Discover the hidden power of your inner voice and learn how to harness it to enhance performance, rather than let it get the best of you.

Choosing a keynote speaker for TCS Live is no easy task. Sure it’s a conference for hockey coaches, but there’s so much more that goes into the game than simply Xs and Os. Making coaches better makes their players better and with that in mind, we swung for the fences with our keynote speaker.

Meet Ethan Kross.

The bestselling author and award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, is all about mastering the internal conversations we’re having with ourselves at every waking moment.

Hear that voice in your head talking to you right now? Yep, that’s the one.

High achievers, such as athletes and coaches, have discovered the hidden power of their inner voice and learned how to harness it to enhance their performance, rather than let it get the best of them.

Kross studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships. As one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind, Kross’ presentation provided guidance on how coaches can assist themselves, and their athletes, in managing the voice inside their head and use language to elevate their performance.

“We spend 1/2 to 1/3 of our waking hours not living in the present. During that time, we’re talking to ourselves. So we need to manage these conversations more effectively and that’s the science I’m sharing with you today.”

Kross’ 48-minute presentation includes diving into three main points: why do we talk to ourselves, how can we talk to ourselves better, and how can we use this science to help ourselves, players and teams?

Get these answers with use of nine tools Kross suggests to help those struggling with chatter.

More on Kross:

After earning his PhD in Psychology from Columbia University, Kross completed a post-doctoral fellowship in social-affective neuroscience to learn about the neural systems that support self-control. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2008, where he founded the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory.

Kross’ research has been published in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. He has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, The Economist, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Time.