Hi Everyone and welcome back to the Hockey Journey Podcast, episode number 97, Sports Stories Part 2, presented to you by Online Hockey Training.com. I'm your host Coach Lance Pitlick. If you're new here, please make sure you subscribe, so you won't miss out on any future episodes.
Before we hop on a plane, head south for some warmth, some sand between the toes and begin the conversation, if you want to learn more about me, my hockey experiences, what I know, and most importantly, how I've been helping hockey players get really good with a stick and puck, just head on over to onlinehockeytraining.com and gain instant access to my 10 part video series where I'll show you everything. Consider it my gift to you.
Lastly, if you live in Minnesota or are visiting the State of Hockey sometime soon and you want to schedule an in-person off-ice stick skills lesson, I'd love to have the opportunity to show you my little world. Go to sweethockeycoach.com, and watch the video on the homepage for instructions. Thanks and I look forward to working with you sometime soon.
I don't know if you've noticed over the last year of me pumping out The Hockey Journey Podcast episodes, for the solo one's like this one, there's a constant revisit to certain topics. Like productivity, goal setting, habits, purpose, leadership, peak performance, mastery and mental toughness. Why do I keep going back to the well, talking about the same concepts over and over and over again? Because, if you're not thinking about it everyday, taking action everyday in order to execute more consistently, you'll never be able to become really good at anything unfortunately.
If you're pursuing something big, one of the best strategies to help you along the way is to learn from others that have already traveled that path you're on, or find similar driven individuals to learn about. As you know by now, I like to include some book quotes to help drive the points home. If you want to solve the mystery and maybe find the code why some people are so much better than others, it doesn't matter what the sport or life sector it is, let's hear the advice the best of the best are receiving and practicing. So Let's begin
Book Number One
Raise Your Game
High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best
By Alan Stein Jr.
Quote #1
“I’ve spent the past fifteen-plus years working with the highest-performing athletes on the planet. I now teach people how to utilize the same strategies in business and life that elite players and teams use to perform at a world-class level. My goal for this book is simple—to educate and inspire readers to take immediate action to improve their mind-set, habits, and value. ... When it comes to improving performance—in any area of life—the most basic and effective strategy is to close performance gaps. These are the gaps between what we know we are supposed to do and what we actually do. Everyone has performance gaps, but the world’s highest performers and achievers have found ways to eliminate or reduce them in the most important areas. We live in the information age. Thanks to technology, we can find quality information on just about anything in a matter of seconds. Not knowing something is hardly ever the reason our performance suffers. The reason we get stuck, frustrated, and exhausted is not from lack of knowing—it’s from lack of doing. This book will help motivate, inspire, and guide you to start closing your most pressing performance gaps.” (End Quote)
Quote #2
SELF-AWARENESS
“Self-awareness is like the arrow on the Google map—you start there, figuring out where you are. Then it’s about the commitment to do what needs to be done to get you where you want to be. ‘The best performers observe themselves closely,’ business journalist Geoff Colvin wrote in Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everyone Else. In the book, Colvin looked at what distinguishes top performers in all arenas and found, ‘They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own mind, and ask how it’s going. . . . Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.’ I’ve given many corporate talks around the country, and I would argue that most people are sleepwalking through their work routine or, at the very least, comfortably on autopilot. Be honest: How often do you take this kind of inventory of yourself? Is it a daily habit? If not, ask yourself how you can make it one. It will be a game-changing decision and will lead to growth on a variety of different levels.” (End Quote)
Quote #3
DISCIPLINE: CASE STUDY 1
“To be disciplined is to carry incredibly high standards for yourself. It’s making those lofty standards your baseline, meeting them, and then trying to exceed them.” (End Quote)
Quote #4
DISCIPLINE: CASE STUDY 2
“For forty-five minutes I was shocked. For forty-five minutes I watched the best player in the world do the most basic drills. I watched the best player on the planet do basic ball-handling drills. I watched the best player on the planet do basic footwork. I watched the best player on the planet do basic offensive moves. Granted, he did everything with surgical precision and super-hero intensity, but the stuff he wasdoing was so simple. I couldn’t believe it. Later that day I went over to him. ‘Thanks again,’ I said, ‘I really enjoyed watching your workout this morning.’ ‘No problem,’ Kobe replied. Then I hesitated, not wanting to sound rude—or worse—condescending. ‘You’re the best player in the world. Why do such basic stuff?’He flashed that gleaming smile of his. ‘Why do you think I’m the best player in the game?’ he asked. ‘Because I never get bored with the basics.’ He knew that if his footwork was not razor sharp, then the rest of the move would never be as good as it could be. And he knew that the only way to do that was through sheer repetition. Kobe had such an understanding of building things step by step, brick by brick; he worshipped on the altar of basics. If someone at Kobe’s level needs to commit hours to practicing the fundamentals, then so do all of us. Kobe taught me a pivotal lesson that morning. The basics are simple, but not easy. If they were easy, everyone would do them.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
YOU WILL ALWAYS LOSE THE COMPARISON GAME
“My friend Paul Bioncardi of ESPN loves to say, ‘You will always lose the Comparison Game.’ Why is that? Because it’s rigged. It has no function besides enlarging self-doubt. I’m typing this chapter on board a flight to South Dakota. Among the 250 passengers on this plane, I can quickly find someone better looking, funnier, more successful, taller, more muscular, smarter. It won’t take long to find someone who scores higher than me on almost any metric. If I use these people as my measuring stick—to determine my self-worth and value—I will always lose.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
COACH
“If you are a coach—you need to make a commitment to being a leader. That title is not just handed to you because you hire and fire, have the biggest paycheck, and make the final decisions. True leaders have a vision for where their group is going and have developed a culture that makes everyone want to work together to get there. They have character and are committed to serving and empowering every member of the team. Above all, they care: about whom they’re working with and what they’re doing. It is only then that they have earned the title of leader.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
ONE MORE REP
“When Wojo came up alongside me, I asked him, ‘How many more reps do you have?’ ‘One rep.’ ‘Wait, what?’ I asked. ‘One?’ There was no way this guy only had one rep. I was almost pissed off. But then he said, ‘Yep. Just one more rep. Thirty more times.’ I smiled because it was the perfect attitude. It was a lesson in living present, in focusing on the single step, in blocking out everything else and zeroing in on only what needed to be done. As you look out on your own personal and professional landscape, I hope you have the courage and determination to take that first single step. Have belief in yourself, in your coach, and in your team, and I know you will make it to the next one.” (End Quote)
Book Number Two
The New Toughness Training for Sports
Mental, Emotional, and Physical Conditioning from One of the World's Premier Sports Psychologists
By James E. Loehr
Quote #1
“Toughness training is the art and science of increasing your ability to handle all kinds of stress—physical, mental, and emotional—so that you’ll be a more effective competitor. It’s a highly sophisticated and thoroughly proven method of perfecting your sport skills while minimizing the risk of physical injuries and emotional setbacks that so often attend overtraining. What does toughness training toughen? Your mind, body, and emotions will become more flexible, responsive, resilient, and stronger—the real meaning of tough as used here—through Toughness Training.” (End Quote)
Quote #2
YOUR IDEAL PERFORMANCE STATE
“Do you think what happened to you in this example ever happens to super-competitors like Michael Jordan, Chris Evert, Wayne Gretzky, and Jimmy Connors? Do you think they always show up for the game feeling motivated, excited, eager, and confident? If you’re not sure of the answer, let me give it to you. The super-competitors are just like you and me—they get tired, burned out, sick, and sore just like everybody else. So how do they do it? How do they mobilize their Performance Selves and bring to life the emotions that empower them? By what miraculous means do great competitors transform fear into confidence, tiredness into energy, boredom into fun? Here’s how: they learn exceptional performer skills.” (End Quote)
Quote #3
THE CHALLENGE RESPONSE + EMOTIONAL TARGET PRACTICE
“Getting tough when the heat hits means becoming emotionally challenged. When adversity strikes it means no retreating, no whining, no excusing, no raging. The archer’s bull’s-eye means hanging in, holding on, mobilizing, firing up, and forging ahead when almost everyone else is heading for the locker room. Rather than fear and helplessness, what you get is distinct feelings of aggressiveness, spirit, and fight combined with a profound sense of calmness and confidence. Competitive problems become stimulating rather than threatening and—since positive emotion fuels the challenge response—a sense of loving the battle gradually takes form. To love winning is easy; to love the battle requires toughness, a skill that is honed only through dedicated emotional target practice.” (End Quote)
Quote #4
MAKING WAVES
“It’s important to understand that only rarely does the volume of stress defeat us; far more often the agent of defeat is insufficient capacity for recovery after the stress. Great stress simply requires great recovery. Your goal in toughness, therefore, is to be able to spike powerful waves of stress followed by equally powerful troughs of recovery. So here is an essential Toughness Training Principle: WORK HARD.RECOVER EQUALLY HARD. From a training perspective then, training recovery should receive as much attention as training stress. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
THE MARCH OF CHAMPIONS
“All great tennis champions have that same walk between points—between their battles—that marching soldiers display. Top tough competitors show the same focus, confidence, energy, and precision that soldiers do when they walk. No weakness, nothing sloppy, nothing but strength. Tennis champions walk the way soldiers march to bolster courage and control. I’ve come to refer to it as the matador walk.Practice looking and acting the way you want to feel in your performance situations. Doing that pays off in terms of victory in combat for soldiers; it can pay off in terms of victory in competition for you.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
THE FIRST RULE OF TOUGHNESS
“Tougher physically also means better acting with the body. As you learned in Chapter 3, greatcompetitors are great actors. Because the connection between the way you feel and the way you act is so powerful, I often refer to the following concept as the First Rule of Toughness. Here it is:
PROJECT ON THE OUTSIDE
THE WAY YOU WANT TO FEEL ON THE INSIDE.
It’s so important to understand the communication process between emotions and the muscles of your body. When you’re angry, sad, or fearful the muscles of your face, shoulders, arms, and legs become stimulated in emotion-specific ways. You immediately start looking the way you feel: angry, sad, or afraid. Unless, of course, you’re a great competitor and it’s competition time. Great competitors have learned to reverse the stimulation process. To achieve this feat, which is essential to their competitive success, they use the same transmission channels that consistent losers use. However, rather than allowing their emotions to stimulate their muscles in the losing way, they use their muscles to stimulate the emotions they want to feel in the winning way. The key can be stated in just nine words:
THE LINK BETWEEN EMOTIONS
AND MUSCLES RUNS BOTH WAYS.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
GETTING TOUGH MENTALLY
“Being tough mentally means that you have acquired skills in thinking, believing, and visualization that enable you to: • Readily access empowering emotions during competition • Quickly change from a negative emotional state to a positive one • Cope emotionally with mistakes and failures • Trigger an Ideal Performance State at will • Cope with crisis and adversity. Mental toughness means that under the pressure of competition you can continue to think constructively, nondefensively, positively, and realistically—and do it with calm clarity.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #8
PERFORMANCE GOALS VS. OUTCOME GOALS
“Center your strategic plan around performance goals rather than outcome goals. Performance goals are goals you control absolutely, like doing 200 curl ups or practicing relaxation skills for ten minutes daily. Outcome goals are goals you don’t control absolutely, like winning the tournament, making a particular ranking, or scoring a certain number of points. Outcome goals can backfire. Invest your energy in things you can control and the rest will happen automatically. • Dream big in the long run; think realistically in the short run. • It all begins with a dream for the future, and it all happens with what you do today.” (End Quote)
Book Number Three
Finding Your Zone
Ten Core Lessons for Achieving Peak Performance in Sports and Life
By Michael Lardon M.D.
Quote #1
“The Zone is the ability to perform at your highest level in whatever domain in life. It is not a phenomenon exclusive to sports; it exists in every endeavor in which men and women apply themselves. But most people who achieve this higher consciousness and intense level of engagement get to this state of mind by accident. And this is why so many of us assume there’s something magical about being in the Zone. . . . Through a lifetime of study, scientific research, and one-on-one work with athletes, I have repeatedly observed ten essential characteristics that the world’s greatest athletes possess that not only enable them to perform at an optimal level but also allow them to transcend the distractions and everyday challenges that can potentially hinder their performance. Based on both my scientific research andpersonal experience, these components form both the basis of this book and the platform from which you can develop the mental acuity, the emotional power, and the skills that will help you improve your performance in whichever sphere of life you choose.” (End Quote)
Quote #2
WHAT IS THE ZONE?
“Simply put, the Zone is a mental state in which your thoughts and actions are occurring in complete synchronicity. The thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is bypassed and one’s mind is actually operating at a more primitive, reflexive level while being fully engaged. When the thinking brain is quiet it can react (or act) more efficiently, sampling increments of time in smaller intervals, which is why people who have experienced the Zone talk about feeling as if time passes slowly and effortlessly. The 100-mile-an-hour baseball comes in slow motion; the feeling is calm and the result is often beyond expectation. Children are playing in the Zone. They do not have to have a magic drug or mantra. They don’t need a $400-an-h0ur shrink. The Zone is not a magical place, although it feels that way. Indeed, it is a state of mind, an attitude, and a mental goal that all of us possess the potential to attain.” (End Quote)
Quote #3
THE TEN LESSONS
“Lesson One - Dream
Lesson Two - Be Prepared to Overcome the Odds
Lesson Three - Transform Desire into Will
Lesson Four - Trust Your Brain, Keep It Simple, and Stay Positive
Lesson Five - Stay in the Now and Be in the Process
Lesson Six - Manage Your Emotions and Thoughts
Lesson Seven - Keep Your Motivation Pure
Lesson Eight - Acceptance and Faith Conquer Fear
Lesson Nine - Build Confidence and Win
Lesson Ten - Perform under Pressure”
(End Quote)
Quote #4
TWO SCORECARDS
“A professional golfer cannot control a variety of things that influence whether he wins or loses a golf tournament. He cannot determine what his competitor does and what the weather is like. Imagine a player hitting a perfect shot, only to find that it has burrowed into a divot in the middle of the fairway. The typical emotional response is to get upset about the bad break, which in turn only hurts any chance of hitting the next shot well. Great competitors learn to identify what variables are integral to their performance and which ones are within their power to influence. It is the discipline of differentiating controllable and non-controllable variables that allows you to expand your energy most efficiently and productively. A simple exercise I ask Tour players to engage in is what I call the two scorecards.”
As Lardon tells us: “This human predilection to be strictly results-oriented is toxic to the elite performer. When you stay more process-oriented and focus on mastering the controllable variables, you inevitably accomplish greater results.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
STOP COMPARING YOURSELF
“When we surrender to the experience and let it happen, we usually end up victorious. The Zone is about the here and now and not some other place or concern. A mind that is worried about what others think or is constantly evaluating his or her performance and comparing it to that of others puts up a blockade to the Zone. This comparative thought process, of judging one’s self in relation to others, cuts us off from the “juice,” and the Zone evaporates. I like to say to my players, ‘The higher the bar, the purer the motivation.’” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
KEEP YOUR MOTIVATION PURE
“The simple question you must ask yourself repeatedly is, ‘Why do I do what I do?’ You need to stay attached and clear about the motivation behind your efforts. If your motivation is for reasons of fame and fortune, it will be hard to find peak performance. If you used to love what you do and now find that your motivation is moving from intrinsic (love) to extrinsic (money), you should pause, breathe, and stop the cycle of burnout. Try to remember how it was when you started and see if you can re-create the same enthusiasm... Make an effort to care about the things you used to care about and note what was mostimportant when you had the most fun. Simplify the things that have become complex. Metaphorically, see the forest from the trees. Remember, you may not be able to please everyone, but regardless, you must absolutely please yourself.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
YOUR CONFIDENCE GARDEN: TEND IT WISELY
“Confidence is the cornerstone of success in all domains of life, and developing it is much like nurturing a garden. It takes attention, gentle care, and vigilance. Poor self-confidence is like a garden that has been overgrown with weeds. The gardener must search through all the foliage to find and nurture the flowers. Self-confidence can be nurtured by many gardeners, including coaches, family, and mentors. But it is most important that you understand how to nurture and develop your own self-confidence.When you grow confident, you are essentially learning specific concrete knowledge that bonds your intention with your ability, thus forming trust. It is this trust or confidence that forms a crucial bridge to being Zone-like—in your attitude, your approach, and your ability to realize your goals and turn your desire into will.” (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #8
ACTIVATION ENERGY - 451 DEGREES, PLEASE
“Activation energy is the energy required to start a chemical reaction. For example, you may not know that paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit and does not ignite at 450 degrees. Now imagine yourself lost in a forest, cold, needing warmth. You invest energy by rubbing two sticks together, causing friction in hope of igniting some paper and leaves. You create heat by your efforts and even raise the friction area’s temperature up to 450 degrees without successfully creating fire. Sadly, you quit in discouragement, not knowing that the activation energy is 451 degrees. However, if you push a little harder and create a little more heat and raise the temperature one degree, the chain reaction occurs and the fire ignites—burning without more effort, burning by itself. Great champions know that if they push a little more and prepare better than their competitors, they will move past the threshold and consequently set the stage to enter into the Zone. The difference between good and great is immeasurably small. Sometimes all it takes is a bit more perseverance and you find yourself at the next level. This process of giving that little extra builds upon itself and forms the foundation for great performances.” (End Quote)
Alright then, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty inspired after reading all of this to you. What quote really hit home for you? Mine, which is going to get a quick reread, came from book number two The New Toughness Training for Sports, by James E. Loehr and it was quote #3.
Quote
THE CHALLENGE RESPONSE + EMOTIONAL TARGET PRACTICE
“Getting tough when the heat hits means becoming emotionally challenged. When adversity strikes it means no retreating, no whining, no excusing, no raging. The archer’s bull’s-eye means hanging in, holding on, mobilizing, firing up, and forging ahead when almost everyone else is heading for the locker room. Rather than fear and helplessness, what you get is distinct feelings of aggressiveness, spirit, and fight combined with a profound sense of calmness and confidence. Competitive problems become stimulating rather than threatening and—since positive emotion fuels the challenge response—a sense of loving the battle gradually takes form. To love winning is easy; to love the battle requires toughness, a skill that is honed only through dedicated emotional target practice.” (End Quote)
Did you notice a recurring theme throughout each of the books? I did. If you want a strong mind, you have to train it like any other muscle in your body, if you want to strengthen it, and this has to be done on a daily basis.
So I don't forget before I let you go, I've put a link to all of the books in the description, if you're interested in picking up a copy of your own.
Well that concludes another episode of the hockey journey podcast. I can’t thank you enough for stopping by and listening. I hope you enjoyed sports stories part 2. If you think there’s someone in your circle of family and friends that might like this episode as well, please share it with just one person, it will really help me in growing this hockey community.
Again, I appreciate you being here, don’t forget to subscribe, rate or submit a review, I hope to see you back here soon, and do me a favor, make someone close to you smile today. All the best my friends!!
