Early dismissals are rarely random. Four causes cover most of them: your eyes aren't at match speed yet (the first boundary ball looks slower than it is), you played a scoring shot before you'd earned it, you touched a ball you could have left, or you walked in with no plan and the bowler had one. Every fix is about surviving to ball twenty — after that, batting gets easier for physiological reasons, not mystical ones.
Ball-tracking is a warmed-up skill. For roughly your first fifteen balls, everything arrives effectively faster than it will later — which is why the pull you middle at ball fifty gets you caught at ball three. The fix is boring and works: defend and leave until your feet have moved properly ten times. Facing throw-downs before the innings shortens the cold window; nothing removes it.
Look at your last five early dismissals honestly: how many were defensive shots? Almost none, usually. The drive on the up, the pull at a ball not short enough, the cut too close to the stumps — all fine shots LATER. Earn them: set a ball number (or a felt milestone — 'after my first boundary along the ground') before which the aerial and horizontal-bat options simply don't exist.
The corridor nick to the keeper is cricket's most repeated early dismissal, and it's opt-in. Practise the leave like a shot — shoulder up, bat high, eyes following the ball all the way through — because a good leave is information for you and demoralisation for the bowler. If it can't hit your stumps and you don't have to play it: don't.
The opening bowler has a plan for you; symmetry helps. One sentence, set before you walk in: where you'll score, what you'll leave, what you refuse to do until ball twenty. Batters with a plan get out too — but to good balls, not to gifts.
Nets start you warm — you've usually faced twenty balls before the 'innings' matters. Matches start you cold with consequences. Recreate match conditions: start your net with a formal first-twenty plan and have a friend 'dismiss' you for real (swap out) if you nick one.
Check the tape: if your early dismissals are attacking shots, it's decision-making (mental, fixable this week). If they're defensive — bowled through the gate, LBW playing across — it's technique (fixable, but in the nets over a month, not at the crease on Saturday).
Club level: fifteen to twenty balls of deliberately restricted batting. It feels slow and costs you perhaps six runs of possibility; it buys back the forty you average when you're still there at drinks.
Sticks works anywhere you can swing a bat — at the nets, or at home with nobody bowling. It watches through your phone and speaks this kind of coaching out loud, one focus per shot — in English or Hindi. Video never leaves your phone, and it's free while Sticks is in beta.