Athletes Mind Map

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.

Today I'm going to talk about what is a mind map for athletes and why is it important to use? A mind map is a very useful tool that will help you understanding different areas where your goals are. So let's start with the Ready to Play mind map. The Ready to Play mind map will focus on three areas for you as an athlete. Number one, your mental toughness, your mindset of where it is. Number two, the physical side of things, which will include things like your training program if you're a hockey player, the on ice, if you're a basketball player, what you do on the court, off the court, as far as your training, also including is your sleep imagery, how you do different things. And the third thing is the nutrition, properly fueling your body. Your body's like a machine and not properly fueled. It will break down. Do you have a pregame meal? Do you have post game meals? What are you putting into your body? There's so many great tools that could help you understand that, including a dietician or somebody closely that really understands how to properly fuel your body. So you look at these steps here and the first thing we talked about is a little bit about the mental toughness. Like how well do you handle stress? How do you do it? Do you get nervous before you play? Do you put stress on your, on yourself or you have a big, you have a big exam in school, Are you adding stress to yourself which is going to carry on through your body, which is like toxins in the body. So you're going to have this stress that you're carrying, which is going to carry to your team, which is what's going to happen. You're going to bring that bad energy into the dressing room. And there's a lot of areas around this mental toughness like, or how well do you handle the mental side of life or sports? How do you handle it? How do you handle adversity or things that are not working well for you? How well do you handle mistakes? So if you're playing in a game and you make a mistake, how fast do you recover and bounce back? Or how well do you handle the physical side of the game? We talked about the physical meaning the Physical training, but also the physical side of a game. If you're a football player, basketball, which is physical, all sports are physical. Lacrosse, hockey, no matter what it is, baseball could be physical in its own way. So we put this into a mind map to help you, just to keep you organized, to have a little structure within, within your life. So it's going to help you get to, to where you want to be. And we use these little branches. So a good example would, under the mental toughness, we're going to have these little circles and you're going to add little bits and pieces of information to each circle that's just going to remind you of what you need to do to be ready to play. This is going to help your mental toughness in so many different ways, more than you would ever believe. Because you're going to be looking at this map. It's going to give you the direction, the physical side. Okay, this is what I have to do for my training program. I need to work on these things. I need to get better, I need to get stronger. Boy, am I going to train hard during the season or harder during the off season. You should know these things as an athlete. It's harder doing the off season. You're still going to train hard and smart. But we say you build the engine on the physical side during the off season, right? You build that engine and you maintain it during the season. And how are you going to maintain it? These are all different tips that you're going to use that's going to help you with your game and your overall mental toughness. If you like, go to the Hartman Academy, which you might be on it right now, and read a little bit about the mind map. Print the mind map. Use the little icon at the bottom of the page to the left, or it might even be to your right, depending if you're on the phone or you're on your computer. And leave us a message on how we could help you with your mind map so it can create some structure for you. It's so important that an athlete does whatever they can to get to that next level. I use this hockey analogy and if I look back at different stats of things and how I played or was I tired a particular night, that one night could be the night that a team is coming to see me play to get recruited. If it was for college or coming to see you play, it could be you don't really want to give up any opportunities. You need all the tools possible so you could achieve your dreams and goals, whatever that Is, or that extra kick of motivation. You're in between periods of a hockey game and are you going to put something healthy into your body, like an orange, something that is going to fuel your body instead of putting a chocolate bar into your body where it's going to spike your energy up for five minutes and then all of a sudden bring it down lower to where you don't want to be. This is why the mind map is so important. And you can create your own mind map. Mind maps have been out for many years. You can look at our mind map and then look at it. You might like it. Or like I said, create, create your own. So I look at two. If you look at, even as a hockey player, there's a million plus hockey players in the United States and not all of them want to go on to the next level. It's okay to play for fun. But if you really want to take your game to the next level, get a college scholarship, play Division 2 or even club hockey, play junior hockey. Whatever your goals and aspirations are, whatever that plan is that, that you want to do, you could do it. But what's going to make you different than everybody else nowadays? I was just talking to a former, former NHL player, he's an NHL scout, and we talked about the, you know, the difference between when we played back in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, early 2000s, and compared to players today. And one big thing is the sticks, right? The sticks are so much better today. Some of the players that scored a lot of goals back in our day could have used that big log, that big heavy stick without saying the names of some of those, those brands. They were like carrying a big log in your hand or it was like a, it was heavy. Like how did you get the shot off? And now some of us could shoot better today at our age than we did back in those days, just based off of the equipment. But, but we needed this, these goals and plans and things in place for us to do that. That's why I'm providing you with this mind map. Look at the mind map. Let us know how we could help you. What's going to make you different than everybody else? How are you going to get the edge? The purpose of the, with the stick is that everybody could shoot everybody. A lot of people could pass. Some players are smarter than others. Some players are not as smart. Some people could skate well. Some people, you know, everybody could skate at a high level. Some people are fast, some people are not. But what's going to give you the edge. Maybe it's this mind map keeping you organized. Go to Hartman Academy. Look at the bottom of the page there under the Healthy Mindset for elearning for athletes. Follow some of these plans. Print the mind map. Use it so you could get to the next level by having structure in place.

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Sam.