Mindful Hockey

Mindful Hockey 

Mindful hockey is a practice that Elite Hockey players incorporate into their daily lives to help them with mindfulness, concentration, insight, right effort and trust.  

What exactly is mindfulness?

Jon Kabat-Zinn has said quite simply: 

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally, as if your life depended on it.” 

The book, The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance by George Mumford is a proven blueprint for mindfulness to improve athletic performance.   

Mumford's book is considered the best book available in the mental toughness category.

"Everything is an inner game. Pure performance starts with the mind. What’s in and on your mind determines how well you perform..."

"The Mind is a muscle. You need to take care of it through daily practice.  It's that simple and that profound", 

-George Mumford

Commitment is the first criteria for establishing daily practices for a mindful hockey player.

Mental toughness.  It is a measure of individual resilience and confidence that predict success in sport (in this case hockey).   

Commitment - Determination - Purpose 

Focused Awareness - Concentration 

As a broad concept, Mental Toughness is a set of mental attributes that allow a person to become a better athlete and able to cope with difficult training and difficult competitive situations and emerge without losing confidence.  Mentally tough athletes are committed and willing to take all the steps necessary to achieve success.  They understand that it takes sacrifices and determination to fulfil their dreams.  They don't take no for an answer, and they don't stop when they are faced with obstacles. 

To become mentally tough, you must be ALL-IN. 

Coaches, parents and players are always looking for a way to improve confidence, quality and consistency of play.

"If you want to pursue excellence and high performance, then you have to be willing to get uncomfortable. For some elite athletes it’s not even a question of will; they love to get out of their comfort zones and thrive on pressure. That was one of Michael Jordan’s defining characteristics: how much joy he could find in being in a challenging, pressure-filled situation. Love it or not, to learn, you’ve got to take risks and stretch yourself. You’ve got to romance the unknown and concentrate on pushing the envelope so that you can attain new skill.

Many athletes who are looking for help, bail out when the going gets too tough.  Why do they leave, they leave: because they never get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

In fact, many individuals want to change, but they’re often unconsciously attached to their suffering or to the old self they think they want to change. 

Many of our beliefs are tied up in our self-concept. If we believe we can move out of our comfort zones, then we can, and we do.  Freeing ourselves from attachments, maintaining a “calm benevolence in all circumstances” and living fully and experiencing happiness in the present moment, rather than focusing on the future or obsessing over—and blaming—the past. 

You have absolute control of your thoughts and history is full of examples of people who, with incredible mental control, were able to step way, way out of their comfort zones because they had to, and who came out strong. "

-George Mumford

In The Moment

You have to be in the moment. You can’t worry about what just happened, the shot you missed, the missed play you made two minutes ago, because it’s over. You can’t worry about what’s gonna happen the next time down the ice. You have to be right there in the moment.

Mindfulness helps you pay attention to your thoughts in a nonattached manner, which often takes the emotional charge out of them, slows down your experience of time, and reconnects you to the present moment. It’s only in the present moment that you can cultivate conscious flow in your life, achieve optimal levels of performance, and experience that exalted place called “the Zone.” 

The Zone - The Flow

Every athlete knows it; and you remember it as that time when you played the best game of your life.  Everything was perfect and you enjoyed every second of the game.  It felt like everything was in slow motion flow.  You were in The Zone.

In The Mindful Athlete, George Munford describes when snowboarder Shaun White performed the first ever Double McTwist 1260 to win the Gold Medal in Vancouver Olympics he was asked, " what was going through your mind during your run?"

White replied: “At that point you’re really not thinking, you’re just letting it happen. It’s a mixture of being completely focused, then slightly not caring.”

I can’t think of a better description of the ZONE. 


So how do you repeat it?  How do you get into the Zone.  You must get into the present moment and eliminate distractions.  You must train you mind.

"The mind can free us or trip us up. If your mind is filled with thoughts or emotions, you step out of flow. The minute your mind is elsewhere, the present moment is gone"

We’re all interested in the secrets of the Zone experience because it’s the ultimate experience of    optimal performance in sports 


Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leader in the field of positive psychology and the author of many books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is considered to be the godfather of flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow, or being in the Zone, as the act of “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” 


We can deconstruct the anatomy of flow in any way we want, but the truth of the matter is that it all starts with the mind. Flow is your ability to stay in the present moment. It’s a very particular state of mind. The ability to stay present is what fosters the Zone experience. There’s no denying that strength and skill are a big factor in achieving high performance in sports, but many players have extraordinary strength and skills. The real key to high performance and tapping into flow is the ability to direct and channel these strengths and skills fully in the present moment—and that starts in your mind. The flip side of this equation is also true. No matter how strong or skillful you might be, your mind can also impede that talent from being expressed, and it often does so in insidious ways if you don’t take care of it. 

But being in the present moment—and being aware or paying attention to what’s happening in the present moment—is far easier said than done. Without paying attention in a particular way, as Kabat-Zinn suggests, our minds wander, flit around obsessively, latch onto things, and float off. Sometimes it seems like the harder we try to keep the mind in the present moment, the more quickly it slips out of our grasp.  This is often referred to as the Monkey Mind.

Monkey Mind

Monkey mind is a term that refers to a mind that is restless, agitated, confused, or that is hard to control. It’s become a somewhat frequently used term in our high-tech, high-anxiety modern society. Editor Daniel Smith’s bestselling Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety is a recent addition to the proliferation of literature devoted to the perils of the monkey mind. 

In Monkey Mind, Smith writes, 

“A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. 

Consciously Aware

Being Consciously Aware can help eliminate the the monkey mind.  On a very basic level, when we’re consciously aware of the in-breath and the out-breath—or in other words, the act of inhaling and exhaling—we infuse ourselves with that life force and anchor ourselves in our own deep center space. Our monkey minds slowly stop swinging from vine to vine, because our breath holds sway over our minds. Being in that space makes it easier for us to stay with our conscious breathing. It’s a cycle: the in-breath, the out-breath, and the space between the two that lingers. That space is suspended like the pause between two waves, and then the breath comes back like the tide. 

Focused Awareness

We’ve all seen professional athletes sitting quietly, concentrating before a game during the national anthem. If they’re mindful athletes, most of them are actually bringing their attention, not to the game ahead but, to the present moment: fully concentrating on their breathing and, in so doing, centering themselves in that calm place where they’re able to be in touch with the space between stimulus and response.

Awareness of breathing, quite simply, is one of the most fundamental techniques for moving into mindfulness.

As Thich Nhat Hahn says in Present Moment, Wonderful Moment, “Conscious breathing is my anchor.”

Conscious breathing, or aka- Awareness of Breath, concentration and relaxation coexist..

There are different ways to focus on awareness of the breath. The easiest way is to sit comfortably on a cushion with your eyes closed or your gaze soft, and begin to focus on your inbreath and your out-breath. You can also lie down and participate in a guided meditation, walking through an internal body scan, bringing your attention to your breath while breathing into different parts of your body 

Mindful Meditation

When we do get thrown off-balance, we remember to come back to the fullness of the present moment through conscious breathing and mindful meditation. 

One of the problems with practicing meditation and cultivating mindfulness and concentration is that you can’t see or measure them. People often say, “Oh, this doesn’t work, I don’t see immediate results,” or “This is internal soft woo-woo stuff.” But it’s like planting seeds. You don’t actually see them growing. When they first sprout, they’re under the surface, invisible to the naked eye, but you know that with time and the proper attention and care, they will grow and bear fruit. You can imagine quite clearly the tree or plant it will become. The same principle applies when it comes to mindfulness and concentration. Eventually, the regular practice of mindful concentration will reveal what’s hidden in our own emotional blueprints, and in so doing, will lead us to even greater levels of self-knowledge, personal growth, and above all, wisdom 

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