Coach Mickey Podcast

Join Mickey Anderson and Adam Phomin of CrossFit Closer as they discuss goal setting and goal hierarchy.

Welcome to the Coach Mickey Podcast, thank you for joining me. This podcast is all about practical ways to improve your mindset. Today I’m going to be focusing on “Toxic Words”, and we’ll work through some practical ways to improve your word selection that will directly affect your mental state. The words that we use when we speak to other people, and in self-talk have been proven to affect the way we feel, the way we think, and the way we act. Today, marketing experts understand this and use it to help persuade and influence human behaviour. Motivational speakers, preachers, coaches, politicians all carefully choose their words because they understand how important they are. Toxic words are simply words that when we say them out loud or even in our head, they create a negative or “toxic” emotional response. They are words that stop you from taking action, they block you from seeing solutions, and they set us up for failure. Naturally, toxic words create an emotional sensation of lack, inability, frustration and disappointment. They strip us of any motivation we might have had, and keep us feeling stuck, down and helpless. Some of the most commonly used toxic words are: Cant, might, should, try, if, maybe, someday, and could have. Just like there are toxic words, there are words that do the opposite. They give us power, motivation, and persuade us to perform tasks. They influence others to take action, the instil belief. Think about a powerful speech that has impacted your life. If you don’t have one, that’s ok, I challenge you to go online and look up powerful speeches and listen…listen to the words they use, listen to the tone they speak with, and be very cognizant of the emotions that come to you. How you feel when those words are spoken. These power words are things like: Easily, create, Now, unlimited, realize, aware, experience, naturally. An example of reframing a toxic statement to a power statement would be this: you were thinking about your work day and all the things you had to do you thought “I can’t get all of that done”. Reframing could look something like “I am naturally very productive, and my boss is aware of my workload”. Not so bad right? We’ve simply taken out the can’t, and turned the whole thing on its head using power words. The words we use every day influence us far more than we realize, whether it's in conversation or in our thoughts. The great thing is, that we have complete control of those words. Over time and with a lot of practice, this process becomes more and more natural. Another little trick I recommend is to find a motivational speech that really moves you, put it on your phone and listen to it whenever you feel stuck. It’s a great way to give yourself a boost. When I was swimming my brother recorded a speech from the movie any given Sunday, where Al Pacino is motivating his team. I would listen to it before big competitions and loved how empowered I felt. I hope that you found some helpful tools in this episode that will allow you to recognize when you are using toxic words, and over time can learn to naturally replace them. I hope you’ll join me again in the future as we continue this conversation about mindset and how it affects our everyday lives. Thank you so much for listening, I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and like and share it.

In this episode, I take you through my own personal journey from being an athlete to being a mindset coach. You'll learn about my experiences from childhood, through my university years, and my retirement from competitive sports. I take you through my accomplishments and my failures so that you can have a greater understanding of who I am and why I coach. This whole experience of mine is not one that is uncommon, many athletes go through the same struggles I experienced. The problem is that no one talks about it, or when they do talk about no one has any idea how to deal with them. We are so embarrassed and ashamed of our limits that we pretend they don’t exist and suffer in silence. That is really why I created this podcast, to open up this whole conversation. To share experiences, tips, strategies and tools to help create positive change. I hope that through listening to this episode you now feel like you know me a bit better and that you’ll join me again for episode 5 where I talk about toxic words and negative self-talk. Thank you so much for listening, I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and like and share it.

In these first 3 episodes, I have been focusing on how athletes explain and rationalize their results to themselves in their mind, and how that affects their mindset and successes in the future. Today I’m going to talk you through the concept of Permanence or what’s referred to in psychology as the locus of stability. Then I’m going to bring together all three concepts to show you how you can create a 3-step process for looking at outcomes, to developing a better mindset. We’ll go through an example of how you can break down an outcome, and create an action plan to overcome whatever obstacle or outcome you are facing. When I say Permanence, what I mean is when you look at an outcome, how you perceive it will affect your future? Do you see this either consciously or unconsciously as permanent, or is it temporary? When we look at the greatest athletes and performers out there, they share a few characteristics in the way they perceive events in their lives, and this goes for both positive and negatively perceived events: 1. They are very specific in the way that they describe the situation to themselves, they are detail oriented; 2. They recognize what they have control over, and only focus on that; and 3. They see outcomes as temporary, and they recognize that change is always possible. From this way of looking at outcomes, they create a really simple way to see a path out. That is what is the real key to all of this, but without the detail, feeling of control and belief that it is temporary it is almost impossible to feel like you can overcome something. In this episode, I will go through a way to use these three concepts as steps to reframe an outcome and create an empowering path forward. If you take anything away from today’s episode I hope that you understand the importance of getting really clear with ourselves when we explain outcomes to others and ourselves. I hope that you start to catch yourself when you talk about or think about things as permanent when they aren’t, and start to focus on the temporary and the controllable. Thank you so much for listening, I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and like and share it. My goal with this podcast is to give you little mindset snippets, tools and experiences to help open up the conversation about mindset and how it affects our performances and everyday lives. Be sure to tune into episode 4, where I’ll be taking you through my own personal story as a former athlete. You’ll learn about my background, my athletic career, and how I got into mindset coaching.

Welcome or welcome back to the Coach Mickey Podcast, this is Episode 2. Thank you very much for tuning in. This podcast is about Mindset and Performance, and my goal is to open up the conversation about Mindset and how it affects our performances and everyday lives. I’ll be covering a range of topics and personal experiences that I hope will help you start to think and talk more openly about Mindset. In the first 3 episodes, I will be focusing on how athletes explain and rationalize their results to themselves in their mind, and how that affects their mindset and successes in the future. In the last episode, I focused on generalizations, and how athletes can sometimes broaden an experience to a much greater effect than it really is. Today I’m going to talk you through Perceived Control; what that means is we’re going to be dissecting how the amount of personal control an athlete believes they have over a past performance affect future performances. Thank you so much for listening, I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and like and share it. Be sure to tune into episode 3, where I’ll be talking about the concept of permanence and how it affects future performances. I’ll be tying all three concepts together, generalizations, perceived control and permanence.

Coach Mickey Podcast - Episode 1: Generalizations In this podcast, I’m going to be talking about Mindset and Performance, I’ll be covering a range of topics and personal experiences that I hope will help you gain a better understanding of how you can train your mindset to improve your performances. My goal is to help make mindset a conversation, and open up the discussion to as many people as I can. In the next few episodes, I’m going to focusing on how athletes explain their results to themselves, and how that affects their mindset and successes in the future. There are 3 main factors I’ll be focusing on in regard to this topic; generalizations; perceived control; and permanence. In episode 1 we focus on Generalizations; when we generalize or broaden a statement or event to something larger and wider than it really is. Thank you so much for listening, I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and like and share it. Tune into episode 2, where I’ll be talking about perceived control and how it affects future performances.