST?

Dave Austin and Shane, there’s a lot of the work that they’re doing with Extreme Focus. Dave co-created the BEAST principles with a man named Roger Anthony, who I only got to meet one time when I was still playing. He passed away over the last few years. He’s one of those guys that as soon as you see him, you know he’s special. As soon as you talk to him that one time you’ll never forget him for the rest of your life. Roger had created a lot of animal metaphors in the work that he was doing, teaching mindset around the animals and how their physical traits and how they can be guides for us as athletes, business, people, whatever.

The idea of achieving and creating a better life, business, or family is a never-ending pursuit. Click To Tweet

Like a BEAST is a little bit of that along with the other animal analogies that I’ve created over these last few years of working with athletes. The original be a BEAST principles was this whole system. I started creating animals to solve specific problems. I was coming up with these athletes who were struggling with something. Maybe they’re being impatient on their journey. I started thinking of a cheetah. Here’s this fastest land animal on the planet. When it begins its pursuit, how does it start? It starts off slow. It’s stalking. It’s creeping. Its face is relaxed. Its eyes are on the target. If you’re watching on video, I hope that one day I can see it in person.

They’re 100 meters away. They’re only going an inch at a time. They build into a slow trot. They wait until the last possible second to full-out go out. The one thing that I’ve learned through all these animals, they say the greatest strength of the cheetah isn’t its flat out speed but its ability to be agile. It’s chasing the gazelle that can go almost as fast. The gazelle knows where it’s trying to go. It knows all the cuts. The cheetah could say step for step with all the cuts in the pursuit of it. I see that it’s because the cheetah took the time, it built up the rhythm, the balance, the timing. We can stay in pursuit of this gazelle with whatever cut it makes because it took that time to build up its speed.

The cheetah is one of the animals in Like a BEAST. Play Like a BEAST is the program. It’s twelve visualizations that I teach the animals in the beginning. I use them as metaphors because the brain loves to learn in metaphors. The first half is teaching the animal, me painting the picture and walking through the language of seeing this cheetah in the environment. The second half of the audio is the athlete playing in their performance with those same qualities and characteristics because that’s one thing I don’t like about mindset training. It’s a lot of stuff that I’ve done in the past. It’s like, “I’ll explain the principles to you, all the steps maybe you take notes and maybe you go out there and try and practice it.” With all the stuff that I learned about visualization is you could take someone and see themselves performing differently and imagining what it would look like for them to perform with more confidence, more focus to see their body, their face, their actions and their technique with more confidence, more focus, more resiliency.

One of the biggest problems that I see with athletes or people in general when it comes to visualizing is they make this highlight a fantasy reel of their perfect life and their perfect day, which is not going to ever happen. I feel the brain realizes that this is a fantasy and dismisses it. One of the greatest strategies I could share is if you see yourself overcoming the adversity, seeing the failures, seeing things not going the way that you want, but seeing yourself respond where you’re in more confidence, you’re more powerful. You’re more resilient. That’s training yourself to show up that way in those times so you can continue to go forward. The Play Like a BEAST visualizations, they’re all designed that way where you got the lion, the cheetah, the tiger, the rhino, a bunch of different animals and they’re all teaching the lesson. At the same time, they’re allowing the person to go and listen to them and to see themselves with those qualities. It’s training their body to command the brain to show up like that when it comes to practice game time, lesson whatever it is.

I can see how those skill sets can not only be helpful in the field as an athlete but in corporate spaces as well as an entrepreneur or as a business person.

The Play Like a BEAST visualizations, I designed them for athletes. I talk about being on the field or the core in one sentence. I referenced an athlete about one other time. Some of this has been passed around in a lot of different environments. I listened to them on most days. It’s something that can be done that way in their language. I had a lot of training and a lot of different avenues, but it’s the way that they’re very intentionally trained. Even if we don’t have the seven minutes to sit there and close our eyes and get all zen and dive into the visualization, their language is in a way that you cannot not see yourself, at least at an unconscious level. Some days I’m sweeping the floor, I’m playing in the background for me and the boys. You’re having these thoughts and these movies of seeing yourself responding, reacting the way that you want to, the way that you need to in order to make these goals and these dreams that we have a reality.

What is your role in the Sarah Foundation?

My girlfriend who probably won’t be a girlfriend for very long in a good way, she’s absolutely the light of my life. She’s an amazing woman. She’s another masterful coach. She more specializes in energetic work. I know this stuff is starting to grow lately, but it’s mind-blowing some of the things that she can do. She’s created the Love Sarah Foundation, which is coming together. It’s beginning to get put out there. It’s still a vision. She’s a visionary. We talk about creating these visions. I need someone to help me and to sit down. They need to ask me the questions. It took me three years from Peak State and Like a BEAST for me to be able to articulate what I wanted.

GCM 63 | Having The Right Mindset

Having The Right Mindset: Don’t visualize the perfect life or perfect day that you want. That’s just fantasizing.

 

That’s a good point to make to people. There are some people where we need help in creating the vision. There are other people who are visionary type people. They need the builders. I’m a builder. You give me, I’ll work all day. I’m like the camel, throw something on me and I’ll walk through the desert for 1,000 miles. I’m a builder. Sarah has played a huge role in coming into me, asking me questions and helping share what comes to her with the visions that she sees with Like a BEAST, Peak State and all these other things. She’s created this vision for the Love Sarah Foundation. She sees the end 100 years down the road and she shares all the stuff. It goes back and forth. It’s my job to sit there and ask her questions on sequencing everything.

She has this vision for 100 years in the future of where it’s going. It’s right in her face. It’s a real thing. She’ll go into stress and be overwhelmed sometimes because she’s like, “I don’t know. I see it all, I don’t know what the next step is.” It’s my job to sequence everything, to write a lot of the messaging, a lot of the copy stuff for her and be a speaker on stage to the main vision of the foundation. There’s a lot of aspects to it. This first part of it is creating video educational technologies for children. The way that I explained it is this stuff we wish we learned in school.

We’re raising a lot of money to the foundation not only to create the technology, to get the instruction from the right teachers and everything that we want, but also to distribute it in a way it could reach as many kids across the country and eventually in the world where it’s stuff on earning money. It’s stuff on managing and handling money. It’s stuff on relationships and the dynamic stuff. It’s a lot of self-worth, self-compassion type teachings. She’s brilliant, especially working with young kids. I can never do a great job as articulated at all as she can. The easiest way for me to explain this is about getting information and educational resources to children on the stuff we wish we learned in school. I’m providing a lot of the mindset stuff too as well.

That’s increasing the consciousness of our kids at a very young age.

She goes into the whole frequency of the planet. She’s very gifted when it comes to that stuff. That’s her 100-year vision. She sees everything at the end of it. The whole world together in this beautiful portrait that she talks about. This is one of the steps. The foundation is one of the pieces that’s going to make that all happen. There are many amazing, beautiful people who are stepping up. It’s only going to continue to grow where it’s not going to be anybody’s one thing, but it’s going to be this whole partnership of many different people and ways of reaching people that are going to lift the planet up.

What does that do for you, Jason, to be able to raise the awareness and the consciousness of the people that you work with in terms of your clients, your company and with this foundation into kids? What does that do for you?

It’s interesting because it’s probably been a little over a year where I had this experience. I was waiting for the experience for many years because you hear about other people talking about the experience like you and I want one of those too. I was down in Cabo. I was at a training seminar. We get walked through this process. They’re like, “We’re going to sit down and create a spiritual vision,” and all this other stuff. You go through like the ten-minute Enya soundtrack. It’s always Enya that they are playing. I’m crying. It started coming to me where there was a question in there something about you’re the effect of some cause in the world.

I looked at my life. I’ve had a very beautiful life when I was younger. There were a lot more challenges. I always wanted love. I always wanted a tight family. I didn’t grow up with any of that stuff. I’ve been able to create this tremendous family. It’s a tremendous co-parenting situation. We’re still incredible friends with my former wife, the boy’s mother, and we give and flow back and forth. We help each other in many different avenues of life where it’s a tight family. I brought in Sarah. She’s brought in her man, Dave. It’s like there’s been this expansion of a family, not a separation. It’s been this beautiful thing. I’m going through all that story in my mind during this visualization.

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I have so much that I wanted to share in terms of healing and love. This was my bigger picture than just working with athletes. The Love Sarah Foundation, when it was presented to me, that was part of it. At the time of having all the stuff about healing and raising the planet up in frequency, divine, feminine and masculine energies and all this crazy stuff were coming to me. Here I am, I’m working with athletes, which I love to death. It wasn’t like congruent completely with this company and its big vision and Love Sarah Foundation, when it was presented to me. I was like, “That’s everything that I saw back in Cabo in 2018 whatever it was.” It’s a deeper purpose if I can answer your question.

Based on everything that we’ve said on the show, if I had to sum it all up, you’re giving of yourself even more deeply than you did in your fifteen years in the league. You found something where you can give deeply. You can increase the frequency and the consciousness of people. That’s your service. I believe that when you find that thing in life that you enjoy giving or contributing to life, that is you walking in your purpose. It does give you a sense of reward and a sense of fulfillment, which is what I was getting to. I was building this path to a game-changer mentality mindset, the whole process of changing the game, changing your mindset gets you to that place. Most people when they have a game-changer mentality experience, they find something about themselves that they can contribute. That brings them much joy. They find balance and peace in other areas in their life, love, finance, you name it. They got it. They’re living on purpose. Not for a purpose, but on purpose. That’s what I was getting to with you.

When I was asked that question on cause and effect, I looked back on it. I just came in right now. It’s almost like Slumdog Millionaire if anyone’s ever seen that movie. You get to that point where all of a sudden you get presented opportunity where everything that happened in your life you could see happen for a reason. Even all the things that were painful, that were huge struggles and challenges that you went through, and all of sudden you get to a point where you realize that it will happen for a reason. It’s your gift to give back so other people don’t go through the same experiences and at the same levels. Love Sarah Foundation is my Slumdog Millionaire moment.

What’s next for you, Jason? Are you going to continue to build the Sarah Foundation and grow your mentoring company? Tell us what’s on the horizon for you?

One of my intentions with Like a BEAST, a lot of it in the beginning was on a Peak State transitioned over to Like a BEAST. I had the Play Like a BEAST program. There’s some group coaching that goes on, but I chose LikeABeast.com. That is the name of the company because I saw a lot of other opportunities to Parent Like a BEAST, Love Like a BEAST. I want to create an audio and visualization program for parents. Athletes go through their own pressures, but it fails in comparison to the pressures of being a parent, the stress and the overwhelm and stuff that we go through this. To have seven-minute visualizations where we are locking in on the gratitude and appreciation of life, seeing ourselves respond and react to situations that normally would stress us out.

It’s seeing ourselves performing or reacting or responding to the way we want to in those environments and pretty much taking the model that I did with the visualizations in Play Like a BEAST and doing a Parent Like a BEAST. That’s something that’s coming very soon that I’m excited about. We’re continuing to take the steps with the Love Sarah Foundation because that is the bigger purpose. There’s a lot of great stuff. It’s an exciting time and I’m trying to make sure that I live and enjoy life as well. It’s one thing to achieve the dream I found out. It’s a whole another thing to live the dream and being in appreciation and gratitude that you’re doing exactly what you want to do because sometimes it happens. You go into like, “I got so many responsibilities.” There is so much pressure. We fail to enjoy and appreciate what we have even when things are going fabulous.

I learned that lesson during my professional career where it was like I was at the end of the road towards the end and I realize I had been living the dream that I wanted since I was a kid for my entire life. I didn’t realize I was living it. I have the mindset, the mentality of enjoying it and being grateful because there was so much pressure. There were such high expectations, not only from myself but from coaches and the organization and from fans, from family, people watching the games back home that I spend many years wasting, not having the fulfillment and appreciation of the journey. I made it but didn’t live it is how I like to describe it.

That brings me to the point, you can have it all but not be present to it. How can people connect with you, Jason, if they wanted to learn more about you, your programs and the Love Sarah Foundation? How can they connect?

GCM 63 | Having The Right Mindset

Having The Right Mindset: Live on purpose. Find that thing that gives you a sense of fulfillment and reward.

 

LikeABeast.com right now is the easiest best way. We’re on all the social media stuff. On Instagram, it’s @PlayLikeABeast_JasonBotts and Facebook as well. My personal email is Jason@LikeABeast.com. LoveSarahFoundation.com is there for people who want to learn more about that information as well too.

Thank you for coming on the show, Jason. It’s been a pleasure to interview you. I love what you’re doing in the world. I love how you are contributing. I’m looking forward to learning more about you, seeing more about you and the BEAST training program. I may even sign up for that myself because I’m big into nature. Nature teaches us so much. We don’t pay attention to it, but there’s a lesson in everything in nature. I may even be taking a look at this Like a BEAST program. What is maybe that one thing, if you want it to lead that Game Changer Mentality nugget or message that you would want to leave for people?

My personal motto is to live the dream. I probably said it 47 times on this. I’ll leave it with live the dream.

Mr. Jason Botts, Mr. Live The Dream, you might have a new name nickname now. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for what you’ve contributed and live the dream.

Thanks, Rodney.

Thank you.

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About Jason Botts

GCM 63 | Having The Right MindsetJason Botts is a former Major League Baseball Player, and now a Mentor and Mindset Coach to Elite Athletes, Entrepreneurs, and Family Men. Retiring after his 15th Professional Season, Jason founded Peak State, a Coaching and Online Training Company that specialized in building success for Athletes on and off the field.

His unique animal teaching metaphors quickly spread and led to the development of Like a Beast, an audio program company that leads people to achieve their biggest goals through the power of visualization and the wisdom of the animal kingdom. Jason also plays a significant role in the Love, SARAH Foundation—an organization dedicated to the creation and distribution of free educational training to our youth, with vital lessons for a happy and successful life not taught in the classroom. Jason resides in West Palm Beach, Florida, with his two sons Lincoln and Lenox.

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Are you ready to shed your past, rise above your present, and go confidently in the direction of your dreams? The first step? Decide. Choose right here and now to make a move. Set your intention. Then simply ask Rodney for help. https://rodneyflowers.com/mentoring/ 

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