Services | Champions Mindset

At Champions Mindset, we offer two fundamental training programs for a wide variety of Sports teams to enable their athletes to get into and stay in the Zone more consistently and for longer periods of time.

These programs are designed to improve their overall Mental Toughness. To perform on “Demand under Pressure,” athletes need to learn and develop the right attitude and mindset that will allow them to create the right focus and feeling so that their innate abilities and skills will shine through when they need them the most.

Our mental training sessions are typically 60 to 90 minutes in length, and they can be conducted at our office, or we can come to your facility. We recommend a minimum of one session a month as our sessions progressively build on the fundamentals so that the young men and women on your team can take charge of their confidence, focus, resiliency, mindset, and behavior.

Gain The Ability To: SEE, READ, and REACT

The better you see, recognize and exploit information, the more successful you are as an elite athlete. This is measured, developed, and trained via a number of Brain-Vision Training Stations that have specific exercises that target and enhance their:

Decision making
Brain processing speed
Spatial awareness
Mental stamina and endurance
Peripheral awareness
Attention (selective, distributed, sustained, dynamic, etc.)
Focus and tracking
Visual Skills (Convergence, Divergence, Depth Perception, Alignment, Recognition, Tracking, etc.)
Anticipation
Target Accuracy
Eye-Hand Coordination
Team Sports Psychology
Reaction and overall response time
Situational awareness
Cognitive skills (executive functioning, working memory, auditory processing, response control, etc.)

All of these skills can be quickly developed at our office and through our home training program, which in turn will develop their Sports IQ and overall Confidence on and off the playing surface. At the beginning of the season, we can establish a Baseline to determine their strengths and weaknesses with regard to these skill sets so that our clients can see and process more, allowing them to remain safer and possibly aid in the prevention of sustaining a concussion. This type of training can also assist in the treatment and return to play protocol for athletes who have suffered a concussion. These sophisticated training tools can objectively tell where a client is, which in turn, is great for the client because they get to see and understand how they are doing in the process of recovering from their injury.

This program is suitable for all ages and skill levels. Champions Mindset offers age and skill-appropriate training for youth, middle school, high school, university, and professional players. We offer year-round training programs that are based on years of research, experience, and scientific data.

There are 5 Areas of Peak Performance that enable an athlete and a team to be at their best.

As illustrated below, each quadrant must be fully developed if the athlete wants to reach their ultimate athletic performance goal/dream. The Hub of the Wheel (Lifestyle Habits) is, first and foremost, the most critical element that needs to be addressed because this allows the athlete and team to maximize their training in each of the performance quadrants. Most athletes often have a good understanding and awareness regarding training their physical and technical skills. However, they have very little knowledge and practical things that they can do to develop their Mental Toughness.

Together
Everyone
Achieves
More

"It’s Amazing What You Can Accomplish If You Do Not Care Who Gets The Credit.”

– U.S. President Harry S. Truman

At Champions Mindset, we provide sports teams with the critical mental skills that allow each member and the team as a collective whole to understand themselves better and develop the self-awareness that promotes cohesion, drive, energy, belief, and sacrifice to not only reach their individual goals but the overall collective mission set forth by the administration, coaching staff, trainers, and the players on the team. Over the past three decades as a player, technical coach, and mental coach at the amateur, collegiate, and professional levels I have discovered the seven core mental skills that need to be developed and nurtured if an athlete and team wants to reach the pinnacle of their sport:

Concentration
Composure
Confidence
Commitment
Consistency
Coachability
Compassion

The Key to Success: “Success Leaves Clues”

If you examine the best athletes and teams in the world and the culture that they have developed within their organization, you will quickly realize that “Success Leaves Clues.” Over the course of a season, John will conduct mental training workshops for your team on each of the 7 C’s of Mental Toughness and provide the practical tools and exercises that foster Emotional Intelligence and Mental Resilience so that each team member will grow not only as an athlete but enhance personal growth and development.

At Champions Mindset, we believe your most powerful resource is inside your brain!

Outstanding performers in all fields are taking advantage of our unique approach of blending Mindfulness, Perceptual-Cognitive Training, and Biofeedback technology with an individualized Mental Skills Coaching Program. This personalized approach helps our clients overcome mental barriers to achieve consistent peak performance with improved focus, confidence, poise, removal of mental “blocks,” and increased emotional control during stressful or frustrating situations. Our clients are upping their mental game, overcoming challenges, and taking their performance to the next level in all aspects of their game and life.

Gain The Competitive Advantage With Individual Sport Psychology

John provides parents, coaches, and athletes of all ages and skill levels quick and effective solutions to assist them in achieving and even exceeding their performance goals. Athletes rapidly gain the insight, tools, and strategies to understand how their mind works and to gain control over it in a way that optimizes their personal performance, as opposed to sabotaging it.

Performance Psychology for Athletes offered at Champions Mindset ensures that your Mindset is more consistently positive and productive, which in turn, allows producing performance results “under pressure and on demand”. Athletes will learn the life and mental skills that will allow them to optimize the mind-body connection so that they can achieve personal and athletic goals.

Discover Your Inner Champion by Utilizing Individualized Sports Psychology

With our personalized program of one on one mental coaching, our clients analyze their mental game through a series of conversations and assessments and develop a training plan to work towards optimizing strengths and overcoming barriers. Athletes will learn and master the 7 C’s of Mental Toughness: Concentration, Composure, Confidence, Commitment, Consistency, Compassion, and Coachability that will prepare them for the obstacles and challenges they might be currently dealing with or face in the future in their life and in their sport.

The one-on-one mental coaching program offered by our Registered Sports Psychologist- John Stevenson, will allow you to:

Achieve the optimal state of mind – to perform your best under any conditions
Gain new motivation and confidence – to break through mental barriers
Unleash the power of your body, mind, and spirit – to realize your full potential
Create a healthy, balanced lifestyle – athletically, professionally, and personally
Deal with fear – and use it to propel you forward
Handle stress, anxiety, and health concerns
Think, act and perform like a champion!

The Perceptual-Cognitive and Mental Game Coaching Program for Goaltenders offered by Champions Mindset not only prepares and allows its clients to face and overcome the many challenges that can often threaten their career. Some common examples are: a lack of goalie coaching, negative comments and behaviors from the head coach, getting pulled, getting traded, getting injured, dealing with a major illness or sickness, not getting played, losing championship games, playing on a last place or poor defensive team, hostile crowds, getting cut from teams, death of family member, friend or teammate, bullying or negative comments from your teammates.

Develop Mental Toughness

Yet these events can teach valuable life skills such as focus, visualization, self-control, work ethic, discipline, and persistence that can be used in the classroom, obtaining their driver’s license, improving relationships with peers or family members, or dealing with the many challenges that life inevitably hands everyone. Goaltender’s participating in this program will learn these key mental skills by developing daily breathwork, mindfulness meditation, and mental rehearsal practice in their mental gym.

Goalie Mindset Matters

I have been working as a goaltending and mental performance coach with goalies for approximately 35 years. Over that time, I have had the great privilege to see many of my clients win championships, make all-star teams, and win individual accolades such as the Vezina, CHL goalie of the year, MVP in the World Junior Championship, first and second team all-American team selections and NHL/AHL- MVP’s in all-star games.

The general public often mistakenly thinks that these individuals have “ice-water” running through their veins; that they have never experienced any challenges during their goaltending career. I can unequivocally tell you this is not the case.

More accurately, they have had to deal with a tremendous number of obstacles and setbacks along the way. At the end of the day, however, my clients understand the bottom line, as New England Patriots’ head coach Bill Belicheck would say: “Do your job, know your job, and enjoy your job! – STOP PUCKS”

“I play a position where you make mistakes. The only people that don’t make

them at a hockey game are the people watching.”

- Patrick Roy

In order for goaltenders to advance to the highest levels they absolutely need a balanced approach with regard to their training and honing their skills.

The first foundation/framework that I discovered is called “The Performance Wheel”. This key mindset took many years to develop, and I must admit it was discovered by accident over many years of trials, tribulations, and errors while working as a goaltending coach. I have had the wonderful opportunity to meet and work with some of the best goalies, mental coaches, vision and strength trainers, nutritionists, sleep experts, goaltending and hockey coaches across the planet. While working with these elite mentors, I discovered the key actions and thought patterns that allowed goaltenders to succeed whether the goaltender recognized these thought patterns or not. Early on my coaching career, I made the big mistake that most goalies and goalie coaches still do now. I only focused on the technical and physical side of the game.

As “The Performance Wheel” quickly illustrates there are 5 key components with regard to becoming the best goalie you can be. Most goaltenders and parents have never heard or realized that the tactical and mental part of the game could be trained. You will often hear NHL coaches or players comment on the importance of Hockey IQ and/or Mental Toughness.

In order for goaltenders to advance to the highest levels, they absolutely need a balanced approach with regard to their training and honing their skills.

The Perceptual-Cognitive and Mental Game Coaching Program for Goaltenders offered by Champions Mindset not only prepares and allows its clients to face and overcome the many challenges that can often threaten their careers. Some common examples are a lack of goalie coaching, negative comments and behaviors from the head coach, getting pulled, getting traded, getting injured, dealing with a major illness or sickness, not getting played, losing championship games, playing in the last place or poor defensive team, hostile crowds, getting cut from teams, death of a family member, friend or teammate, bullying or negative comments from your teammates.

I am often asked by goalie parents when a goaltender should start to do mental training. My simple answer was yesterday! The sooner they can get started, the quicker they can develop their Mental Resilience for sport and for Life!

Across amateur and pro sports, Perceptual-Cognitive/Vision training is fast-becoming the latest way to get an edge over the competition. Most athletes are not aware that there are a lot of drills and exercises that they can do at home and at the competition site to develop and prepare their brain, eyes and body to effectively and efficiently “read” and process the play at faster rates. The visual system plays a vital role in athletic performance.

Track Moving Objects Faster

A top-level player must be able to track the flow of a game in order to make critical in-game decisions and react effectively to the changing situation. This involves identifying multiple moving objects (players) and then tracking them to follow and predict the game as it evolves. It has been shown that the difference between elite and sub-elite players of team sports is minimal in terms of strength and fitness levels but large in their ability to effectively read a game, process the information, and make effective decisions. For example, it is widely noted that in the NHL, Wayne Gretzky was neither the biggest nor fastest player on the ice, but he excelled at being at the right place at the right time through reading play with supreme effectiveness.

Perceptual-Cognitive Training Works For All Sports

Numerous studies have tracked the benefit of Perceptual-Cognitive Training for athletes from many different sports. Some of the sports that have shown improvement in performance are Hockey, Table Tennis, Golf, Rugby, Soccer, and Tennis. For sports with rapid movements, the athletes who have undergone this type of training have a significant advantage over their competition.

Champions Mindset Inc. has partnered up with Neurotracker, Reflexion, Senaptec, Fitlight, and Vizual Edge to provide various cutting-edge programs that train the eyes and the brain. These programs can now be done from the comfort of your own home. John will customize an affordable, accessible program to address your weaknesses and maximize your strengths. Neuroplasticity is the biggest discovery in the history of neuroscience; the brain’s innate ability to adapt to environmental demands through functional reorganization, increasing pathway efficiency and growing new neural networks. In terms of the extreme cognitive demands of the sport, neuroplasticity is a major factor in any athlete’s performance potential. In principle, the process is similar to how muscles improve to meet performance demands when put under physical stress.

We train athletes to process greater amounts of visual information faster and more accurately so that they make better decisions and their physical reactions are faster and more accurate, especially when under stress. We use a variety of high-tech tools and techniques to test for specific weaknesses and improve performance. These facilitate the training of a wide range of specific visual and neural skill sets to advanced levels.

Champions Mindset improves an athlete’s performance by training visual skills such as:

Peripheral Awareness – allows perception of what’s going on at either side of you without turning your head
Dynamic Visual Acuity – enables sustained and clear focus on objects when they are moving quickly
Depth Perception – provides spatial judgments, such as how far away an object or person is
Eye-Hand Coordination – involves the coordinated processing of visual input and motor-skills involved in hand movement
Color Vision – the ability to detect different colors and hues to interpret subtle features in the environment
Contrast Sensitivity – the ability to distinguish between fine increments of light versus dark
Process Visual Information Faster.

Bottom Line: Athletes who utilize perceptual-cognitive training will improve their response time during play action and increase their situational awareness, enhancing gameplay anticipation and decision-making time available to choose play options.

The latest research from Harvard suggests that we spend 47% of our time at work mentally off-task. We are often thinking about the past and/or future. And when we are distracted, we are not able to be productive or fulfilled.

Furthermore, among all the positive traits effective leaders bring to the workplace, research has revealed an attribute that is more reliable in predicting overall success than our intelligence quotient (IQ) – our Emotional Intelligence (EI). EI is the capacity to recognize and effectively manage personal emotions in ourselves and others.

Our One-on-One Executive Coaching Program uses a combination Mindfulness-Based Coaching and Perceptual-Cognitive Training to develop your Emotional Intelligence and Cognitive Capacities to allow you to reach your personal and professional goals.

Achieve Your Goals

Coaching is for those who are:

Motivated to start making an effective, lasting difference in their life by changing their mindset and attitude.
Driven to start feeling more confident, empowered, and successful in the workplace, becoming a better leader.
Willing to put in the work to tone and improve their mental game in business, sport, and life.

Is Personal Or Executive Performance Coaching Right For You?

If you actively want to achieve greater performance in your personal and professional life, then this intensive one-on-one program will improve and promote your:

Decision Making
Self-Confidence
Self-Awareness
Well-being
Problem-Solving Skills
Focus and Mental Stamina
Better Sleep Patterns
Emotional Intelligence to foster greater creativity and innovation
And Decrease your Stress and create inner peace

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

– Will Durant

The ability to be present, calm, aware, focused, clear, positive, compassionate, impeccable and equanimous are the core skills that will be developed with this type of meditation training. The scientific benefits of this type of practice are numerous:

Personal/Health Benefits

A brain rewired for greater focus and happiness
Improved Immune System
Lowered blood pressure
A healthier heart
A reduction in chronic pain and a greater ability to manage it
Decreased anxiety and better handling of stress
Improved Memory
Improved ability to learn
Regulated emotions
Improved cognitive-processing

Organizational/Professional Benefits

Creativity
An ability to anticipate and serve client needs
Increased ability to listen to others and utilize valid feedback
Better handling of stressful situations and working more effectively under pressure
Ability to more effectively coach or mentor staff
Improved time management
An ability to prioritize
Better judgment and decision making
Improved concentration on the task at hand and enhanced ability to stay focused, making one more effective
Enhanced capacity to work on multiple projects because of an enhanced ability to focus on a single task in a given moment, thereby becoming much more effective and efficient.

Team Sport Psychology

Individual Sport Psychology

Goalie Mindset Training

Perceptual Cognitive Training

Executive & Personalized Coaching

Track Moving Objects Faster

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Achieve Your Goals

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