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I am a fat man, I always have been rotund, I hope to someday not be; I work at it, but the fact remains I am large. Not surprisingly then, I grew up thinking that running, or really any exertion of movement was HARD. The day I most dreaded in high school was not big hard tests, or trying to find someone to take to the prom, it was the mile run :) You know the one day in PE where every one has to run a timed mile for some unknown reason ;) So it may surprise you to find that now I am a long distance runner. I mostly do 10ks and half marathons, but I have done a full marathon and I just did my first sprint triathlon this weekend. I started doing more distance running just as a way to try and lose weight and because I am a masochist ;) I probably would have given up because running was just SOOOOOO HARRRRRD and I figured I would never be able to run more than a mile or two and never faster than 14 minutes a mile or so. However one of the seminal moments in my running career was when I finally accepted an invitation to run with a friend (before this point I was too embarrassed by how slow and short I would go). Well the time comes and I meet up with a friend to run and we start off and sure enough I am dragging down the pace, huffing and puffing, barely able to keep up. I feel myself really wanting to tell my buddy we need to stop, or at least take a rest when something strange happened. My buddy started talking. It was nothing in specific that he was saying, he just started a conversation, and through my gasps and gulps for air I contributed some, but mostly I was just listening to him wax poetic about whatever was going on in his life, we talked about sports some, and our girlfriends at the time, you know whatever, and before I knew it we were back at our starting spot! Huh, "weird" I thought to myself, we must have taken a short cut back to the cars. But much to my surprise when my friend reported our running distance and time we had gone 3 miles in about 32 minutes! Not only a distance record for me, but a mph record as well. And as I stood there in disbelief I also realized I wasn't breathing nearly as hard as when we had started!
So I asked my friend (a much more experienced runner at that point) what happened? What changed? And he told me, "you are thinking about this running thing TOO MUCH. You THINK it will be hard so it IS hard. You THINK you should be breathing hard so you DO breathe hard. You THINK you are slow so... guess what? YOU GO SLOW! When I got you to stop thinking about running (by starting a conversation), you immediately starting going faster and breathing easier!" To this day I have never ran slower than a 10 or 11 minute mile even on my longest running. I am not even sure I could WALK at a 14 minute mile pace today. That one experience took away the entire stigma that I had in my mind about running. A stigma that had been so ingrained into me that I couldn't get out of it on my own, it took someone else shoving it into my face and saying, Look see! I told you it wasn't that hard! For me to finally get it.
Anyway, bottom line is that I am a believer in the power of the mind, especially as it pertains to sports and pre conceived notions of ourselves. If Figgins sees himself as a lead off guy only, then... maybe that truly is the only thing he can excel at! If Wedge finally figured out that Figgins mind was only going to let him feel successful from the lead off spot then good for Wedge to make it happen. There is no way to look at Figgins this year versus the last couple years and not see a huge difference in not only Figgins baseball actions, but his demeanor and charisma as well.
The brain and mind are truly miracles!