The power of positive thinking

Such a cliché, right? Maybe not.

Last week, I talked about behaviour and reward, which I had first stumbled upon in the context of disciplining children. Another great discipline technique that we have learned is to always frame our requests positively: for example, instead of "Don't hop around the house" we ask "Walk quietly". For an impulsive four-year-old, the rewording helped tremendously - it's as if she would fail to hear the "don't" part of the statement, and her brain would just latch onto the "hop around the house" part, so she would hop more, which was precisely the opposite of what we wanted. Once we started reframing the requests, the unwanted behaviours decreased, and were replaced by desirable behaviours.

Then, of course, I got started thinking about this concept for hockey, or in fact sports in general. In the heat of the moment, our coach often yells negative advice from the bench. Last week, his catchphrase was "Not up the middle!" when clearing the puck away from our net. But what he really means is "Clear it to the corners!" Hockey moves fast and we act impulsively, so the same trick of framing his requests positively should work on us, too.

In a quiet moment, I started making a mental list of a few things I wanted to work on, and tried to figure out what I was used to thinking in those situations:

• Not up the middle! - when clearing the puck in front of our own net
• I can't get that - when racing to a loose puck, or fighting for it along the boards
• I don't know what to do with this - when trying to break out of our end. I often found myself passing to stationary forwards just to get rid of the puck, and the play was being shut down. So I want to get in the habit of carrying the puck when there are no good passing options.

Next I figured out positive ways to express what I wanted to be doing:

• Clear it to the corners!
• I CAN get that (aka "you have to really want it")
• Carry the puck up yourself!

I had two games last week and noticed an improvement in my performance in all three situations, though I wasn't always consciously thinking in words while making decisions on the ice. I've limited the number of phrases to three or four for now, and am working on internalizing them by going over them while I'm driving to my games, and while I'm on the bench between shifts. I'm so impressed with the improvements to my game that I've got at least a dozen ideas for new phrases that should be useful. Pretty cool, if you ask me - the power of positive thinking!