Vision Training

Ted Williams was arguably one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He is the last man to hit .400 over an entire baseball season and is a measuring stick for all great hitters. Baseball legends report that his eyesight was so crisp he could see the seams on the baseball as it was thrown from the pitcher. Whether that was true or not, he still had extraordinary vision which is key for success in baseball.

This type of vision doesn't come naturally for everyone. When I was in college, our baseball team went through vision training drills. We would set up a room in the offseason where each player would go through exercises specifically trained to increase peripheral vision and reaction time. These also included agility and balance drills while focusing on improving eyesight. The theory was that training a player's vision would improve their performance.

We had no real time data to determine if this made baseball players better, but the principle of vision training applies to other parts of our life. We function as parents because of what we have seen our parents do (or not do.) We lead others because of how we have seen other people lead. Our life experiences shape the way we view things. These are all a current part of our vision, but they don't have to be the permanent way we we look at things. I believe we have the choice to train ourselves to look at people, circumstances, and our environment differently. We have the power to decide the old way of looking at things is not satisfactory and to do something different. It may not be easy to retrain our vision, but it is possible if we decide it matters enough to us.