Adam Bennett Drafted 6th Overall Talks Mindset

Welcome to the Mike Hartman Show. Mike is a performance coach and former Stanley cup champion with the New York Rangers. Topics on this show are focused around stories, mindset and champions. Mike will also go into details about helping you with your pain points and struggles and finding motivational solutions on how to have the mindset of a champion. Now, here's your host, Mike Hartman.

Greetings everybody and thank you to my good friend Mike Hartman for having me on the show this week. I'm excited to introduce myself and share a little bit of my background, my history with you and what I'm doing today and helping out athletes from really around the world that are able to log in with me and get some coaching. So to get things started, I'll introduce myself. My name is Adam Bennett. I am originally from Georgetown, Ontario, Canada, which is a small town just west of Toronto. And I grew up playing minor hockey, as most Canadians do. It's kind of in our culture and our blood and followed in the paths of my parents who both played and even my grandmother played. That's how Canadiana it is up here. But I played, I played double hockey my whole minor career, I guess did not have aspirations for AAA as some of the kids did in our area. But back when I played, in order to get AAA hockey, I had to go into the big city and move and you know, I wasn't quite prepared to do that. So I just wanted to have fun and play with my friends. And so I stayed hometown. I played Double A right through Bantam and then I joined the local Junior B team which were called the Georgetown Geminis at the time. They're now the Georgetown Raiders of the Ontario Junior Hockey League and it's now called junior a tier 2. But back then it was Junior B, so played a year there and I guess caught the attention of the Ontario Hockey League because the very next year I was drafted second overall to the Sudbury Wolves and so made a move from small town at I believe I was 16, 17 at the time, to Sudbury and played a season up there, I guess fairly successfully because then the NHL came knocking and there was the NHL draft the following year and was really fortunate to have been selected by the Chicago Blackhawks as the sixth overall pick in the 1989 draft. So literally from small town Canadiana went from Bantam AA hockey to the next year of Junior B hockey, the next year of OHL hockey, which is the Ontario Hockey League, which is, you know, part of the Canadian Junior Hockey League system up here, which would be the elite players of that age into the NHL. So within four years, it was a whirlwind of activity and just going with the flow. I made a decision, I guess around 15 years old, that I was going to be a hockey player. And that's where I kind of set my focus. I was also a good volleyball player, made a club team that had practices at the same time as the, as the hockey team. So I had to make decisions and, you know, pick a sport at that point. But I played everything. I played, you know, rep baseball, I played rep soccer, I did the volleyball, as I said, and hockey, of course, golf, whatever, you know, whatever sport was out there, I was into it. And I think that really was an asset for me because, you know, I was a well rounded athlete. You know, I didn't specialize in something on a young age, you know, where I may have lost interest in it, you know, come a few years later, which a lot of kids do now, because maybe it's what they play year round. They don't really get a break or experiment and play other sports that maybe they enjoy more, I'm not sure. But anyways, that was my experience, was moving quickly through the ranks and then attending my NHL training camp at 18, which for a guy that really didn't have a lot of exposure to the major leagues at a younger age, because back then we only had hockey night in Canada on Saturday nights. That was really what we watched. Beyond that, it was hard to follow. We didn't have Internet and, you know, we're busy doing our own thing, so we just went along for the ride. And I got into trouble probably, you know, a couple of years I was up and down with Chicago, could never really stick. And, you know, I would get up, play a few games and they'd send me down into the minors and you know, I'd play for stretches and then I'd get called up again and, you know, get a chance to get, get into the lineup, but never really stuck. It was back and forth. So it was around, you know, 20 years old that I got interested in the mindset coach and I asked for help with Chicago. I was losing confidence, was not performing consistently well. And I just, I reached out to the staff, I said, you know, is there somebody I can talk to just to kind of help me out, try and figure things out. And, you know, that led me to a sports psychologist. But, you know, it didn't fit the need. They didn't know what I was going through. Whatever they had learned, they had learned in a book. So they didn't have the experiences that I was going through. But I mean, they tried to help the best they can. But where I really took off was picking up the books, you know, going to the libraries, going to the bookstores, buying the books. And if, you know, as an athlete you have a lot of downtime so you end up spending a lot of time with yourself, just, you know, in your own thoughts and sometimes they're not good. So I use that time to start educating myself on mindset, changing the way I was thinking, having some goals out there, you know, being able to handle my emotions and the negative self talk. And I used these books to really prime myself. And I guess, you know, fortunately within, you know, a short time, I then become a full time NHL player. And I use that experience to tell the athletes I'm working with. Now that, you know what, it's not always about ability, right? Ability will take you so far, but it's the mindset that's going to put you over the top. And the difference between the elite player and the average player, it's not physical abilities. It has everything to do with what's going on between their ears. So I've kept that, that's, you know, I'm 51 now, so we're talking 30. I've kept that mentality that all the roles I've played in coaching and you know, now mindset coaching, working with athletes for the past 30 years, I've always used mindset as what, you know, my differentiator between other coaches. I wasn't all about X's and O's, wasn't all about, you know, skating them hard into the ground and conditioning and so on, which is all great. But I knew what was going to make the difference for these athletes and especially long term, was to help them control their mindset, control their thought process and you know, get a hold of their emotions and change the negative talk and so on and so on. So what I do now for your audience to understand is I am mindset coaching. As I said, I've carried this with me for 30 years and it's always been in the background. But now I've reached the point where this is really so important, especially coming out of the pandemic and athletes having struggled perhaps for the last couple of years trying to re establish themselves. But I understand the journey, I understand the challenge that these guys are going through and any athlete is going to come up against roadblocks unavoidable, so best to prepare for it. And I say, you know, if you're going to spend time in the gym and working on the muscles and getting in condition and, you know, training yourself well, you, you know, you're wise to spend just as much time training your mind, training your mindset, conditioning yourselves for good habits, you know, creating the mantras and so on. So that's where I'm at now. And if people want to contact me or reach out, you know, would love to hear from you guys. My website is adamschampionmindset.com I have a three step process that I work with my athletes. First one is we do testing just like you go to the gym. The first thing is we want to find a baseline test. So let's use a test that measures mental strengths and weaknesses. And everybody's different. There's no pass or fail. But we really need to identify where are the areas that we can really put emphasis on to build you up. Step one is the mental assessment where I get a score on 28 markers of your mental strengths and weaknesses. Once we evaluate that, then we move to step two, which is the coaching. Where I work with my athletes average about once a week for about 45 minutes. I know everybody's busy and so forth, but we need to plan these things and we go through the coaching. I give them the tools that the elite athlete uses. And so once I've shared all that with them and of course we work through the plans as we're going. Step three is really to zero in with my athletes on their experiences. I then become sort of the mentor and coach along that point and we really zero in on the athlete's needs. Once they have all that information, then in step two, we really apply it and get them working weekly on that. So that's where I'm at. And I want to thank Mike again for having me on and I hope maybe hear from some of you guys down the road. But if anybody's struggling out there, it's about confidence, it's about setting habits that are going to set you up for the future. And I do understand that the athletes are going to go through struggles and I always feel it's best to prepare. So thank you very much again and Mike, I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Take care.

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