Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Win Every Shift

There were a lot of good quotes in the local papers when Steve Yzerman retired. I thought one of the best discussed his desire. It went something along the lines of "... he wanted to win every game, every period, every shift."


On Sunday night, I decided that I should use my hockey games as an opportunity to practice mental preparation techniques that I also use for cycling. I thought I'd keep it simple and just come up with a few goals for the game, just like I have goals for my races. With the basic goals in mind, then the technique is to come up with a short, powerful phrase to get your mind in the right state to achieve them. Then, I used what my Mental Edge book calls a "success history search" to associate some emotion to them.

My phrases for the skate were:

  1. Win every shift
  2. Own the corners
  3. Get open (I had a little trouble coming up with a good #3)


Doesn't sound like too much when you read it, but, when you've spent 30 minutes in the car attaching emotions and positive images to those phrases, it gets you pretty fired up. In the game, I found that my phrases worked really well. One surprising result was that my focus during the game was much better than it usually is. Since hockey isn't my "main" sport and it's a pretty informal group, sometimes on the bench near the end of the game, I'm getting tired and I'm watching the clock and I'm just ready to go home. This week though, even though I was getting tired near the end again, my focus was much better. I didn't have any thoughts about the clock running out and going home, and I actually felt stronger near the end of the game.

Assuming that my fitness this week wasn't noticeably better than last week, you have to put the difference down to my attitude. Interesting result.


After some reflection on the way home, I think for next week, goal #3 will be "move your feet".

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