How to Develop An Unbreakable Mindset For Elite Hockey Performance

Let me ask you a question

Have you ever gone into a game, practice, test at school, date… anything at all with unshakable confidence?

How does that affect your performance? 

It makes you feel unbeatable, right? 

Imagine if you could carry that into every game in your hockey career.

The good news is you can build this mindset… the bad news is it takes constant daily work.

Mindset, put simply, is how your beliefs, attitudes and perspectives shape how you interpret the world and the events that happen to you.

This is what makes it so important for elite hockey performance 

Do you believe you have what it takes to play against the other team's best player?

Do you bounce back quickly after turning the puck over and causing a goal? 

How do you feel about your ability to show up when the pressure is on in the championship game 7?

5% of life is what happens to you - 95% is how you respond to it 

A big problem I see with hockey players today is an inability to build or access this state of mind

Lots of high level players I work with in the CHL and NCAA have almost no confidence in their game…

Or they let one bad play ruin the rest of their game sending them into a downward spiral or playing worse… then feeling worse.. And so on.

Outside of giving you confidence on the ice.. Why is mindset important? 

1. It gives you a roadmap

If you don’t know WHY you’re doing something thats when you aimlessly bounce from task to task or exercise to exercise with no real direction of where you’re going 

1. It allows you to trust your skills and not be reactive

Someone who is highly reactive is generally a good sign that they have a weak mindset 

They are the person who is super confident until the shit hits the fan and then it goes out the window 

They see the top player on the other team and start to question whether they can defend them 

They make a bad play that leads to a goal and it haunts them and affects the rest of their game.

These players are reacting to the situation rather than staying anchored in their confident mindset 

Im going to give you a few tactics to get out of this reactive mindset at the end of this letter

But first.. Lets start with why

You have to have a why or else you will aimlessly do tasks that you think will move the needle but you have no way to gauge it.

If you don’t have a goal you can measure against, how do you know if you’re moving closer to that goal or not?

If you can’t answer the question - What is the most important task I should focus on right now

Then you don’t have a clearly defined why 

How do we find our why? 

Your why is your northstar, the thing that guides you, the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. 

To find it you have to scratch through the surface layers. The why sits deep inside of you. 

When I ask my players their why, most will say I want to play pro hockey

Yeah you and everyone else who has ever played hockey… go deeper

I want to make a lot of money.. You could do that without playing hockey, go deeper. 

I want to repay my parents for all the sacrifices they made in my childhood hockey career, I want to be able to buy them a house and have my dad hoist the stanley cup with me…

Bingo! 

Thats your why

You find it by starting with your obvious goal

Then ask yourself, what's the motivation for this surface level goal..

And you continue this process to go deeper and deeper.. You’ll know you’ve reached your why when you get a visceral and emotional response

If it gives you goosebumps or makes you tear up a little.. That's your why!

Now use this as fuel every single day with every single thing you do. 

Don’t want to go to the gym? Remember your why 

Don’t feel like giving this drill your all? Remember your why

Your why is a powerful motivator 

Its why I encourage all our athletes at the start of any of our programs to find their why using this simple exercise and to STATE it OUT LOUD before every gym session. 

This brings us to step two of the unbreakable mindset 

2) Set Intentions Daily

To keep your why and your goals top of mind its best to set your intentions daily 

Personally, I like to do this in the morning and at the start of my training sessions. 

In the morning its best to sit down with a journal and write out your 3-5 goals. 

I break 3 and 5 year goals down into smaller yearly goals then break these down further into smaller quarterly goals, monthly goals then finally weekly goals. 

What are the tasks I need to get done this week that move the needle closer to my one month and 3 months goals. 

Hitting my 3 month goals should lead to hitting yearly goals and eventually 3-5 year goals

Often times when my hockey athletes tell me their goals they’re very vague and lofty… I want to play pro hockey. 

Which is a great goal but it doesn’t exactly give us a road map to get there and there are so many places to start that it can become overwhelming. 

So if your goal is to play pro hockey 

Your goal for the year could be to make the highest level team in your area.

Your 3 month goal could be to improve your snapshot. 

Your one month goal could be to shoot 1000 pucks this month 

Which means your weekly goal is to shoot 35 pucks a day 

Breaking your goals down this way allows you to clearly set out a roadmap and then writing them down every morning reminds you what you need to do to move the needle for that day. 

Then before my training session I will use tactic number 3

1. Visualization 

This is pretty straightforward but there is a bunch of research showing the power of visualization for athletes. 

It doesn’t have to be complicated just spend 3-5 minutes envisioning what it looks like having already achieved your goals. 

If we use the pro hockey example again this would be laying on the turf pre session envisioning what it looks like if you were a pro. 

See yourself putting on your skates, playing against your favourite player. Envision what a pro athlete’s day would look like. Showing up to the rink, how would it look, how would the rink smell? 

Be as detailed as possible with this process

1. Learn and have a reset routine 

The last piece of this puzzle is important because this stuff isn’t linear… it's not all greenlights. 

You will have setbacks and that's ok as long as you make them a learning experience. 

In the moment it does you no good to dwell on mistakes and setbacks. Instead you have a reset routine and you take time to analyze later when you have some distance from the situation 

This is explained well in my recent Youtube video from my podcast with pro player Sam Jones. 

The process looks like this. 

Say you’re playing a game and you make a bad pass.. You could dwell on this and have it affect the rest of your game or you can develop a reset routine like this one: 

My personal routine 

I allow myself 10 seconds to beat myself up - After this you wipe it from your brain and move on with the rest of the game. 

Develop a cue that wipes it from your brain.. For me this is taking 3 big breaths and holding the last one for 5 seconds then clapping my hands twice. This tells my brain it's time to move on and re focus on the task 

I stole this technique from Tiger Woods 

I'm a big golfer and for anyone that plays, you know it's an incredibly mental game. 

So what Tiger does when he hits a bad shot is he takes the ten seconds and then he unstraps and restraps his glove.. This is his cue to now move on and re focus on the task at hand

Create your own reset routine that allows you to do this. 

Then comes the learning. 

This one comes from the podcast with Sam. 

After his game is done, he sits down with his journal and writes out every single mistake he can think of for the game. 

Putting it on paper makes you realize how dumb some of the things you’re dwelling on actually are. 

You can do this after every game and practice and then you can take a look back periodically and if there's a pattern

Like I missed the tape and sent the puck for icing then you can now identify this is a recurring problem and you can create a plan of attack or a new goal to address it. 

Use these tactics to start building an unbreakable mindset.. Understand that this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes daily practice and constant refinement so allow yourself a little time to get it down. 

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