 I want to share an idea with you that you may not be ready to understand, but as you get older, as you become more experienced, you'll start to know what I'm talking about. If you want to be a successful player, if you want to play well every time you step on the pitch, you must understand your mind is more important than your feet. Now you may not have to agree with that right now. You may not have to even understand that right now, but you must be open to the idea. So you've been working hard training your feet, making your feet better, improving your skills, but have you been training and improving your mind? If you want to be a great player, start to work on this because this will allow you to achieve success in any area of your life, on the field, off the field, wherever you go. If you have control over this, you have control over your future. So in this video, I'm going to give you four tips to help you improve the strength of your mind so you can be more successful on the field. You are responsible for yourself. You're responsible for your own player development, your personal development. You're responsible for your success. If you're not successful, whatever that means to you, that's on you. That's your own fault. Don't blame other people. Don't say, oh, if I had the luxuries of other people, guess what? You don't. You're dealt the cards you have. Now how are you going to play them? You need to take responsibility for your own football career. You need to take responsibility for your own life. And you need to take responsibility for your insecurities and inabilities. So if you're always looking to other people to solve your problems, you're never going to get where you want to be. Yes, I can help you. I can show you things. I can teach you things, but nobody can teach you and nobody can help you like you can help yourself. So instead of always looking outside of yourself for the answer, start looking inside and understand that you have the power and the ability to solve all of your problems. So whether you're lacking confidence, you get nervous before games or you're horrible at shooting and you need to improve your fitness. Start looking inside of yourself and realizing that you have the answers. You can be your own best teacher. You can be your own best motivator. You can be your own best mentor. If you just start taking responsibility for your problems and start solving them on your own. I want you to understand something extremely important. You cannot control anyone else. You can only control yourself and you can only control the way you respond to the events that happen around you. So right now, if you're getting angry with your teammates, if you're getting pissed off at your coach, if you're getting frustrated with the referee, understand the problem isn't them. The problem isn't that your coach is an idiot or your teammates are jerks or the referee is against you. The problem is you do not have the mental capacity and strength to deal with those situations to get over it and to get on with the game. So stop blaming other people. Guess what? You can't control them. They're going to be jerks. They're going to be idiots. They're going to do things you don't want them to do, but you can't control them. You can only control yourself. So whatever happens out there on the field, realize that you need to focus on what's important. That's playing your best. That's helping your team win. So if people are currently pissing you off, you're getting angry, you're getting frustrated easily, you're crying, you're complaining, you need to stop that and you need to understand. The problem isn't them. The problem isn't what's happening out there. The problem is what's happening in here. You need to learn to control your emotions and again, take responsibility for yourself. So realize whatever happens out there, you can't control them. It's going to happen. What you can control is yourself and how you respond. So you need to deal with it. You need to get over it and you need to focus on what's important. And like I said, that's playing well and helping your team win the game. I cannot do a mentality video without talking about positivity, staying positive and being optimistic regardless of your situation. Most players before the game, they're nervous, they're afraid and again, they think those emotions, they think those thoughts are out of their control when in reality, they're all their own fault. So change the way you think and you'll change the results you get. But before the game, they're afraid, they're scared, they're nervous, they're thinking about everything that's possibly going to go wrong. In the game, they make one mistake. The negative self talk starts going off and they go on a downward spiral, start playing horrible. After the game, they just feel sorry for themselves, depressed, feel like everything is out of their control and they can't play quitting. So if you don't want to be like most players, you need to take responsibility for your own thoughts and you need to be positive with your own thoughts all the time. Whether things are going good or they're going bad, you need to stay positive and you need to get something out of the situation. Remember, there's no failing, there's no losing. You either win, which is fantastic or you learn. You can get something out of every situation, good or bad, if you just stay positive and you look for the value. So before the game, I need you to be positive. I want you talking yourself up, telling yourself, I am going to play great today. I'm going to be a beast. I'm going to be so aggressive. I'm going to make tackles. I'm going to score goals. I'm going to take shots. I'm going to be involved. I'm going to motivate my teammates. I'm going to help my team win. I'm going to put them on my back and take them to victory. That's the way you need to talk to yourself in your own mind. During the game, you need to be positive with yourself. If you're doing things well, encourage yourself to keep going. You're doing great. Stay involved. If things don't go well, even more important, you need to stay positive and you need to tell yourself you can bounce back. You had a bad touch. Focus on what happened. Okay, I can do better next time. You missed a goal for an opportunity. I'm going to go and find another chance. I'm going to go and get another chance to score a goal for my team. After the game, it's so important that you're positive with yourself. Whatever happened, like I said, you need to review the game. You need to be positive about it and say, hey, I didn't play my best today, but you know what? I can learn from this experience. I made this mistake and this mistake and I'm going to practice that in training this week and I'm going to come back even stronger. Get motivated, stay positive and be optimistic. If things didn't go well, believe that you can make them better in the future. If you just put in the work and the practice, if things did go well, great. Enjoy that experience. Enjoy that emotion, that feeling and take that into next week's game. I always want you to be ambitious and I want you to be hungry for more. Even if your team is winning 10-0 and the game is over, I want you to keep going. I want you to be hungry for more touches, for more tackles, for more involvement in the play. I want you to get more assists. I want you to get more shots. I want you to get more goals. When you're playing, always stay hungry for more. Hungry for more experience, hungry for more chances to develop yourself. Never let an opportunity get away from you without getting the most out of it. So stay hungry. Stay ambitious. If you can do that, you're going to improve faster than everyone else because you'll be making the most out of every single individual training session, every single team practice and every single game. You'll get more touches. You'll get more tackles. You'll get more shots. You'll get more passes. You'll get more experience and you'll become a better player. So stay hungry. Stay hungry for the game. Keep that appetite for the game. You want to be involved. Even if you're playing horribly, you want to be involved. You want to be part of the game. You want to better yourself. You want to gain more experience. So whether you're playing good or you're playing bad, whether your team is winning 10-0 or you're losing 10-0, stay hungry for more. Those are four mental traits I want you to possess. And more importantly, you should want yourself to possess if you want to be a great player and be successful. So number one, take ownership. No one is going to help you like you can help yourself and you can solve all of your own problems. So take ownership of your insecurities and inabilities and work to remove them. Work to improve on them. Number two, learn to deal with it. The problem isn't other people. It's not your mean coach and your teammates that are idiots. It's that you don't know how to handle them. So if you're getting angry, you're getting pissed off, you're getting frustrated and it's taking your focus away from the game. It's taking your focus away from improving yourself and becoming a better player. You need to learn to handle those emotions, to get over it, to shake it off and get back to what's important. Number three, stay positive. Regardless of what happens, whether your team is playing well or you are playing well, whether your team is playing bad or you are playing bad, you need to stay positive and you need to be optimistic about the future. And finally, stay hungry. Make the most of every opportunity. Always try to be as involved as you can in the game and keep talking to yourself in that way. You always want more. Yes, you're doing great. Yes, you've achieved great things, but what's next? Okay, so think about those four mental characteristics or mental traits and add them to your game. And again, you can only do that for yourself. I can't do that. I can just give you the ideas. Now it's up to you to take those ideas and put them into action.