SEASON 2: EPISODE 06 TRANSCRIPT
Ben Zobrist
Ben Zobrist: I think emotional intelligence is the thing that young athletes need more than anything, coaches need more than anything, parents need more than anything. And so Champion Forward is developing resources around dealing with the feelings, the failure, and the fame that come with sports achievement. Working on emotional and mental skills around the human and heroic sides of the sport, we know that that develops a healthier mental health mindset going forward.
Dr. Greg Jones: Our world is facing significant challenges. And at every turn, another conflict seems to await. Yet we survive, we overcome, we even thrive by relying on an intangible and undeniable gift. Hope, it fills us, connects us, highlights our individual purpose and unites us in the goal to do more together. Hope fuels us toward flourishing as people and as a community. My name is Greg Jones, President of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with people who demonstrate what it really means to live with hope and lean into the lessons they've picked up along their journey. They are the Hope People.
Our agent of Hope today is Ben Zobrist, former Major League Baseball second baseman and two-time World Series Champion and MVP. Ben is also involved with the nonprofit Champion Forward, which aims to support young athletes navigating the emotional challenges often faced in sports, promoting emotional intelligence and mental health awareness. Throughout our conversation, we look back on some of Ben's own personal struggles with identity and fame and how he was able to find hope again in his faith and in his life's purpose.
I want to first tell you that you gave me hope in 2016 as a lifelong Cubs fan to see the Cubs win the World Series. I often had said before that, that I thought that if the Cubs ever did win the World Series, the kingdom would come in its fullness. So I was a little surprised that the world continued on, but it was really exciting and an amazing achievement. So thanks for instilling hope in us life-long suffering Cubs fans.
Ben Zobrist: Oh man, I'm so glad I got to be a part of that. I mean, probably if you were in Chicago that night, anybody that was, they probably thought the world was going to end with the streetlights maybe coming down places. But it's been such a blessing getting to hear people's perspective about where they were and what happened and how they experienced that. So it's been awesome.
Dr. Greg Jones: I want to begin by just asking you about your own sense of what gives you hope on a regular basis. You've been somebody who's inspired a lot of people through your athletic achievements. What's giving you hope?
Ben Zobrist: Well, I mean, I would always have to say a sense of what God made me to do here. Where I feel purpose is when I feel like I'm connected to him and connected to my purposes here on Earth. And for me, as a ball player, I spent a lot of time tinkering in the batting cage, enjoying, trying to figure out how my swing could work better for against this particular pitcher. And if I was ever going really good with my swing and they tell you not to mess with too much when you're going really good, it was almost disappointing for me because I love the tinkering part. I want to go back into the workshop and try to figure out what I can do different. And I think whiteboarding now is something I really, really enjoy. And it's just this idea of, you know what, there's something new around the corner, there's something new to develop and create. So in the athletic world, I'm always looking for ways to improve not only myself, but the people around me and the athletic world in general.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's great. I love that. I want to probe that a little more in a minute. But one of the things that you did that was very successful as a baseball player was that you were versatile. You played multiple positions, which these days often people start early on honing in on one thing only, and yet you were able to help a team succeed in a variety of ways through a variety of positions. Can you talk a little bit about how that shaped your sense of what it means to excel?
Ben Zobrist: Yeah. Well, that didn't come by my own idea originally. I mean, it was based on survival in the sport itself when I got sent down to AAA and I was trying to figure out if I was going to be a major league player or a minor league player. And I had come up as a shortstop and I had pitched during college a little bit and done a few different things. But in the major leagues, they basically told me, "Hey, if you want to be a part of our club, you're going to have to wear a lot of different gloves and try different positions." And at first, it's uncomfortable and you're not sure if you can do it, but you do the best you can because it's your best option. And as I started to do that more and I had an open mind about, it actually probably was one of the best career moves I ever could have done.
And like I said, I give credit to Andrew Friedman from Tampa Bay Rays at the time, Joe Madden, my manager. These are guys that they were innovative thinkers in the baseball world, outside the box thinkers going, "Hey, maybe Zobrist can play every day and play different positions all the time." And it made me a more valuable free agent later on in my career. It helped me develop a sense of excellence around a team mindset instead of just an individual mindset because previous to that time as a baseball player, as an athlete, it's, "Hey, I play this position, I'm a professional and put me in that position or send me to a different team." And I was like, "Hey, if this is the best thing for the team right now, I'll try to do it all, whatever you ask me to do that day." And like I said, it's more uncomfortable and there's more probably risk for failure at the professional level, but at the same time, it actually led me into probably the most excellent version of myself.
Dr. Greg Jones: You touch on something that I think is really important, especially in athletics, but also in organizations and in our broader culture. And that's the difference between a kind of individual mindset and a team mindset because the best teams, the teams that win are not just the collection of the best individual players, but there's something that happens and you talked about that if it's best for the team. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset and how that helped you win some championships?
Ben Zobrist: Yeah. Well, I mean, I grew up in the church. My dad was a pastor. And it was a small town, so whenever somebody had a need, my parents were jumping to it, trying to help and figure out what they could do to help those families in that church. And that's a community mindset that we had in my small town of Eureka, Illinois. And I think it's much more difficult now to see that as an option because we are so isolated. You can live next to your neighbors and not really know them at all. And everybody's got their own sense of community online or community at their workplace or community at their place of recreation or something that they feel like those are my people.
And people feel more isolated now than they ever did, and it's not because they're not connected to people, it's because they're not healthily connected to people. And healthy connection has a lot to do with knowing how you feel around somebody, knowing how they feel around you, and knowing how the broader context of our culture. We're all trying to benefit everybody around us. And when we don't know the people that we're in the most community with, we don't know them on a personal face-to-face level, that's not really community. I mean, that's my belief.
Dr. Greg Jones: Oh, I think that's right.
Ben Zobrist: It's really challenging I think for young people nowadays.
Dr. Greg Jones: Well, and I think for young athletes who get into an AAU culture where you're not even with the same team from week to week sometimes, and it's all about just you as an individual developing. It becomes hard because relationships take time, and you want to go through struggles together and come out on the other side, not just say, "I'm through with you."
Ben Zobrist: And to do that, like you said, it's going to be uncomfortable at times. You're going to go through some pain together, some suffering together. And oftentimes, they're going to bother you. I think in baseball, we're with each other so much that the teams that become toxic, it becomes really apparent by the middle of the year, because they're playing baseball together every day. And the teams that become good, they build a healthy sense of rapport and rhythm amongst the team that by the end of the year, they're just flying. You can see that certain teams separate themselves from others. And ultimately, that's kind of what we want in any group that we're a part of. Don't we want to be able to get to a point where we're in a rhythm and we understand them, they understand us? Because there's something way more rewarding about winning together than there is doing something as an individual.
Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah, that's powerful. And I think some of the best movies we adore, particularly the sports movies, are about when teams pull together and overcome odds.
Ben Zobrist: Don't get me started on '80s and '90s sports movies, they're my favorites. Most inspirational.
Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah. You just mentioned the term inspiration. You talked a little bit about your parents growing up and then you talked about Andrew Friedman or Joe Madden. Who are the people who inspired you and helped you develop a sense of both who you are and how teams work and how mentors really affected you?
Ben Zobrist: Yeah, for sure. My parents were a big part of that. My dad being a pastor, he always had a really high standard of excellence for himself. And then I think also for us and a level of even mental toughness that he was like, "Hey, if you want to be an athlete, it's going to take more than the average work ethic if you want to be great at something." And so he didn't let me settle for just whatever I felt like I wanted to do. He's like, "Look, as an athlete, I understand you're going to not do well at times and fail quite a bit. But if you want to be great, you got to push through that. You got to work when you don't feel like working."
And I think the other people that have been so inspirational to me are the people that have failed over and over and over again and then keep coming back, keep coming back, keep coming back. And I have some other friends, I mean, John Harrison, who's a really close friend of mine who is helping me lead my nonprofit right now, Champion Forward. What inspires me is when people are willing to get back in the box. That's the analogy I use as a baseball player, step back in the box after failing over and over and over again with a positive mindset, with a mindset of hope like, hey, yeah, I might continue to fail. But it's not even about the result that I get from this, it's about getting back up, trying it again, seeing if I can tweak something, working on something, and it's ultimately all of that is going to develop my character and resilience. In the long term, it's going to make me a more positive and passionate person in whatever I'm pursuing.
Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah, baseball's a unique sport because the guys who fail seven times out of 10 are in the Hall of Fame. To be a career 300 hitter, you're failing a lot more than you're succeeding in that sense. So there's got to be that resilience. And I mean, we all watch you in the game seven of the World Series and maybe all seven games of the World Series, but you were talking about tinkering and the batting cage and all the off-season workouts. The key to what you were able to do in the World Series was shaped a lot earlier and developing habits and disciplines.
Ben Zobrist: Yeah, 100%. I had already been to a few World Series before that had done my fair share of failure on a playoff level, and I was known. It was funny because people thought of me as a clutch player. But if you ask me what I thought about myself, I remembered all the times that I failed, and I also remembered that the failure wasn't going to stop me. If you do something over and over again with consistency and you find a passion that isn't about the statistics that you enjoy doing over and over and over again professionally, people recognize that. And there's something about that, that's stepping back in over time that produces a result that I'm way more proud of the character development that it challenged me with every day, then I would be the statistical line.
Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah, that makes sense. Talk a little bit about the friends on a team or perhaps friends from other settings who can help pick you up when you're feeling down or you're just ready to give up.
Ben Zobrist: Absolutely. One guy that comes to mind, one of my best friends that I met while in college, we played Athletes in Action Baseball together. And then he went on to be a personal trainer after college baseball. I went on to play professional baseball. And he ended up moving to Nashville, he started training me because he was doing personal training. His name's Josh Costello before I get too much further. But Josh works with some of the best athletes around. But at the time, he was just getting his start. And I'll never forget about 2007, I was in a really tough place in AAA up in Louisville Kentucky, and I was feeling depressed. I got sent down from the big leagues. He came up and visited me, stayed in the hotel, and he talked to me, trying to counsel me basically before I'm heading to the field.
And I remember laying on my hotel room floor crying about my situation and not really knowing why I was feeling the way I was feeling. And he was just like, "I got you. I'm here regardless. I know that you're going to be okay." He would pray for me in person. He was just there for me in a dark moment. He wasn't going to get anything out of visiting me in AAA. I wasn't a Major League baseball star. I was the guy bouncing up and down, barely anybody knew who I was at the time. But he was a guy that didn't care so much about that, but cared about people.
And then if I look ahead in my story, Jason Hayward's another guy that comes to mind who in a team concept, we were in the darkest moment for our team where we lost a lead. We thought we were going to win the World Series and be the first Cubs team to do it in 2016. But there was definitely a moment for sure in game seven that we thought, "Uh-oh, this is not going in the right direction." And he had the unique ability at the moment to not only have the emotional intelligence to recognize what he was feeling and put that to the side for the moment, but he was able to go, "Hey, this is what the team needs and I'm going to make sure that it happens." He pulled everybody together, told the coaches, our coaches to go upstairs because he's like, "We just need a guys-only meeting down here." And the players all funnel into this little weight room in Cleveland game seven. We had just lost a big lead and got punched, and you know as a Cub fan what that feels like.
Everybody's like, 'Oh, no, here we go again. They're going to lose again. It's been 108 years. Now we're the closest we've ever been in 108 years, and we're going to lose this." And with all that going on, Jason refocused, "Listen, hey, nothing matters that's outside of this room right now. The voices and things that are going on outside of this room, none of that matters. What matters is what the people in this room believe, what do we believe about each other." And he said, "All year long, we've had each other's backs between those lines."
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow.
Ben Zobrist: And that was a very powerful moment that refocused us on what we're capable of in that moment and what we really needed. We needed to have each other's backs and just go back out there, give it everything we had, win or lose. That wasn't the point. He wasn't saying, "Hey, this is how we're going to win." He was saying, "This is what we need. We need to know that we are together, even though it feels like everything's falling apart. We're together."
Dr. Greg Jones: That's powerful. Such a key moment and inspiration, and that giving a sense of hope that isn't just optimism, we're going to win, but we're going to bring our best in that moment. I want to take you to that time because you've been really articulate and powerful in talking about how game seven, you win, you're named MVP, you're on top of the world, both as an individual athlete and as a team. Couldn't be better, and yet you felt empty.
Ben Zobrist: Yeah. I think one of the things that we're addressing at Champion Forward is we talk about helping young athletes, their parents and coaches deal with the feelings, the failure and the fame that come from their athletic pursuits. And I didn't know what to do when there was all this other stuff thrown at me. I knew how to play Major League Baseball. I knew how to tinker in the cage. I loved my profession. But I didn't know how to deal with all the stuff that was coming from the outside that I wasn't aware was going to be coming at me from winning.
And when that happened, it took me into a dark place of like, now, not only do I not have the trophy or the carrot to go get, I was very much a fixed mindset motivational person at the time and trying to figure out what's really going to motivate me to keep doing this, and why was I doing it? If this is making me miserable, having all these people grabbing at me, why did I even want this? And it brought a real sense of I'm not enough. Saying yes, I can't say yes to enough people. I just didn't have, Greg, a healthy sense of boundary.
And so I started diving into that, doing therapy, realizing, wow, I don't really feel like I'm enough even after winning the World Series MVP. If you don't have the right mindset, you're not going to feel enough. And I thought even God was putting pressure on me at the time that I needed to do things. And it was when God woke me up and said, "Ben, when you're in your worst, hardest place, you're enough. You're enough. I love you just like that." And that was a total watershed moment for me, and it really changed my life from then on.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. And I love the way you described that because you're bringing together things that people sometimes push apart, a sense of excellence and a commitment to the highest levels of achievement with that sense of grace that God says, "I love you just as you are, and not because you did this or because you're doing that." That seems to be at the heart of what you're doing with Champion Forward.
Ben Zobrist: It is.
Dr. Greg Jones: Talk about how you're trying to pour into young people and coaches and parents with that vision that, yeah, you can really try to be a champion and move forward and yet be undergirded with a sense of being embraced and loved as well.
Ben Zobrist: Yes. Yeah. Well, often I talk about when we're trying to pursue our athletic achievement, there's this human part of you that you can't get away from, and that's the part that can't process the feelings that you're having in split seconds in the middle of a game, or the shame that you feel when you strike out the end of the game, or you blow, you make an error that blows the game for your team, or you're just not having a great year like statistically, you're going down. All good athletes eventually push through that, but sometimes we push through it in expense of the human side of us. And we numb out as a human say, okay, I don't need to feel that and I'm going to numb out. But I actually think that I could have been a better teammate. I could have been a better figure in my athletic sports world had I been more emotionally intelligent.
I think emotional intelligence is the thing that young athletes need more than anything. Coaches need more than anything parents need more than anything because sometimes as a parent, you're on the sideline, you're feeling it just as much if not more than your athlete. And so Champion Forward is developing resources around dealing with those, the feelings, the failure, and the fame that come with sports achievement. We're giving them emotional intelligence techniques, and we have some mental health connections through our organization, but we are not mental health therapists. We're not trying to be that. But we do know that working on emotional and mental skills around the human and heroic sides of the sport, we know that that develops a healthier mental health mindset going forward. So to a certain degree, we're trying to do some pre-habilitation before we get to the real challenges that I had to deal with as an athlete where your whole identity is called into question in that moment. And so we want to help young athletes build a healthy sense of identity earlier on as they're moving from high school into college and potentially beyond.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful and so important, especially these days. You have a remarkable platform because you've been so successful and have achieved so much, and yet you're willing to be vulnerable and to talk about the tough stretches and when things didn't go well or when you felt empty. How do you think that gets communicated best in this culture where we seem to want to hide our true feelings?
Ben Zobrist: I think it gets communicated best when the leaders do it, when the people at the top to it, when you tell your team, "Hey, I'm coming in with this today. I'm struggling with some fear, I'm struggling with some shame." You don't have to give context to it. That's the thing that people don't understand is actually the body. When we just talk about the feeling without even telling people the details and the context of why you're feeling it, you could still create boundary and still be transparent. I think when leaders lead with their own transparency and vulnerability without detail, still maintaining boundary, it gives other people the freedom to actually be human while they're pursuing their heroic pursuit. And that to me is the most powerful way to start communicating that. If we have more leaders like yourself doing that and students can see that, "Wow, you know what, I can talk about how I feel too while I'm still being great and excellent," then it's not stigmatized. It's not looked at as weakness, and it's actually strength to be vulnerable and transparent within boundary. That's strength and healthy strength.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautifully put. As we move toward a close, I want to just ask you, as someone who's an extraordinary agent of hope and champion of hope, what would you want to communicate to a young person who's aspiring to be a great athlete or a great performer in music or entertainment or just excellent in whatever they do? What would you want them to hear from you?
Ben Zobrist: I think I would want them to hear that a lot of what you've probably learned up to this point is you being as strong as possible and you using your mind to strategize what you need to do to get where you want to go. But you're missing two really important components that God gave you that actually can help you really soar, and that's your heart and your soul. And if you don't dive into a sense of spirit, what you were made for, purpose, personality, the things that make you unique and different from anybody else in this entire world, if you don't understand that and you aren't able to share your emotional experiences with anybody in your life, then you're missing a really, really important part of being super successful someday.
So if you want to be super successful, you can't just live above the line in your mind and strength and doing all the things and thinking the right things. You've got to actually get into feeling with your people and also digging into your personality, what makes you unique outside of any roles that you're pursuing, because the role is not who you are. Who you are is someone that fits into that particular role. So the way that Ben plays baseball is probably the same way. He's going to do his own way of doing that, and then he's going to go and talk on a podcast and talk the way he talks. I can't be anybody else. Be comfortable in your own skin and really try to be who God allowed you to be in creating in that particular role. If that role isn't made for you in the future, the right roles will show up if you are living in your heart and soul at the same time as doing and thinking.
Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for participating in this conversation with the Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself, and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.