5th Grade Teacher

Welcome to the Healthy Mindset App podcast where host Mike Hartman, a performance coach and former professional athlete, brings his passion to help athletes and workplace athletes achieve their dreams and goals while being mindful of everything else in life. Mike also uses this platform to share his targeted assessment application, Healthy Mindset course meditation and goal setting technique for the athlete and workplace athlete. We're glad you're here. Now let's dive headfirst into this episode of the Healthy Mindset App podcast. Here's your host, Mike Hartman.

Welcome back. This is our 259th episode of the Healthy Mindset App podcast. And a lot of our podcast early on was focusing around having that healthy mindset and we're not getting away from that. But, but today we're going to talk about the importance of gratitude and having gratitude and we're going to share a lot of stories around gratitude. And I have mentioned it in the earlier podcast, the last podcast that we're going to have subject matter professionals come in and share their stories of gratitude. I have teachers that are going to be coming in and coaches and professional athletes sharing their stories. But I thought it was important that the first few stories that we got off the ground were the stories that have meant a lot to me in my life. And I'm going to talk today about my fifth grade teacher, Tom McPhillips. And just to give you the backstory, I was not the best student. Probably wasn't until 10th grade and then when I moved away to Canada that I really, really had to pick up my studies because at that time, if you didn't pick up your studies, I played in Toronto. I first left when I was 16 to live in Toronto. Now, if you didn't have good grades, you didn't play. So and of course my father, with me being away and if I didn't do well in school, he says he was going to drag me home. So that put a little, you know, kind of kicked me in the butt a little bit. And I had to do it, thank goodness. But I struggled early on, I could tell you I really struggled. And the one thing I had on my mind was sports. And then after school, more sports and then recessed sports. And you know, there's only, it really wasn't a balance in your life. But looking back on it, there's one person I could really thank and it was my fifth grade teacher. He played a crucial role in building my academic skills and how I went on later in math, reading and writing. He really made it. We called him Mr. McPhillips. Really had a love for his students and what that did to us, it really gave us a love for learning. You wanted to learn. I know we have teachers out there today that are like this, and we have teachers that are not like this. I have heard. So he really sparked the enthusiasm for me to learn. And he would give us these tools, like what we use in our business with the Healthy Mindset app, like meditation, visualization, things like that. But tools like how to study better, how to have better study habits. He would teach us how to organize our thoughts and our work and how to manage time in fifth grade, which, yes, we talk now about managing your energy and managing our time even today a lot, of course. But when you're starting at fifth grade, it really gave us a really good foundation of what we needed to do. And one thing is that when you're young and you're struggling like I did, I had a lack of confidence. But the minute I walked into Mr. McPhillips class, he made sure that he looked at everybody is on their own individual level. And that's so important. Now, if you look at a sport team, you have 25. Usually, let's say it's hockey or it could be basketball. And you have all these different personalities. We're all different, but everybody's unique. We all learn differently. Some learn by listening, some learn visually. So with Mr. McPhillips, he really laid out the foundation for us and really helped me in my everyday life all the way through to problem solving to this day, you know, and really helping with life skills. And I think we need more of that in the classroom. There was so much too at that time just learning from Mr. McPhillips and what he has done. The one thing he did do is he didn't let us get off the hook that easy. When he was not happy, he. His way of getting through to us was not really pointing out, let's say somebody was in class and they were disturbing class. Hopefully it wasn't me in his class. But what he would do was instead of pointing the finger at you, he would bang this big bowling pin on his desk. And it got our attention. And I wish some of our coaches would do this to this day, whether it's a sports coach or it's a teacher, because instead of pointing the finger at us because we would know it was. It was whoever made, you know, was the class clown that day, let's say it was me. I knew it was me. But Mr. McPhillips had a way of doing that, or if you did It a few different times, and he'd pull you out in the hallway and talk to you and talk to you like, you know, I was a young man or the young girls in the class, and it was really. It really got through in such a way that it really impacted us at such a young age. And what happened later on? I developed a friendship with Mr. McPhillips. I actually golfed with him a handful of times and got to know him in my later years. Spent my summers living in Michigan in the beginning years. And it was great just playing golf with him and talking to him and learning from him and just. He allowed that friendship to flourish in so many ways. You know, he's definitely greatly missed today. But again, it's so important. You know, teachers out there, I never tell anybody how to teach. I don't tell coaches how to coach. But character development is so important. And I hope we could learn from this today because, you know, we learn how to be empathetic and learn how to be kind and learn how to be responsible. And what happens is you have a teacher like Mr. McPhillips who has such an impact on you that, you know, you're thinking about it these many years later. And I'm 56 years old and I'm looking back on how he really helped me in my development. So, again, for me, this was a way of me sharing one of my stories of gratitude. I hope this has helped you in any way. We're looking for more people to share their stories. Like, we do have a lot of people in different, like I said, professional athletes, subject matter professionals. We have some teachers, different people lined up. But we would love to hear your story and if we could play it here. We have a really good following now, actually, which to me is important because the whole purpose here is how much value can we add? So this entire year now is the stories of Gratitude and any question, please feel free to reach out. And if you want to leave us a review, it would really help because what that does, it shares the message with everybody else that's out there. So thank you so much. I want to thank everybody that has been with us now for years. I'm thankful, I'm grateful and have a fantastic day.

We're so glad you joined us for this episode of the Healthy Mindset App podcast with your host, Mike Hartman. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. That helps others find the show and we greatly appreciate it to dive deeper and learn more about the Healthy Mindset program or to get in touch with Mike, please Visit our website, healthymindsetapp.com thanks again for listening, and we hope you'll join us again in the next episode of the Healthy Mindset App podcast. Until then, be well.