We work With People Who Perform — Not Performers Who Happen To Be People

I played fourteen years of professional baseball, seven of them in the major leagues with the Marlins, Padres, and Cubs. And for most of that career, everything I was taught about mental performance was some version of "be tougher" or "want it more."

It was not until I started studying what actually works — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Self-Determination Theory, Mindfulness-Based Attention Training — that I understood why those platitudes fail. They treat the performer as a machine that needs better programming. The evidence says otherwise. The evidence says the performer is a person who needs clarity, attentional capacity, and a personalized system for showing up under pressure.

After baseball, I earned a Master's degree in Performance Psychology. I served as Mental Skills Coach with the Chicago Cubs, then as Director of Coaching and Player Development with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and later as Vice President of Performance. I helped build one of baseball's most respected pitching development systems.

Now I run Intentional Performance, where I bring that same evidence-based approach to athletes, coaches, executives, and organizations. The work is rooted in a principle I learned from Ken Ravizza, one of the founders of applied sport psychology: we are not working with baseball players. We are working with people who play baseball.

That distinction changes everything.

The Anti-Grindset

The performance industry has a problem. It sells urgency, discipline, and suffering as virtues. It packages anxiety as motivation. It tells you the answer to "why am I struggling?" is always "you're not working hard enough."

Intentional Performance takes a different position. Sustainable high performance comes from three things: knowing who you are (Identity), training your capacity to be present (Attention), and building personalized systems for preparation, regulation, and learning (Ritual).

This approach is not soft. It is demanding in a different way — it asks you to be honest about what matters to you and then align your actions accordingly. That turns out to be much harder than just grinding.

Background

M.A. in Performance Psychology

14 seasons professional baseball (7 MLB: Marlins, Padres, Cubs)

Head Applied Mental Skills Coach, Chicago Cubs

Director of Coaching & Player Development, Pittsburgh Pirates

Vice President of Performance, Pittsburgh Pirates

Frameworks: ACT, Self-Determination Theory, MBAT, Motivational Interviewing

Contact: john@baker-hq.com