Featuring Bryce Goll, LCPC and Christina Schrader, LCPC, CMPC from Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement — a conversation with Ryan Johansen of Elite Baseball Training / Johansen Baseball 2.0, Season 2, Episode 9
What does it actually take to get better at baseball?
Most conversations about player development focus on mechanics — swing path, bat speed, release point, spin rate. And those things matter. Deeply. However, in a recent episode of the Johansen Baseball 2.0 podcast, host Ryan Johansen brought our own Christina Mondragon-Schrader, LCPC, CMPC and Bryce Goll, LCPC from Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement into the conversation to talk about something that doesn't show up on a Trackman readout: the psychological and emotional barriers that quietly undermine skill development in athletes at every level.
The conversation ran nearly an hour, and it covered a lot of ground — from what mental barriers actually look like in practice, to how they show up differently off the field versus on it, to what athletes, coaches, and parents can do to start addressing them. Here's what we want you to take away.
One of the foundational ideas that ran through the entire conversation is this: mental performance is not a personality trait. It's not something you either have or you don't. It's a set of skills — and like every skill in baseball, it can be taught, practiced, and improved.
Bryce and Christina work with athletes across a wide range of sports and levels, and they hear the same thing over and over: "I'm great in practice, but I fall apart in games." Or: "I know what I'm supposed to do, but I can't make myself do it when it counts." These aren't character flaws. They're signs that the mental side of performance hasn't been trained with the same intentionality as the physical side.
That's where sport psychology comes in — and it's exactly why we're so energized by partnerships like this one with Elite Baseball Training.
A psychological barrier to skill acquisition is anything in an athlete's mental or emotional world that gets in the way of learning, developing, and performing. These barriers can operate in the background for years without anyone naming them — which is part of what makes them so persistent.
In the podcast, Bryce and Christina discussed several of the most common ones they see in baseball players and athletes generally:
The gap between practice and performance. One of the biggest frustrations in player development is athletes who look polished in the cage or bullpen but can't replicate that in games. This gap is almost always psychological. Game environments introduce pressure, stakes, and scrutiny — and without the mental tools to handle those things, the brain shifts into a threat-response mode that tightens muscles, narrows attention, and disrupts the automatic movements that athletes have spent hundreds of hours building.
Fear of failure and its relationship to learning. Baseball is a sport where failure is baked in. Even at the highest levels, the best hitters fail seven out of ten times. But when fear of failure becomes the dominant driver, players stop taking the risks that learning requires. They play not to fail rather than playing to grow. That shift in orientation — from learning to protecting — is one of the most reliable ways to stall development.
Perfectionism as an obstacle to growth. High-achieving athletes often carry a deeply ingrained belief that mistakes are unacceptable. That belief might have served them early in their career, when physical talent alone carried them through. But at higher levels of competition, where skill development requires constant refinement and honest self-assessment, perfectionism becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. Players who can't tolerate errors often can't absorb the feedback that errors contain.
Mental health challenges that show up on the field. This is something that Christina and Bryce are particularly thoughtful about, given their backgrounds as licensed clinical therapists in addition to sport performance consultants. Anxiety, depression, and significant life stressors don't stay in the locker room. They come to practice. They come to games. When athletes are struggling off the field — with relationships, identity, pressure at school, or family stress — that shows up in their performance, their coachability, and their capacity to absorb new skills. Treating the athlete as a whole person isn't a soft idea; it's a practical necessity.
The role of comparison and external pressure. Today's athletes are growing up in an environment of constant measurement — analytics, rankings, social media, travel ball showcases. All of that external focus pulls attention away from the internal process of development. You can't get better at something if you're too busy watching how everyone else is doing. The athletes who develop the fastest are usually the ones who can stay genuinely curious and focused on their own growth, even when the pressure to compare is everywhere.
One of the threads that ran through the whole conversation was how inseparable off-field mental health is from on-field performance. Bryce and Christina don't just work with athletes on focus cues and breathing techniques — though those matter. They work with athletes on the full picture: identity, confidence, stress management, relationships, and the emotional regulation skills that make all the performance work possible.
An athlete who is managing significant anxiety in their daily life is going to struggle to stay present at the plate. An athlete who ties their entire sense of self-worth to their batting average is going to freeze under pressure. An athlete who doesn't have the emotional vocabulary to process a bad week is going to carry that into their next practice, and the one after that.
This is why the work we do at Grow Wellness Group is holistic by design. Our sport psychology practitioners are licensed clinical therapists first — which means they can meet athletes wherever they are, not just where the sport demands them to be.
So what does it actually look like when an athlete works with a sport performance consultant at Grow? The answer is different for every person — which is part of what makes the work meaningful.
For some athletes, the starting point is learning to recognize their own psychological patterns: what happens in their body and mind under pressure, what triggers the shutdown, what early warning signs tell them they're about to spiral. Awareness comes first.
From there, athletes build a toolkit of practical mental skills — things like pre-performance routines that anchor focus, breathing techniques that regulate the nervous system in real time, self-talk strategies that keep an athlete constructive rather than critical, and process-focused goals that redirect attention from outcomes to execution.
But the deeper work is often about belief — about shifting the stories athletes carry about who they are, what they're capable of, and what it means when things go wrong. That kind of work takes time, and it takes a therapeutic relationship built on trust. It's not a six-week program or a motivational speech. It's an ongoing, personalized process.
One of the things that makes this podcast conversation so valuable is that Ryan Johansen came at it from a coach's perspective. How do you recognize psychological barriers in the athletes you're working with? How do you talk about mental performance without making a player feel like something is wrong with them? How do you create an environment where athletes feel safe enough to take the risks that learning requires?
These are questions we love exploring with coaches at Grow. Our coaches' education program exists precisely because the best outcomes happen when the physical and mental sides of development are working together — and that requires coaches and sport psychology practitioners to be speaking the same language.
If you're a coach in the Naperville area and you want to learn more about what sport psychology can add to your program, we'd love to have that conversation.
If you have an athlete in your life who seems held back not by ability but by something harder to name — self-doubt, pressure, anxiety, inconsistency between practice and games — please know that this is one of the most common things we see, and it is entirely addressable.
Reaching out for sport psychology support isn't a sign that something is broken. It's a sign that you understand what it actually takes to develop a complete athlete. Mental performance skills are real, trainable skills. Just like a curveball or a two-strike approach, they get better with the right instruction and the right amount of practice.
We're here when you're ready.
This article is a companion to Season 2, Episode 9 of the Johansen Baseball 2.0 podcast, featuring Bryce Goll and Christina Schrader from Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement.
Grow Wellness Group 200 East 5th Avenue, Suite 109 | Naperville, IL 60563(331) 457-2020 | info@growwellnessgroup.com
Our sport psychology team offers individual athlete sessions (in-person and virtual), team programs, coach education, workshops, and more. Whether you're a player, a coach, or a parent — we're here to help athletes grow on the field and beyond it.
Bryce Goll, LCPC is a therapist and Sport Performance Consultant at Grow Wellness Group, specializing in working with athletes and performers on anxiety, confidence, and mental health. Christina Schrader, LCPC, CMPC is a therapist and Certified Mental Performance Consultant at Grow Wellness Group, bringing both clinical expertise and a background as a competitive athlete to her work with athletes at all levels.
