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INTRODUCTION

HOCKEY CONFIDENCE: YOUR KEY TO WINNING

Playing the Game of Your Life

PICTURE THIS . . .

Your heart is pounding.

The crowd is exploding, screaming your name.

Again and again, you hear your name—it becomes an anthem.

The anthem gets louder. The sound vibrates through your chest. It becomes a war cry.

The clock is running down. The team is watching you, trusting your every move.

You are in complete control. This is your time. The opposition is nothing more than a mere distraction.

You feel your heart banging against your rib cage. You are sucking in air. You are smiling.

You smell the sweat that’s built up over the years seeping out of your hockey gear, its presence somehow reassuring.

You. Are. Beyond. Confident.

You inhale the frozen air coming off the ice. It reminds you of all the years you’ve spent flying from one end of the rink to the other. This is your ice.

You are solid, stable, balanced. Ready to take off.

You see the image of a panther in your mind’s eye—dangerous, fully focused, and ready to explode at any second with controlled aggression.

This is your time.

This is your game.

You are playing the game of your life!

Then, in the time it takes to power a puck from one end of the ice to the other, you hear,

“What the hell did you do that for?! You are an idiot!”

What?!?

Within seconds, that hockey dream is now your worst nightmare.

The puck turns over. The other team is running away with your vision, your mission, your future.

The blow is painful. You snap right back down to earth—bang!

All too quickly, the game is over. Your dreams lie smashed on the ice. Your heart is aching. Your head is pounding.

You hear the crowd . . . complaining.

You smell the grease of the fast-food concession and it turns your stomach.

Your eyes glaze over and you can’t even see your own stick clearly.

So near, and yet so far . . .

Just when you felt you were finally getting to the stage where you could be confident, trust your own instincts, and feel trusted, you lost it all. So near, and yet so far, the pain of defeat kicks in. You are right back at square one, lost and searching. Searching for the one thing that will transform your game, the one thing that will make you act out of faith in your own ability and not fear that you will mess up.

This is your time. This is your game. You are playing the game of your life!

If only that fleeting feeling of confidence could last more than just a few seconds.

Searching for Solutions to Self-Doubt

HERE’S A QUESTION for you. Do you feel you would be a better hockey player if you had more faith in yourself when things went wrong? If you had more confidence? NHL all-star Jarome Iginla thinks so. He says: “Confidence is a big part of everybody’s game.”¹

Do you agree? Is confidence a big part of your game? Perhaps you have said to yourself, Today I will play a better game and have more fun. You may even have promised that you won’t question yourself so much, that today is going to be better, that you are going to be better. Then the heavy old mind games come right back. If only you had a solution to the self-questioning, the self-doubt, the anxiety, the exhaustion, the anger, the sadness, the fear, the hurt, and the guilt . . .

Perhaps you saw yourself being a much better player. You may have committed heart and soul to raising your stats and getting better results. Then you found that your nervousness or anxiety got in the way of playing the game of your life.

Doesn’t it sometimes get exhausting to be inside your head so much?

Perhaps you doubt yourself, question yourself, so much that you make stupid mistakes. Perhaps you’ve gotten frustrated with your coach or angry at your teammates as your mood crashes down.

Do you ever feel guilty after a game, feeling as if you have let down yourself or your family or your team? Does the fear that you might never reach your full potential grate on you? Perhaps you have felt that your progress has been one step forward and one step back. You get a taste for the good feelings, the good results . . . and then, like water through your fingers, that progress slips away.

Sometimes you may even have lost hope of ever making powerful, permanent change happen for you. And now you may be beginning to think that it has something to do with you.

If you have felt like this in any way, at any time, you need to know that there are hundreds—if not thousands—of hockey players who feel this way too.

Changing Your Life for the Better

HOW DO I know that other players sometimes feel the way you do? I work with them, day in and day out. I train them to find ways to help themselves get better results by strengthening their hockey confidence.

Know this now: You are not alone. If you have been experiencing these feelings, then I wrote this book so that you can help yourself.

DOESN’T IT SOMETIMES GET EXHAUSTING TO BE INSIDE YOUR HEAD SO MUCH?

I’m Isabelle Hamptonstone—call me Izzy. I am the confidence consultant for hockey players in the National Hockey League (NHL), Canadian Hockey League (CHL), and American Hockey League (AHL); Olympic competitors; hard-playing corporate presidents; and maverick CEOs. I’ve written this for you from my home in Sun Peaks, British Columbia, Canada, which is close to the home of Memorial Cup champions the Kamloops Blazers. I’ve experienced, time after time, how training the brain to develop and sustain hockey confidence can upgrade results and change lives for the better.

The lives of the hockey players I’ve worked with have changed, and so have the lives of the families that support them. Players tell me that having one thing they can do for themselves, every day, has given them a solid internal foundation of confidence. From that foundation have come their greatest scores in life.

Successful NHL players that I train have told me that they are inspired by their heroes and learn from the life lessons that their heroes’ stories can teach them. This has helped them to raise their game and to perform better, both as players and as human beings. They have achieved happier and more successful lives, full of rich new realities.

Sadly, for every successful player I work with one-on-one, there are hundreds more who are struggling to become truly confident. Those struggling players are yearning and searching for a way to make permanent positive change happen. But somehow that change seems to slip right through their fingers. You bet they deserve success. And you can bet they want it badly. You know that they’re trying, trying, trying—day after day after day—to do better. How do you know? You may have been there too.

That is why I wrote this book: to share knowledge so that you, too, can reap the rewards. It’s also to provide tools and examples for the people who support you and to help turn you into a game changer. This book is designed to help you—to help you help yourself and get results. So here it is, a step-by-step page-turner of stories and solutions that addresses the fundamental key to your success in hockey: overcoming the mental block that is lack of confidence.

Learning from the Best

THIS BOOK CONTAINS a collection of powerful techniques that work consistently. Use the tools, learn from the stories, and develop your own powerful confidence to help you deal with stressful situations. As you’ll see, some of the greatest hockey players in the world have used these very same action steps to change their game and their lives.

On our journey of profound personal development, we will be joined by some of the biggest names in hockey, and I’ll share stories of some of the greats, including Wayne Gretzky, Doug Lidster, Scott Niedermayer, Shane Doan, Darryl Sydor, Jarome Iginla, and Mark Recchi. They were all determined to make powerful, positive change happen, and they took action. They stepped up. Their intention and the right actions produced results—and in some cases, Stanley Cup championships. The key to their success was finding the right tools to help them deal with tough situations, and then using them. You, too, can learn from the best, from players who really know what it is to be hockey confident.

Confidence is a big part of everybody’s game.

JAROME IGINLA

Remember, great minds think alike. There is a phrase that many find inspirational: “Stand on the shoulders of giants,” which suggests that we all would do well to learn from our heroes who have gone before us. This is especially true in hockey! They can show us how to deal with our challenges by telling us how they dealt with theirs.

This is your time, this is your game, and this is your life. Stand on the shoulders of the hockey giants and learn from the best. Reach higher, skate faster, get consistently confident, develop your focus and accuracy, and become the champion you were meant to be.

Here, in this book, is a wealth of ways to get better, together with stories of action to inspire and create hockey confidence. Nothing complicated—just a collection of powerful tools to catapult you forward and help you win from within.

Power up your performance by getting hockey confident.

Skate like the wind,

IZZY