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For me, the key has been experience. Adult rec ball is sometimes hard on the newer officials because newer officials haven't developed the type of judgement that veterans often have, nor have they developed the communication skills to deal with potentially heated situations. Plus, the guys don't really recognize you because you're new, and you're more likely to be challenged. In my opinion, at this point in my career (and I cherry-pick the adult league games that I do), the absolute key to being successful in adult rec league is to simply call the obvious. Every time I work a rec league game now, I work on calling the obvious and the believability of my calls to everyone in the gym. If everybody sees you're getting the obvious stuff and calling only what's obvious, then when a situation arises where you have to call something out of the ordinary, off ball, intentional or whatever, the players will cut you a lot more slack and go along with it, especially if you can add a clear explanation.
I think rec ball has helped me in "real" games immensely in terms of dealing with coaches and players. For me, rec ball has been a great venue to develop communications skills and hone judgement, and working on those things rather than concentrating on "switching gears" is the best approach.
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