Q & A Olympian & Attitude

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 another episode. My name is Mike Hartman, the founder of the Hartman Academy no.com and the author of the book the Healthy Mindset for the Athlete and the Workplace. Athlete. Today we have a sports question that I have decided to do on my own and we never say names, but I work with an Olympian who was actually one of the last cuts on one of the Olympic sport teams without getting too much into it. And she's an unbelievable competitor, great person, leader, everything else. But unfortunately she was one of the last cuts and I understand how that works in hockey. I remember I was working with the women's Olympic hockey team for a very short time where Ben Smith invited me into, he was the Olympic hockey coach and he invited me into the Olympic training center to work with the girls. And I was so impressed with these ladies. And the reason I went, it was right around Thanksgiving time and at that time I remember that there was still, I think maybe three or four players that hadn't been cut from the team. Unfortunately, these are ultra competitive, elite, world class athletes. And I was there just as a listening ear to do some performance coaching, some work. I highly respect Ben Smith. I played for him on one of the US Teams that I was invited to play on with Lou Vero. And it, you know, it meant a lot just to go in there and work with these ladies. I know we had some, some great players. But you know, the, the thing that I'm going to share today is if, at any level, if you're getting cut, it's tough. And the question is, well, how do I, how do I bounce back? What you have to do is take the piano off your back, go back to the basics, take care of your mind, body. The first thing I would do is focus on, okay, am I going to use this for motivation? And I believe in motivation. I don't care what anybody says, you need a little bit of motivation. I remember personally as an athlete that I got sent down my second year and I had to use something for motivation. And I said, okay, I'm in Rochester and I want to get back and what am I going to do? Am I going to sulk? Am I going to have a bad attitude? Or am I going to take action? That's what this is about, taking action and going out there and doing everything I can to be brought up. And I finally got brought up in, you know, to Buffalo just before the playoffs. It was, it was late, like late February, March. I ended up playing in the playoffs and ended up being a good year. But sometimes as athletes, we get impatient. So I told my athlete here, I can't really say it's my athlete. I told one of our athletes that just go back to basics, take care of your mind, body, have that healthy mindset. As we discussed, many times a healthy mindset starts with taking care of yourself, proper nutrition, fueling your body, sleeping, all the things that we've discussed. It might sound redundant, but these are the tools that we use. Go back to some imagery and be in the moment. So if you're going to be, if you're an athlete, go back, it's okay, you have a little pity party for yourself, okay, you didn't make the team, you're going to feel bad, you might be a little negative, that's normal. But then what you do is you bounce back. You focus on all these little things that's going to make you better. You put that, you get that vision board up, we've used that many times. You take that vision board and you say, okay, this is where I see myself now. I'm going to create these measurable goals, so I'm going to make it happen. So I'm going to make the next team and I'm going to just get better as an athlete and as a person. And what that entails is little things like being the first one to the field and the last one off the field, doing all the things that you could do to maximize your ability. Now in baseball, Derek Jeter at the end of his career was always the first one there and the first one off. But he's Derek Jeter, he was able to do that later in his career. But some of, some of you young athletes do everything you can. You listen to your coaches, you follow the, you follow the plan, you implement that, you have your own plan. You break things down, you minimalize things, you do these things as an athlete to help you get ahead. But if you have bad self talk and you're still very upset about you didn't make the team or you're being cut or you start getting vengeful, it's only going to backfire. It's only a matter of time before it's, you get drained. All that energy that you're all that negative energy that you're taking in is just going to be bad energy throughout your body and it's not going to help you. I've said this a couple times. You know, sometimes we overplay things in our head so much that we become exhausted. Back in the day, Muhammad Ali used to see himself winning the fight, but then he'd go to sleep. If he was thinking about the fight all night, he would be exhausted. So we want to work on our energy as well. So if you're one of those players that in any sport that get cut during the year, use it for motivation. Hopefully you'll get picked up on a different team. And I've been around so many players that have had ups and downs. I have one of our ballplayers I'm going to use as an example too here. I'm going on a little bit. But this, this kid made me so proud. He's. He allowed me to use his name and we don't use names. His name is Will Mangarian. He played for Troy and he got to the team and did not play one inning the whole year. He got. I mean, it was his senior year. He was a great player and pretty much, I'm not the coach, but I would have to believe that the coach had their players. The year before was lost to Covid. And Will had one dream. He wanted to play pro baseball. He wanted to finish his schooling and play baseball. I think he got the pinch run a couple times. You can go look it up. Go look him up. Great sports family. His dad worked in the NFL with the New York Giants as one of their assistant coaches. This kid to me is a winner. Well, as it turned out, for whatever. However it happened, whatever reason, I know he was playing some summer ball and he ended up signing a pro contract to play, I think in the independent league. It's called if I'm getting that league right. He was playing in Montana, if you want to look him up. But the thing with Will, though, that I. That I could share with you is Will would, would listen. He followed the instructions. He. Yes, he had his bad days. Yeah. Here I am going off about Will because it just, it touches my heart. He had his bad days, but what he would do is he would show up at batting practice, take extra hits. Then after they would tell him, you're not going on the bus. I mean, I was getting frustrated. I don't know what if I would have handled as well as him so he doesn't take the bus to the, to the next game. I'll explain that a little bit. So they usually, what happens, a team would load the bus and they would say, you're not going on the trip. He went to the gym, he did his studies. The next day he would show up at practice when the team came back, whether it was three days and didn't get treated the way he wanted to be treated. But still he came out, worked his butt off every day, followed plans, did research, put everything in place, took care of his sleep, his nutrition, his mind, body. And he kept saying, I'm shooting for that goal and I'm not going to give up until I do it. Well, he did it. So if you want to know what it takes, that's action. It takes actionable things like Will. And I appreciate this young athlete. I use him every time I talk to him. He, you know, this kid's a winner. So just because of how mentally tough he was and how he handled things. So I made a little turn in events here. I had this written down about if you get cut, what to do. But this is a, to me, this, when this, when I thought about Will, this was a great example of an athlete that, that just wanted it. And you can't teach that. Sometimes some of us, we just can't teach how bad we want it. So, yeah, I turned things a little bit, but that's why, that's why I like the podcast because I'm, I could shift, I made a little shift in what I was going to do. It was going to be a little four minute podcast about if you get cut and using one of my Olympians as an example. But I'm using both. Foreign. So I hope you got something out of this. If you have any questions, you can go to Hartman Academy. You can even ask a question. You don't have to be with us or have taken our program or our 30 day accountability program or anything like that. Just go to the bottom of the hartman.academy no.com. leave them. Leave us a little message and I'd love to help you. That's what it's for. And you could ask us anything you want. If I can't answer it, I won't. Or if it's above my head, I will not answer it. I tell people that we are not therapists, we're performance coaches. If you ask anything in nutrition, I will ask our dietitian who has multiple degrees. But we, we stay in our lane, just like I'm asking you to do as an athlete. Stay in your lane and good things will happen. Have a fantastic rest of your day and just any way we could help you, please reach out.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Mike Hartman Show. If you're enjoying what you've heard so far, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review on your preferred podcast listening platform. We really appreciate that effort. We'll catch you in the next episode of the Mike Hartman Show.

Ra.