Why Hockey Players Lose Confidence
Do you lose confidence based on how you feel in the locker room or during warm-up? This is a common mental game mistake hockey players make.
Have you ever had thoughts during warm-up, such as, “My legs feel tired right now” or “I don’t have it tonight”? These thoughts can have a negative impact on your level of confidence and thus performance.
I call this reactive confidence: when you’re reacting to how you felt or performed in the warm up or first shift.
Also, making assessments during the game, such as, “We are playing sluggish” or “We are making too many mistakes early in the game” can negatively affect your game.
Judging your performance before the game is not good for confidence at the start of the game.
If you feel you don’t have much of a chance, you probably will hold back a little during the game, not fight for loose pucks, be less aggressive on defense or play tentatively on the offensive end.
Judging your game also lead to faulty predictions about outcomes, “Our team started off sluggish. We are not on our game. We will probably lose.” Or “I’m not feeling great, I will probably not play great.”
In reality, you do not need to feel great to play sound hockey.
Do you really need to have a good warm-up to play at a high level? Surely you can point to instances when your warm-up didn’t feel great but you played an excellent game.
As Ken Ravizza would say, “You don’t have to win warm ups.”
Does a slow start always indicate a poor finish? You can probably recall times when you started slowly or were not totally on top of your game but still did enough to pull out a win.
The Boston Bruins were on a 17 game winning streak when they headed into battle against the Florida Panthers.
The Bruins looked sluggish early in the game and fell behind 2-0. The Bruins fought back to tie the game but the Panthers responded with a goal with 9 minutes left in the game.
Boston definitely was having an off night and it would have been easy for the Bruins to just conclude that it wasn’t their night.
Even without their “A” game, the Bruins kept battling and scored on a power-play with 37 seconds. Still, the Bruins were not satisfied and kept pushing, scoring with 6.7 seconds left in regulation to win the game and preserve their win streak.
Bruin Patrice Bergeron, who scored the game-deciding goal, commented on the team’s ability to keep fighting and dismiss thoughts of being tired or not having their “A” game.
BERGERON: “I felt like we were tired tonight, especially early on. I can’t say that I knew all along we had it. It wasn’t our best game by any means or a perfect game but it’s obviously the resiliency you want to see.”
Bruin goaltender Tuukka Rask described the team’s mindset which contributes to the team’s ability to play aggressively despite the circumstances they face.
RASK: “It’s in our DNA now that we don’t give up. We go about our business and battle ’til the end. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. But I think that in itself is a special thing, when you just don’t give up, when you keep plugging. You know good things are going to happen when you do that.”
Focusing on playing in the moment, being aggressive on each shift and pushing until the final second will keep your mind from jumping to conclusions and losing confidence about what might happen in the future.
Stop Jumping to Faulty Conclusions
The warm up is just a warm up so be careful of judging how you feel in the warm up and assuming it will carry over to the game.
And the first shift is just one of many shifts you’ll have in the game. It’s not an omen for how you will perform in the game.
As Ken Ravizza would challenge his athletes, “Are you that crappy of an athlete that you can’t play with your B-game?”
No matter who you perform at the start of the game or how your team is performing in the first few shifts, you must have the mindset to “grind it out and never give in.”
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