 stop saying that don't let yourself say that i can i will i'll find a way i'll get the information i'll learn how to do it i can i can eliminate i can't from your vocabulary number four you must have heart why do millions of technically skilled players get cut and give up okay there's so many players out there who technically they're good enough to play at a high level but they don't make it why usually it's either here or it's here they got weak mind or they got weak heart and what i mean by that heart comes down to your desire to fight your work ethic your hunger your grind your graft okay it's so much more than just what you do with the fee it's so much more than the fancy skills if i can work harder than you 99% of the time i'm gonna beat you okay even though like i got technique on my side too so now you're double screwed you got to be willing to work hard you have to want to work hard you have to have heart heart right here is willing to fight for the team it's willing to fight for yourself it's willing to fight for your goals willing to fight for the people that support you it's not like oh i got nice skills so i'm gonna get by no you're gonna get destroyed especially when you play at the higher level it's so much more than what you do when you have the ball so just learn and we're gonna talk about this i'll go through these notes that i have here let's have a conversation about okay so we're talking about heart heart is about hard work heart is about desire to win and there's a big conversation around what's more important player development or winning because some some youth coaches would be like oh it's all about winning i don't i don't care about the kids i just got to get the results and that's more about his ego and the other side is like oh it's just about the players just about them developing we don't care about winning and my take on that is it's about both it's about developing players but it's also about developing winners okay it's about developing winners the mindset of winning that's what sports about that's what competitions about it's what life's about okay and that doesn't mean stepping on people or cheating or or being deceitful it doesn't mean that it means when i play i play to win i don't give up i work harder than my competition i do whatever it takes okay so it's about developing winners and i need you to adopt that winner's mindset so every time you play whether it's in training whether it's individual whether it's with your friends in the park whether it's in a match you play to win the game now if you lose what do we do we talk about you change your mindset about failure so if you lose you learn from it use it as motivation but when you're in that game you fight you fight if you're playing if you're playing horribly you're having a really bad game you can still control your work ethic your touches off today you missed five chances i can still work hard okay so you need to adopt that mindset of that winner's mentality play to win every game don't give up on anything if the ball is right there and it's you and me i'm doing whatever it takes to get that ball okay within the rules hey and sometimes you push the line i'm not telling a cheat but if you're not going to yellow card every so often you're probably not playing hard enough okay so you gotta fight you gotta be willing to be physical you gotta be willing to work when you're tired you gotta be willing to work when you're playing bad you gotta fight for your team you gotta fight for yourself fight for your goals try harder always try harder and honestly analyze your effort so after your training after your matches you gotta be real with yourself like we said in the beginning this is all on you so if you're lying to yourself about your work ethic you're never going to improve you gotta be honest with yourself say you know what did i did i work hard enough today or did i stop when i got a little bit tired or did that guy push me or did that guy get in my head and i gave up was it the 80th minute and i stopped playing i stopped playing for the last 10 minutes of the game you gotta be honest with yourself you gotta analyze your your your technical performance you also gotta analyze your heart did i work hard enough did i work hard enough you can't always control the ball i can't always have the ball my feet but i can always control my effort i can control my desire to hunt you down and make a tackle for my team and win an interception and win an individual duel i can i can control my ability to track back and to run forward even if i don't get the ball i can always control my effort i can't always control the ball my feet sometimes i touch this off and when your touches off the easiest thing to do is just work yourself into the game gotta run towards hard work because it's going to make you better so many players they run away from hard work they don't want to work hard they think their skills are just going to get them by maybe when you're 12 years old and you're like heaps or levels above the other players everyone's going to catch up to you and they're they're going to do it because they work harder than you and at the top level guess what everyone is skilled and everyone works hard so you need to do both but you need to run towards hard work so what i mean by that is when the coach says hey it's time to do five sprints you don't say oh man why do we have to do this you say yes i want to do this why it's going to make me faster it's going to make me fitter it's going to make me a better player it's going to make me mentally tougher i'm going to do this because i know no one else is going to do this give me give me an advantage on my competition i want to do hard work i want to wake up i want to train every day i want to get better i want to move forward i'm okay doing stuff that other people don't want to do because i know it makes me better than them so run towards hard work you enjoy doing it you want to do it change your mindset it's okay to struggle it's okay to breathe hard it feels good afterwards it's okay to lift heavy weights and and and feel the pressure of the bar on your back it's okay to try something and fail it feels good it means you're challenging yourself it's easy just being in your comfort zone doing what you're good at that's boring that doesn't make you better okay so run towards the hard work success is on the other side of hard work if you do it's always easy the game becomes so hard if you do it's hard especially in training the game becomes easy so you want to do the hard stuff you want to do you want to fail in training you don't want to fail in a game you want to fail in training so push yourself in the training do what's really hard then when you step on the match like oh my god this is easy because i've been pushing myself so hard most people have the opposite right they train so easy and then they get in the game and they try really hard but they just didn't have what it takes because they weren't fit enough they hadn't challenged themselves enough in training how bad do you actually want it so you need some emotional attachments and sometimes we have to do this for more than just ourselves if we're the only motivator like my personal goal is the only thing motivating me oh i want to achieve that i want to achieve this okay that's why i'm going to do this work sometimes that's not enough sometimes on a deeper level it's like i need to do this for my kids i need to do this for my fans i need to do this for my parents who drove me to every single game and invested so much money i need to do this for everyone who's ever doubted me okay so you need some emotional triggers that push you forward when you're feeling tired when you're feeling lazy when you feel like you don't want to do it when you feel like you want to give up you need those emotional attachments to push you forward so i want you to think about that for yourself um discipline discipline discipline discipline this is one of the most important characteristics or attributes that you can develop and it's a skill just like confidence is a skill the more you do it the better you get better the better you get at it but discipline is doing what you know you should do even if you don't want to do it so if you know you need to train and you wake up and it's cold outside and you're feeling a bit tired and you're feeling lazy and you're starting making all these excuses that's when you need discipline you need discipline to say you know what i don't necessarily want to do this but because i said i want to achieve this goal i have to do this and i'm going to do this and now we're doing it that's discipline if you can develop that muscle the muscle of discipline and make it stronger over time you're going to be unstoppable okay it's about fall through we all know what we should be doing we've all written down on a list a hundred times like oh i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do that and then you look back and you didn't do any of it or you did something for a week and now you don't do it anymore discipline is knowing what to do and actually following through if you can fall through in football and all the things that you say you can do fall through in life at least on the majority you're going to be way way ahead okay but you have to again be honest with yourself and say you know what i said i was gonna do this i didn't do this i'm lacking discipline i need to work on my discipline so with each of these i'm just trying to write a little story because stories teach lessons but this is just a little example i had some i went and scouted out these kids in a park because i coach a men's team i coached like the top men's team in my city but i scouted out these kids in the park it was like they were like 16 18 years old they're playing uh this is like probably like a group of like 40 kids and i picked like five kids that i thought okay these guys could probably play with men um like technically they were good enough or they're doing well in that environment and they came in the trial and they they they didn't do that well they did okay they had little glimpses but after after the trial i i came in and i said look boys like technically you're all good enough to play at this level but you're too lazy you don't play enough defense you don't work hard enough when you lose the ball you don't track to give it back if you don't have the ball your feet i don't notice you on the field okay so all those things that i just said what's that about it's about what we just talked about it's about heart they had the choice to do all those things they could have worked harder they could have ran more they could have been more aggressive defensively they were strikers or attackers and the ball was right there and like oh i'm a striker so i don't have to go and track him down or win the ball back for my team okay those were choices and maybe they just had no one tell them that before like hey you're lazy you don't work hard enough you don't play enough defense you don't have enough heart and if you want to play at this level you need that okay but that's what i told them and um they did adopt it and they and they applied that information and it made a massive difference and that's the beauty of if you can learn that like right now you're just a technical player and you can take that and learn that and you can turn that on like if i can transform your game overnight just the ability to work hard the choice to work hard the mental choice to work harder to do more to run more to make more tackles i'm not saying run around like an idiot i'm saying put more effort in play to win every single time play to win don't give up be physical be stronger fight harder okay that can change your game overnight it's just a mindset mindset shift so i need you to adopt the actual step i want you to take for this one is i want you to adopt that winner's mindset it's not okay to lose but when you do you learn and you move on it's not okay to lose if we're in a drill it's not okay for you to be me it's not okay for me to let you win i have to fight if i lose fine i learn from it and i move on i use that as motivation that's part of the sport but it's not okay for me to give up early or not to give my best so whether you're training with your friends you're playing in a practice or you're playing in a match you play to win every single time you never give up until the 90th minute even if your team is losing 3-0 in the 89th you don't give up you keep trying you get three goals in the extra time you do whatever it takes and if you lose you learn from it you move on let's keep