March Madness Timeout

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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.

Welcome back to the Mike Hartman Show. And I am in my car in front of Starbucks. I do these before I have my coffee. Maybe sometimes I should have my coffee, then do these, which will help. A little stuffed up today. The allergies in North Carolina are really starting to get to me. But I had a really good message from an athlete, which I thought was great because I don't hear this a lot and the message I got. So this is kind of a Q and A. But he, he brought to my attention that during the Final Four and I'm not a big basketball fan. I like it. I watch basketball. I liked, you know, watching, you know, the, you know, the Sweet sixteen March Madness. I, I get into it a little bit, but I'm just not one that loves basketball. I know a lot of people do, but during one of the games, I think the last five minutes of the game, Marquette called the timeout. They were playing Michigan State, I believe it was like, what the sweet 16. And what happened during that time out, the coach of Marquette got his team together in a little huddle and he had him do two minutes of breathing techniques. That's all that was. I'm sure he probably said something too, to his team, but I thought that was great. The announcer then went on to talk about. I went back and listened to this. It was great. And the announcer went back and said, they have a mental skills coach and this is some of the things they practice. But these are some the things today that I believe that athletes really need to do. You know, I hear it so many times that the, the athlete is focusing on their physical side to the game and they're not really taking on the mental side, which is so important nowadays. You have so many mental coaches and life coaches and sports psychologists out there and which is great to help the players, but it's important to utilize the tool that you can because you can't always have a coach with you. You can't have a coach by your side holding your hand all the time. So that's why you need to learn some of these skills. If you're, if you're an athlete, whether you're a young athlete trying to get better Try to make your. Trying to make your high school team. Or you're a weekend warrior who actually does, you know, 5K's or 10K races or triathlons. I call them the weekend warriors. Or you're the frustrated athlete, which could be both. You know, you're frustrated within why things aren't working for you the way they are. This is when you should take the time to focus in on your mental skills. I've said it so many times, there's so many great apps out there. There's apps that will help you with meditation, there's free meditation, there's walking meditation to use. There's different apps that helps you focus in on your breathing. You know, the breathing for recovery. I've used this one before. I'm going to share it again. I use something called the gold paint theory. And somebody said to me, what the heck is the gold paint theory? Well, when I was getting involved with coaching 17 years ago now, might have been 17 years, I met a professor from the University of Tennessee named Dr. David Medford and his wife Vera. And they brought me into this coaching world actually, I actually took an assessment from Dr. David Medford. I call him Dr. Dave. I refer to him as Dr. Dave. So I took this assessment from Dr. Dave back then, and it pegged me, like, right when I retired as an athlete, I remember I took this assessment. It was incredible. So that's what got me involved. I ended up calling Dr. David Medford. And this is what, you know, led me to this. And one thing he told me way back then is you have to practice on yourself. You have to practice on your. Even on your mental toughness, because mental toughness can be learned. And we did this thing called the gold paint 30. Now, you could use this. If you work within a business, you could use it before an event. If you're an athlete, I call everybody an athlete. Either you're the athlete or the workplace athlete. And what it is is you close your eyes and you imagine you have gold paint on your body from head to toe. You can kind of do it like in your car, just like I'm doing it now. I'm doing my podcast in here. You could do it in here, you could do it in a quiet room. You could do it anywhere you want where you feel comfortable. So you close your eyes and you imagine you have gold paint on your body head to toe. What I was told back then and what I've learned is with gold paint on your body, a thick coat of gold paint, your skin can't Breathe. And we talk a lot about breath work and recovery, right? So think about that. You have a thick paint, a thick coat of gold paint, head to toe. So I want you to close your eyes. We're do some breathing techniques, do some work. We have many different breathing techniques you could do to get yourself ready. And then when you're ready, slowly imagining all that gold paint coming off your body, head to toe. It's kind of like the two. It's not kind of. It's like the two minute timeout that that Marquette coach did. He had his team do some breathing exercises. Now, I'm sure they had about 20,000, 25,000 people staring down at you. So you don't have to worry about that. You're not going to be in front of a big audience. So you do this and what it does, it just relaxes your mind. It brings you back to center, gives you maybe a little bit of energy that you might need. That energy that might help you. So you could use it again. Use it like, like I was saying before, you can call it the gold paint theory, you can call it any name. You can call it the red paint theory. Whatever works for you is what I believe works like. We had a lot of players in professional sports that had an unorthodox style. Doesn't mean it was wrong. It was just what's best for you. And I'm a true believer in that. Do what's best for you. So practice these mental skills. I know firsthand it will help you. I have mentioned this gold paint theory before and we have meditation as well in our app and we've made a little change. Speaking of the app, we made a little change within the app in the URL. It's not the Hartman Academy, which if you went there, it would lead you to the same place, but it's the HealthyMindsTap.com that's the website, Healthy Mindset, MindsetApp.com and there you could leave your messages at the bottom right corner. You can use the contact button above as well. And you could ask us any question you want. We would love to answer them, especially here on the podcast. I found this appropriate time to do this now. Working on some imagery, working on yourself, working on breathing techniques. And we repeat these a lot because they're really the basic skills. I see it so many time in and time out. Again, what happens is we always want to address the situation after the fact. A lot of us don't really work on our mental skills. If you ask a lot of go around, ask people that are involved with sports, you ask them what percent of sports is mental and a lot of them will just throw out a number. 80%, 90%, 70%, 95%. Well, I say it's a hundred percent because everything you do, you have to think about, including your breathing exercises, your recovery, getting ready to play, being ready to play, preparation, these are all very important things that you need to play to get to a high level. Because every player does it. They do it at the different levels, especially I know in the big leagues firsthand. This is something that's practiced every day and it is a practice. Mindfulness and meditation is a practice. It's something that you need to practice with. So a quick tip here. I hope this could help you. Any questions, go to healthymindsetapp.com we also have our book there, the Healthy Mindset for Athletes and Workplace Athletes. And if you have any questions, please drop us a line. We'd love to help you. And we're now getting into this homeopathic type of products, actually, which our dietitian has something for sleep, for energy. And you don't take it verbally. And it's all, it's 100% natural and, and it's safe. So if you are having trouble sleeping or if you're having trouble with your energy levels and listen, this is beyond my scope of knowledge, but there's something, we have a, there's a stem cell product, it's a patch that you put on and it's all natural. And I'm not into the stem cell. I don't know much about it, but our dietitian is really big into the homeopathic work. Love to help you and looking forward to next time.

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