Thoughts create our Feelings...

Hello Everyone. My name is Valerie Pompey, some of you may know me but many may not. I am a mom to two sons who have been drafted into Major League Baseball. My husband Ken and I are extremely proud of their accomplishments so far. Our oldest son got drafted back in 2010 and for the last 10 years it has been a journey for him as much as it is for our family. We have gone through the up and downs of the game as much as he has with respect to all the situations that arise while making it all the way up to the Major League level. We felt that we could share our knowledge with many parents and players who are going through the process or wanting to become a Major League Player. We want to help others realize their dreams and help them in areas that we have already experienced and could help with the process.

Over the years, we have come to the realization that we as parents, always worked on the physical side. Sure they always told us, “this game is 90% mental and 10% physical”, but they never told us how to handle the 90%. They would say, “learn from the failures or mistakes”. But how do you do that…specifically. I wish I had this knowledge that I have learned these past years, years ago, it would have helped both our boys and myself through some tough times. I have done a lot of studying over the years and have tried many techniques with trials and errors but this one template has worked time and time again. So Ken and I have decided to go into the Life Coaching business because we really want to help as many people as we can. This coaching does not only apply to baseball players, it can apply to any sport or any life circumstance you are dealing with. Hence “Life Coaching”.

We have decided to do these podcasts to help enlighten people on what we have found out. We are going to start with young players or players in general and parents who want to help their children succeed in their perspective sport which will cross over into their entire life. We have decided to start on a topic that is close to our heart and what we are the most familiar with and we feel most passionate about. I know what I have studied will help many people if they just apply it to their lives every day. Just like in the physical aspect of getting better at the sport, we have to work on the mental side just as much, or maybe more than the physical side. In our very first podcast, we are going to introduce you to a template and explain in some detail how it works. But first we need to explain a few things. Do you know that we have thousands of thoughts per day. Some say over 60,000 thoughts per day, some say over 6,000 a day. Either way, they are both right, we do have thousands of thoughts that pass through our minds each day. Some thoughts serve us to think them and some do not. Most of the time, we are not even aware of the thoughts we are thinking. It’s like a little person inside your brain talking to you all the time. And if you just said to yourself, “I don’t have a little person inside my brain”, that is the person I am talking about. Just imagine for a minute if you could watch your thoughts that come into your brain all the time. Would you be happy with the thoughts you are thinking? Would you be like, “wait, why am I thinking that”. Most of us who have never looked at what thoughts we are thinking might be astonished on what we are actually thinking on a daily basis. Some of these thoughts are good for us, but some of the thoughts that we think are definitely not good for us. What if I told you, that there is a way to monitor our thoughts and retrain our thoughts to think the way we need to be thinking in order to help serve our lives for the better. Sometimes our brains are thinking so negatively, we don’t even realize it is happening. We just feel depressed or overwhelmed. This leads me to the next part of my template. Our feelings.

Thoughts and feelings go hand in hand. If we think something, we usually can associate a feeling that goes along with it. For example, if you feel sad, what is the thought that you are thinking that makes you feel sad. Sometimes it is hard to pinpoint and sometimes many people just say they are sad for no reason. But if we really dig deep into our brains, we can come across a thought that we are thinking that is making us feel sad. For instance, my mom passed away a few year ago, when I think about her death and she is not here with me anymore, I feel sad and want to cry. But if I think a thought that she was a wonderful mom, always took care of her family, she was strong, and loved her grandsons to pieces… I feel joy and immediately a smile comes to my face seeing her light up when she sees her grandsons. This is a true example of us controlling the thoughts we think about a specific circumstance. Can you imagine what it would be like if we can control all our thoughts, it would control how we feel most of the time. Most of us want to be happy or content and succeed in life. We don’t want to fail or be sad. However, if we never experienced the feeling of sadness or failure, how would we know what happiness or joy or success feels like. We need to experience all sorts of feelings, but if we can control how we think about these things that we are experiencing in our life and think thoughts that will help us get through life circumstances, wouldn’t that be so much better than just coping with failure or just feeling sad or depressed and not knowing “why”. In sports, they would always say, “learn from this failure”, but they never show you how to. We want to help you learn to deal with failure and show you steps on how to do it. It all comes down to your thoughts and feelings. Your thoughts drive your feelings and vice versa. If you are feeling something, it comes from a thought you are having. This in turn, will drive your actions and results in your life. I know this is a lot to comprehend. But let’s look at another example so I can show you that our thoughts create our feelings and if we are feeling something, it usually comes from a thought we are thinking. Let’s take an example from the baseball world. Say if a coach comes up to me and says, “Valerie, I really like the way your son has been hitting the ball lately, but I don’t think he will ever make the MLB”. I immediately became sad and felt a little angry, and my heart started to beat fast. Can you tell by my feelings what I must have been thinking to make me feel sad and angry about what this coach has just told me. Well, immediately when he told me this, which is the "situation at hand" and something that is totally out of my control, I felt sad and angry because of the thought that I immediately started to think. I thought, “wow, my son is going to be upset hearing this news that this coach doesn’t think he is good enough to make it to the MLB. Then my thought shifted to anger when I thought “who is this guy to tell me that my son isn’t good enough to make it, he is only 15 years old, if he works hard, who knows, many others have made it at a older age”. This thought made me feel angry and a little resentment. So can you see how my thoughts can trigger my feelings on any subject. If the same scenario happened with the coach and I thought the thought “well he is still young and with lots of practice and hard work, he could make it, this is just one coaches opinion”. My feelings towards this situation would be totally different. I would not have felt sadness or anger towards the coach. I would have felt contentment that my son can make it if he works hard and a feeling of eagerness to get started. This would help me in finding new ways to get my son the coaching he needs to become a Major League Player. Can you see the different thoughts I could have to the same situation that is outside of my control, but I totally had control on how I thought about what was told me and in fact, what I thought about created my feelings about the situation. In all aspects of life this is very true. However, most of us just react without even knowing why we react the way we do. But, if we could use these tools to really look into our brains and help us with our life for the better, can you imagine how much better our lives would become. I don’t want to overwhelm you, but this is just the beginning. This template has really helped not only my life, but the lives of other people. I want to share with you what we have found so useful. If you are interested in more info or would like to be coached, please give me a call to discuss further, would love to hear from you.