This morning called for deadlifts, and Thomas had a blister on his hand.
If you’ve ever pulled a bar off the floor, you know deadlifts are brutal on the hands even when they’re not torn up. Thomas looked at the bar, looked at me, and said it flat out: “I can’t grip the bar.”
He wasn’t lying to me. The blister was real. But here’s the thing: he did every set anyway. Lifted more than I did, probably. I’m not picking on Thomas for saying it, because most of us say some version of it every single day. I’m using him to make a point about something I’ve been chewing on since I watched it happen.
The Can’t Hills
We’ve got a lot of athletes who love building can’t hills on the beautiful, preserved grass of their own mind.
“I can’t get this guy out.”
“I can’t hit this guy.”
“I can’t pass this test.”
One can’t hill doesn’t do much damage on its own. But they pile up. Before a kid knows it, he’s spending half his mental energy just navigating around the hills he built himself, and the other half trying to actually compete. That’s an impossible way to play this game, or run a business, or lead a family.
I closed out Friday’s post talking about how a slump almost always starts in the gap between two questions: was I responsible with what I could control, and did I bring what I had today? I said that gap gets filled with self-talk, the same internal voice that decides whether a kid is complying out of fear or working from something real. Today I want to stay right there and dig into what that voice actually is, because I don’t think we teach it nearly enough.
What Self-Talk Actually Is
Self-talk isn’t some vague self-help buzzword. Sport psychologists define it specifically: it’s the verbalization or statements athletes repeat to themselves before or during a skill, whether that’s a free throw, an at-bat, or a mile split (McLeod Health, Sport Psychology: Self-Talk). The goal isn’t to trick yourself into thinking you’re invincible. It’s to replace the automatic negative statement with a specific, useful one, on purpose, before the moment shows up and writes the script for you.
That matters because your brain isn’t a neutral recorder. It’s actively building the next rep off whatever you just told it. Which brings me to my three favorite phrases on this subject, the ones I lean on with my own guys constantly.
“Faith and fear have one thing in common: they both believe in a future that hasn’t happened yet.” Neither one is based on what’s actually true right now. Both are a bet on tomorrow. The only question that matters is which one you’re going to place your chips on, because you’re placing them either way. Sitting on the fence isn’t an option. Every kid standing in the box with two strikes is already betting on something.
“Your brain doesn’t hear do’s and don’ts.” Tell a kid “don’t miss this ground ball,” and his brain has to first construct the image of missing the ground ball before it can even process the “don’t.” You just planted the exact picture you didn’t want in his head, right before he needed his hands quiet. Say “field this ball clean” instead, and that’s the only picture that gets built. This isn’t a coaching trick. It’s how the brain processes language, and it’s why so much of our “instruction” as coaches is quietly working against us.
“Whether you say you can or you can’t, you’re right.” That one’s old, usually credited to Henry Ford, and it’s old because it’s true. Self-talk isn’t decoration on top of your ability. It’s part of the mechanism that determines whether your ability shows up when it counts.
The Piece Nobody Talks About: EQ
Everybody’s heard of IQ. Fewer people talk about EQ, emotional intelligence, and I think that’s a mistake, because the research says it matters more than we give it credit for.
Emotional intelligence is generally defined as the ability to perceive and express emotion, use it to help you think, understand it, and regulate it in yourself and in the people around you (Mayer and Salovey, the researchers who introduced the concept in 1990, later popularized by Daniel Goleman). A 2018 meta-analysis that pooled 21 separate studies and over 3,400 competitive athletes found a small but real, statistically significant relationship between emotional intelligence and sports performance (published in the journal Sports via the National Institutes of Health). Small doesn’t mean irrelevant. It means EQ is another lever, alongside physical skill, that separates athletes who perform under pressure from those who don’t.
Here’s why that connects directly to can’t hills. A kid with strong emotional intelligence can feel the fear or frustration show up, recognize it for what it is, and choose his next thought anyway. A kid without that skill just gets run by whatever emotion showed up first. Self-talk is one of the most trainable pieces of EQ we have access to as coaches. We can’t hand a kid better genetics. We can absolutely teach him to recognize his own can’t hill and build a different sentence to walk over it.
Where I Draw My Own Line
I’ll be honest about where I apply this in my own life, because I don’t think self-talk means telling yourself something untrue.
I’m a good high school baseball coach. My chances of one day managing the Atlanta Braves are very slim. Not zero, but slim. If somebody from that front office ever called me, my first move would be to ask if it’s a prank, because in all my research I’ve found exactly three high school coaches who ever made that jump to the big leagues. That doesn’t mean I tell myself “I can’t.” I will never say I can’t get one of the thirty best jobs in the world. But it’s also unrealistic for me to set my daily goals against that outcome and hold myself to an impossible standard that I have almost no control over.
That’s the real skill. It’s not manufacturing false confidence about outcomes you don’t control. It’s refusing to plant a can’t-hill about the things you do control and staying relentlessly focused on being great right where your feet are today. My guys don’t need me chasing a job in Atlanta. They need me coaching them well this afternoon. Both things can be true at once: I don’t tell myself I can’t, and I don’t waste my energy pretending my daily goals live somewhere they don’t.
The Deepest Self-Talk We Have
For a lot of us, our faith is rooted in the greatest self-talk there is.
King David did this constantly. In Psalm 103, he doesn’t wait for his emotions to catch up to the truth. He preaches to himself first: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!” (Psalm 103:1, ESV). That’s a grown man giving his own soul a direct order, out loud, before his feelings had a vote. He’s building a different hill than the one his circumstances wanted to hand him.
That’s the model. Not ignoring what’s real, David was in plenty of real trouble across those psalms, but refusing to let his circumstances write his internal script unchallenged.
“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31, ESV)
That’s not a can’t hill. That’s the exact opposite of one. It doesn’t deny the size of the problem in front of you. It just refuses to let the problem have the only vote.
The Application
This week, have every kid on your team write down one can’t hill he’s been carrying, in his own words. “I can’t hit this guy” or “I can’t get through this class” or whatever it is.
Then rewrite it with him, using what you now know about how the brain actually works. Remember, it doesn’t process the negative, so don’t just flip the word “can’t” to “can.” Build a specific, positive instruction instead. Not “I don’t strike out against lefties.” Try “I stay on my backside and see the ball deep against lefties.” Not “I can’t grip the bar.” Try “I set my grip and pull anyway.”
Then have him say it out loud, before the moment shows up, not during it. Self-talk that shows up for the first time in the box is too late. It has to already be built.
The Close
Thomas gripped the bar anyway. Blister and all, he did every set. That’s not because he stopped feeling the pain. It’s because the pain didn’t get the last word.
Stop building can’t-hills on the only field you actually control: your own mind. Plant something you can walk over instead.
Greater Together
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