How Jarren Duran Gets Back to Being an All-Star
Jarren Duran plays for the Boston Red Sox. On Thursday night the scores were level and his teammate Willson Contreras was standing on third base, waiting. All Duran had to do was hit the ball deep enough into the outfield for Contreras to run home after the catch.
He didn’t hit it far enough. Contreras stayed where he was and nobody scored.
Duran turned and shouted at him. Then he went back to the bench and slammed his helmet down so hard that he broke a water pipe underneath it, and water went everywhere. Afterwards he told reporters:
“I effing suck. Of course I’m effing pissed at myself. I can’t even do a effing job for this team.”
Some background. Two years ago Duran was an All-Star, one of the best players in the game that season. This year he’s been getting a hit fewer than once every five official at-bats, which is bad enough to get you dropped.
With four days until baseball’s trade deadline, television pundits had spent weeks arguing whether Boston should get rid of him.
He’s the same player who was an All-Star. Getting back there has a lot to do with how he explains his form to himself, and at the moment he’s explaining it in a way that limits him.
Look at what he said. He makes it about himself the whole way through, and never about the swing.
“I suck” is Self. He’s treating one bad hit as proof of something about him. It’s Broad, because he isn’t talking about that at-bat, he’s talking about all of them. And it’s Lasting, because he says it in the present tense, with no end to it.
Underneath it is a Sacred Flaw, one of those old beliefs about yourself that feels like a fact rather than an opinion. “I suck” is the four letter version of “I’m not good enough.”
Elite performers ask, “What went wrong?”
Struggling performers ask, “What’s wrong with me?”
Duran has a whole season of evidence that he can do this at the highest level. He’s treating that season as:
Other, as though it happened to him rather than being something he did.
Narrow, something that applied that year and has nothing to say about this one.
Fleeting, over and gone. So the worst three months of his career are being treated as the truth about him, and the best year of his career is being treated as an accident.
That’s the real problem. Hitting a baseball is hard enough on its own. Now the next one has to be a hit and prove he belongs in the team as well. His Attention Direction has gone from the ball to himself, and it can’t be in both places.
He’s trying to prove he’s good enough while his System 1 mind has already decided he isn’t, so every at-bat turns into a test he expects to fail.
Then Contreras, the man he’d just shouted at, said this. The answer to Duran’s form is buried in it.
“I love Jarren. He’s one of the guys that plays with emotions. Plays 100 percent… if I need to go to war, I’m going to pick him.”
I love that he did it this quickly. Contreras kept the outburst Narrow and Fleeting, one bad night and no more than that. And Duran’s Strengths, Qualities and Attributes, the effort and the caring, he kept Self, Broad and Lasting.
Still true, still Duran’s, still there next week.
He also handed back the Belonging that Duran had just told everyone he’d lost. “I can’t even do a job for this team” says he no longer belongs in it. “If I need to go to war, I’m going to pick him” says he’s the first one picked.
That’s the whole job, done for him by somebody else in a sentence and a half. The work now is for Duran to do it for himself, and it sounds something like this:
“I failed at that task. The next one is still mine. And I can do this, because I’ve already done it for a whole season.”
The first sentence puts a fence round Thursday night. The second part does the bigger job, which is claiming the All-Star season back. Self, because he did that. Broad, because it’s the same game and the same swing. Lasting, because ability doesn’t vanish in July.
Under pressure the explanation comes out instinctively, before you’ve had a chance to think it through. That’s your IDQ talking. “I handled that badly” leaves you something to work with. “I am bad” doesn’t.
Duran is the same player who became an All-Star. The job now is to let that season count for as much as Thursday night does.
The Honest Caveat
Bringing the voice into the open and reframing it is a brilliant way of managing a Sacred Flaw in the moment. But changing the belief underneath takes deeper work. That’s worth doing because it makes the change permanent rather than temporary.
Do You Have Your Own Version of Self-Doubt?
I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about reframing it after reading this post. Let me know in the comments below.
Jarren Duran isn’t in The Pressure Pack.
But if you’ve ever walked away from a difficult conversation, presentation, interview or performance replaying every mistake in your head, then The Pressure Pack was written for you.
It’s a practical field guide to managing pressure moments before they happen, while they’re happening, and after they’ve gone wrong.
The examples come from LeBron James, Carlos Alcaraz, Joe Rogan and other elite performers who have learned to keep performing when the pressure is highest.
