Pressure

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.

Foreign. I want to talk about handling pressure and criticism effectively. As an athlete or even in the business world, it's going to happen that you're going to be criticized. In most cases, you're going to make mistakes. People make mistakes. Sports is a game of mistakes. In business, we make mistakes. I mean, you know, especially in sports, you capitalize on a mistake. Especially in the game of hockey, you know, that's. That creates scoring chances, possibly or the same thing in baseball, you know, the pitcher throws a fastball when he should have thrown a slider. Well, it's a mistake. But how do you handle the criticism? I just want to provide those tools that may help you when you're under a little bit of pressure. Like, one of the tools that we use is meditation. We've talked about this so many times, but we really believe in it. We talk a lot about the same things because we're trying to keep it very simple. Having that healthy mindset in place is so important as well. So we do have the app, we do have that program, you know, within our book called the Healthy Mindset for Athletes and Workplace Athletes. We don't advertise on this show, but we sure talk about what we have to do because we believe in it a lot. And one of the things even within our book is we talked about the fixed or growth mindset. So I want you to write down, or you could use our book the Healthy Mindset for Athletes and Workplace Athletes. It's on Amazon. You could use that. But do you have a fixed or growth mindset when it comes to criticism? So a fixed mindset is that mindset that says, oh, that's it, I'm not listening. This is how it is. But a growth mindset, you're going to be open to things. You're going to try things. Okay, I'm going to take this criticism now. Sometimes it's the other person at the other end and how they communicate that criticism to you. They might say, hey, boy, you were horrible out there today. Well, that's not really a way to tell somebody they're not doing something. Well, there's probably a better way. That's a whole other podcast on how to communicate but how you handle the criticism will help you in everything you do. Like I said, we use tools for it. Whether it's some meditation, if something really got you upset, you could do some imagery that we've talked about many times within our show that we have in our app as well. And these are things to help you. Or I just mentioned the fixed mindset, where I don't really think that's the best option, where I don't like this person. I can't believe they said this to me. Or the growth mindset. Hey, I'm open. Yes, that growth mindset. You're going to be open to hearing things. So write that down. The next thing is also, like within handling criticism right away. Sometimes countering it is having good, positive self. Talk to yourself. Yes, talk to yourself. I think it's okay. I mean, we do it. We've done it in sports for many years. I think I first saw this. I know some of you might be too young to remember this, but the bird Mark Federich from the Tigers used to talk to the ball. So, yeah, I'm being a little facetious here, but it's okay to talk to yourself. It's okay to do a little self talk. Boy, my boss wasn't great, but I'm sure gonna, you know, I'm gonna make it better. I'm gonna have that growth mindset towards things. And how you decide to counter those mistakes, how are you gonna handle it? We talked about adversity in the earlier chapters about, boy, we're handling adversity. How are we gonna fight back from adversity? Well, those are the things that you do. So I want you to write down. Okay, what's the mindset we're going to have going in? So I'm going to make this work. I work with a lot of different business people, and people are under many different pressures to get things done. But the more pressure that you put on yourself, the harder it is. When you have that piano on your back, then you're going to keep having that. That fixed mindset or that negative mindset. That's not going to help you. So it's really important on how you handle the criticism. So I talked to before about people that fail and failure. So let's say you could be in a slump. I know they say in baseball if you're batting.300, you're doing pretty good. If you're hitting 3 for 10, that's darn good. But in some other things in life it's not. But it doesn't mean if you strike out all the time that you're a failure, in my mind, that's that, you know, maybe you failed and we have to bounce back using our mindset, using some of these tools that we talk about. So these are some of these things that I want you to do. We believe in writing them down. You know, you know, what was. Like, write down what was the last big mistake you made. How did you react to it? I'm going to use that word react. So I've done this in my life and this is something that you could take, you know, you could take and try it yourself. But I take a lot of these, these sports analogies that we use because we, we teach by sport. Our book, the Healthy Mindset for Athletes and Workplace Athletes is around the sports methods. But so some, if you look at it like the word react. So in sports, if you're reacting, you, some cases, not all, you're behind the play, but if you're acting, you're on it, you're acting on it. Let's say for some of our hockey players, you're forward, that puck's dumped in, you're gonna go. You're a defenseman. And do you pinch or do you not pinch? If you're acting, you make that decision. Same within business. I'm gonna use your decision within your gut. So if you're reacting to things that work, you'll be behind the play. But if you're acting on it and you go with your gut and your gut says, I'm gonna. This is what I believe I'm gonna do. Let's go. And those are these little things that are gonna help you within having that mindset to move full speed ahead to handle pressure and criticism effectively. If there's anything we could help you with, let us know. We have a lot of these little mindful techniques that we learn, we learned over the years that really help tools that are going to help you. We've mentioned imagery, mindfulness. Think about mindfulness. Mindfulness means being in the moment. Okay, we made a mistake. Now I'm going to. Okay, we're going to change it around. I made a mistake. Now I'm going to change that. And I'm going to be in the moment. I'm going to be fully present within what I'm doing. I'm going to make it better. That's all you could do is work on yourself. So I hope you learned from this episode here. Any questions, go to Hartman Academy. Love to help you.

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Sam.