“Overall what we need to do is make this a process we talk about every day.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re an athlete, a coach, an investment banker, a gardener, or a carpenter - if you approach your work with a confident and clear mind, you’re bound to do a better job. Whistle while you work, right? The seven dwarfs were on to something.

But sometimes life gets in the way of cheerily committing to your work. Sometimes, it always gets in the way. Everyone is fighting a battle behind the scenes about which no one else knows.

For Hans Skulstad, Co-Founder of Center for Sports and the Mind, we’ve come a long way from the days where we worried about just saying the words “mental health.” But the work on mental health isn’t owned, it’s rented.

Coaches have a tremendous responsibility to shape young men and young women. How they handle the topics of the mind will stick with players long after their season and careers are done. You can make the game better for your players, and you can help develop better people in the longrun.

That’s the point of all of this, to improve society one hockey player at a time.

So how do we help? How do we deal with it?

What can we actually do?

Skulstad has five myths when it comes to mental health to help coaches be proactive.

1. Royalty: you either won the genetic lottery or you didn’t
2. Wasting Time: phsyical attributes are all that matters
3. Humpty Dumpty: if you struggle with your mental health, you’re broken forever
4. The Headcase: the player is un-coachable, they choose to have a bad attitude
5. The Emotional Superhero: the player tries to prove they are none of these things, and it makes everything worse

For Skulstad, these myths are aggravated by social media. How you show up and how you feel about yourself used to be closely related. With the rise of social media, this isn’t always the case these days. Kids put perfectly filtered images on social media to elicit positive responses even though what’s going on beneath the surface is anything but positive.

The most successful people in sports and life know what causes stress and know how to deal with it. They don’t ignore it. The brain has to feel and it has to think, and that happens at the same time. These two sides of the brain have to work together.

“Having composed players requires you to be a composed coach.”

And that’s not easy. The more stressors on the feeling side of the brain, the less bandwidth the thinking side has to figure out the root of the problem.

For kids, this internal conflict makes them believe something is wrong with them.

For Skulstad, it actually just means that they’re human.

Noteworthy Timestamps:

• 0:15 “I don’t want to make it worse”
• 2:05 What’s your model?
• 4:15 What we need to do for our kids
• 8:20 The reality
• 9:10 Mental toughness/health/social media myths
• 12:10 Elimination agenda/the traps
• 14:45 Dealing with tragedy
• 20:50 The best book for mental health
• 22:35 The brain problem demo
• 27:55 Plans to solve the problem
• 30:30 Rebooting your brain/team
• 34:20 One simple exercise
• 37:55 Amazing not perfect