The voice inside your head is either your biggest enemy or your greatest weapon
Hey Hockey Family,
It matters what you tell yourself.
Every athlete has two voices: the one that doubts and the one that believes. The trick is learning which voice to feed. That’s why it’s so important to find a saying, a mantra, an affirmation you can carry with you into every practice, every workout, every game.
Something short. Something powerful. Something you can repeat until it becomes a part of you.
For me, that mantra was I CAN. I WILL.
Here’s the story:
Junior year comes and I’m a robot, a machine. I’m destroying guys out there and taking pucks to the net. I’m scoring goals, big goals. I’m blocking shots with my face, with my neck, with my ribs, with my ****. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the win. That’s my only pulse now. I can do this all day.
We call this the grind. And we live for it. It’s all we know.
The cadence of the hockey season presses on, deep into the caves of winter: forecheck, backcheck, dump and chase, weight room, ice bath, stuff your face. We rinse and we repeat, completely captured by every moment of the daily grind of a Division 1 athlete. Enamored by it. And just like that, our junior season is dead and gone.
We just lost to Maine in the first round of the playoffs. I’m bruised and beaten from the season, from laying it on the line. I’m sitting there in the locker room and taking it all in.
I just had a big junior season. I put up good points and put myself on the map in the hockey world. People know who I am now. There’s a buzz about me. It’s quiet in the room and the energy of the season has disappeared. You can feel the shift.
Kimmer “The Norwegian Nightmare” Brandvold, one of my teammates, walks into the room and radiates his smile like he always does. His giant Norseman legs stomping the floor. He sits across from me in his empty stall and we talk about the season. He’s a smart guy. He saw what just happened. He knows that I’m right there. Even if I don’t quite see it yet and fully believe, he sees it.
“You know, Bobby,” he says in his slight accent, “if you double the amount of goals you scored this year for next season, you’ll be in the NHL.”
I do the math in my head, no calculator required. I scored nine goals this season in thirty games, in Hockey East. If I score eighteen goals, I’ll be in the NHL. Of course, I’d be. Guys like me, power guys, gritty guys, bangers, who score eighteen goals in Hockey East go right to the NHL.
He smiles at me and sees that I’m putting all the pieces together in my head. Maybe he sees that moment in time when I first start to believe. He walks out of the room and I look up to the top of the wall above our locker stalls and see a sign with giant blue and red varsity lettering that says:
I CAN. I WILL.
I’ve seen that sign a million times. I sit right across from it but I never really noticed it before. It was just letters and words before. But now my eyes focus on those two statements. I can. I will. And something shifts inside of me.
I say it for the first time.
“I can make it to the NHL. I will make it to the NHL.”
And when I say it, I believe it with every ounce of faith in me. I can make it to the NHL.
I will make it to the NHL.
This becomes my mantra and I say it over and over, all day long. It’s the only thing that’s ever on my mind. I’m going to make it to the NHL. All I need to do is double my goals for my senior season and it will happen.
I show up to the weight room and put an extra ten-pound plate on each side of the bar for a heavy set of hang-cleans. I watch myself in the mirror and see the bulging muscles and I’m repeating it over and over.
I can make it to the NHL. I will make it to the NHL.
....man, I love that story...I wrote it a few years ago when I wrote my savage memoir. If you want to read it, you can find it out there somewhere. Actually that's how I got connected with Wraparound. Lee, the owner of Wraparound read my book and eventually we got connected and he hired me to write savage emails for his Wraparound hockey community. FYI I got my degree in English Writing when I was a Division 1 hockey player at Umass Lowell.
Anyway, that's a snapshot of a moment in my life back when I was playing college hockey that always stuck out to me.
So here’s my challenge to you: What’s your mantra? What words are you speaking over your dream? Find something short, powerful, and repeat it until it drowns out every doubt.
Because it matters what you tell yourself.
See you in the battle,
—Bobby Robins, savage motivator, ex hockey pro