 Let's move forward. I'm talking too much, but the information is just so good, isn't it? Number three, the mind is your greatest asset. You need to understand this. We think it's about our feet. We think it's about what you do with your feet. Yes, your technique is important, but if you don't have this, you're going nowhere in this game and you're going nowhere in life. If you can learn to control this, most people don't realize you're in control of your thoughts. Their thoughts just come into their head and then they're affected by their thoughts. You need to understand you control the thoughts in your head. And if you can control those thoughts, you control your mind, you have so much power. First, you got to understand the importance of mentality. You don't have to totally understand like how to control your thoughts or all the different areas of mental toughness. You don't have to understand that right now. I just need you to know that this thing right here, it's really important. And if you can start figuring this out when you're younger rather than older, you're going to have so much more success, you're going to be way ahead of the game. So understand the importance of mentality. It's the most overlooked area of player development. We just focus on players' feet. This is how you kick a ball. This is how you pass a ball. This is how you dribble. What happens when you're losing? What happens when you get cut from a team? What happens when you had five bad touches in a row? What happens when you missed a penalty shot? How do you come back from these things? That's the real skill right there. That's mental toughness. That's confidence. Okay. And that's a skill. That's something you can improve just like every other area of your game. But I need you to understand that right now. Your body listens to your mind. So if you're getting tired and your mentality is strong enough to say, keep going, your body will listen. If you're getting tired and your mind is weak and it says, okay, that's enough. You can give up now, then the body will listen. The body can do much more than you think, but only if the mind is telling it to do so. So learning to push forward with the mental toughness. It can relate to fitness. It can relate to struggles and obstacles. It can relate to failure. We'll talk all about it. I just wrote down positivity and optimism. For me, like this is the foundation of mentality. I have to truly believe that the future will be better. I have to believe that I'm going to play well today. I have to believe that I can come back from setbacks. If I'm always thinking about the negative and I'm thinking the future is always going to be worse, everything is going to go wrong. Guess what? It will. So I want you to start being extremely positive. Number one, be happy all the time. Okay, my life is so good. I talk about football. I get paid to talk about football. I get paid to make YouTube videos. I pay myself to do it. Other people work in an office. There's fresh air outside. I get to send a home and make good food when I want to eat it. I have enough money to have a roof over my head. I got good friends. I got good people in my life. You know what I mean? I get to play the sport of soccer. How amazing is that? So instead of thinking about all the things that you can complain about, moan about, what can you be grateful about? What makes you happy? So start with positivity. You're on the field. You've got a chance to improve today. Be positive about that. And you know you can improve. You believe in yourself. Remember the last one. It's all on you. Okay, so be positive and be optimistic about the future. If I go into a game and think it's going to go poorly, it will. Be optimistic. Don't get nervous. Get excited. Most people go into a game and they're nervous about, oh, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if this goes wrong? But what if everything goes right? What if I play so well if someone sees me in the stands? What if I play so well, I get more respect from my coach, my teammates? What if I play so well, I score three goals and make three assists? Like when you have that mindset, you're setting yourself up for success. When you have the other one, you're setting yourself up for failure. But you can see I got this. We got the same head. I got a head with a brain inside of it. I'm just choosing to think differently than you. Okay, so think about the mentality and controlling your thoughts. Take control of your thoughts. Confidence is the skill of talking yourself forward and that's just like very basic. Confidence is much deeper than that. But on the surface, it's the skill of talking yourself forward. It's easy to be confident when everything's going well. When you're playing well, when the coach likes you, your teammates like you, you're in good form, the team is winning. It's easy to be confident in that situation. Real confidence comes if times of struggle. I'm playing badly. Confidence is talking yourself forward. It's saying the little voice in your head, right? There's two, right? One is saying, oh, you're not good enough. You'll never be good enough. You're a failure. You're a loser. The other one's saying, come on. You can do this. You can push forward. Just focus on this voice. Make this voice stronger than this voice. Eventually, he goes away where he gets just way smaller and you crush him every time he pops up. Okay, but if I'm playing bad, it's talking myself forward. It's like, okay, I'm not playing my best right now, but I can come back from this. I'm just going to make one simple pass. I'm just going to make one tackle. I'm just going to take one shot when I get the chance. Okay, and you talk yourself forward. Oh, I got cut from this team. Okay, what can I learn from this lesson? This happened for a reason to show me that I'm not good enough. I'm going to take this advice and use this as motivation. Just talk yourself forward. That's true confidence. You can't control what happens, but you can always control how you respond. So what happens on the field? The ref makes a bad call. It gives a penalty to the other team. You can't change his decision. So stop wasting energy on it, but you can control how you respond. I don't have to waste my energy moaning or blaming the referee. I'm just going to get ready for this penalty. My goalkeeper is probably going to save it. I'm going to motivate him. I'm going to give him some... I'm going to pump him up so he's ready and he feels calm and he makes a big save. If they score on us, I don't care. I'm going to go back and score two the other way. You can't control what happens. You can always control how you respond. So focus on your responses. Never let yourself get down. Even if you're losing 6-0, but play like you believe in your ability to come back and win 7-6. Adopt the growth mentality. You are either winning or learning. There is no losing. So what I mean by that is you're either within the game. If you lost, yeah, okay, on paper you lost, but you actually learned. And maybe this is a good thing. This keeps you humble. This made you realize that, hey, I'm not good enough at this or I made these mistakes that I got to stop making. Okay, so you're either winning the game and even when you're winning, you should still be analyzing and learning or you're losing. Failure, defeat, losses, those are opportunities for growth and that's when you grow the most. If you're always winning and you're always succeeding and everything's easy, you're not getting any better. Come on. You need to get knocked down. You need to be humbled. Is that correct? That is correct. You need to be humbled. Okay, so losing failure. Never try to lose, but when you do, just realize this happened for a reason. This is learning experience. This is an opportunity for growth. You're always growing. Change the way you look at failure. When you realize that failures and mistakes and losses and defeats, obstacles, struggles, these are actually opportunities for growth. Guess what? You're no longer afraid of failure. It's okay if you try and you fail because that's an opportunity for growth. Okay, so change the way you look at failure. You're not scared by failure. Failure is part of success. The people who are the most successful have failed the most. They didn't succeed their way to success straight line. It doesn't work like that. They got knocked down way more than you. That's why they were further ahead of you. They failed, they got up, they failed again. They got up, they failed, they got up and they learned and learned and learned. The more you fail, the more you can learn if you have that mindset. If you get discouraged by failure and I wrote that as well, losers get discouraged by failure. Losers fail and they give up or they stop playing for a bit or they get super negative. Winners, when they fail, when they lose, they get more motivated. It gives them more energy. You don't want winners to lose. If you're playing against winners, you don't want them to lose because guess what? They come back twice as strong. That's the mindset that you need to have. Losing motivates you. It fires you up. It makes you work harder. Regret and minimization mindset. I just want you to think about this and want you to start adopting this right away. Basically, what that means is, like I said in the very beginning, you'll never regret trying. You'll always regret not trying. So, for example, if it was a penalty shootout and the coach said, hey, are you going to take a shot? You said no because you were too afraid to fail. You will always regret that. You won't regret going up, taking the shot, missing the shot, getting the shot saved. You'll feel better about that because you actually tried. Maybe not in the moment, but when you look back on that experience, you'll say, you know what? I'm glad that I did that because it gave me the strength to try next time. It gave me the information to make a better shot next time. So, you need to remove regrets from the way that you play and the way that you live. If there's an opportunity to go for a tryout, but you're like, oh, the tryouts next week, but I'm not ready. I'm not going to go. I'm just going to wait until next year. Screw that. Go anyways. You don't want to go. You don't want to regret. Live without regret. So, when things scare you, just do them anyways. Just do them anyways. Even if you don't think you're ready, even if you don't think you're not good enough, just do them anyways because the lesson that you learned from that, sometimes you'll surprise yourself. You'll perform under the pressure, especially when you have this new mindset. You're not afraid of failure anymore, but you'll always regret not trying. I should have took that shot in the game. I shouldn't have asked for a sub. I should have just toughed it out and played longer. Don't regret. Live without regret. Okay? Regret, mineralization mindset. If you want to get away from being nervous all the time or scared or always overthinking, you have to learn to be present. And what I mean by that is, if I'm always thinking about the past, then I'm always sad. Or what's, it's a quote. I'm trying to recite a, who is it? Confucius? Laosu? I don't know. It's a quote and it's like, if I'm always sad, if I'm sad, I'm living in the past. If I'm anxious, I'm living in the future. If I'm at peace, I'm living in the present. Okay? So, if I'm always thinking, and let's apply it specifically to football, if I'm always thinking about how I screwed up last game or the mistake, there's a mistake I made the last time the ball came to me, how can I focus on what's happening right now? Okay? Or if I'm already thinking about screwing up and my teammates yelling at me when I missed the shot and I haven't even taken the shot yet, how can I focus on the technique? So, what you need to learn to do is become present in the moment. When that ball's on my feet, I'm not thinking about the last time I screwed up or screwing up in the future. I'm thinking about what I'm doing with the ball. I'm thinking about the technique that I'm putting on it with my feet. I'm thinking about the technique of the past or the technique of the shot. So, learn to be present in the moment, and then you don't have to be sad or frustrated about what you did in the past or scared about what could happen in the future. You just focus on the moment and doing your best in the moment. So, think about the idea of presence, learning to be more presence and being aware of your thoughts. Am I actually focusing on what I'm doing? Or am I thinking about what did go wrong or what could go wrong? Come back to the moment. It's going to help you with your mentality. And finally, I just want to say on the on the topic of mindset, it's like, do not let the opinions of other people hold you back. Don't let someone else who gave up on their dreams discourage you from chasing yours. Don't let the opinion of one coach make you think that you're a bad player. If one coaches have thought I was bad, I was going to swear, but we'll keep it PG for the kids. Other coaches have thought I was bad. That didn't mean I stopped playing or stopped growing. Maybe when I was younger, I let that get to me. Okay, but don't let the opinion of one coach stop you from impressing another coach because different coaches see different players in different ways. Don't let other players, teammates, opponents, don't let their opinion discourage you. If anything, let it motivate you. If they think you're bad, you're going to work even harder to prove how good you are the next time that they see you. Don't let your past self, don't let a past game affect your opinion of yourself. Just because you played bad in one game doesn't mean you're a bad player. All good players have bad games is how you come back from those games. Just because you weren't as good as you wanted to be last season doesn't mean you can't have the best season of your life this season. Okay, so don't let the past hold you back. Don't let other people's opinions hold you back. Don't let other coaches hold you back. Don't let other players hold you back using this motivation to push forward and move forward. So I just want to give you one actionable step on the thing of mindset other than adopting that growth mentality and changing the way you look at failure. I need you to eliminate this phrase from your vocabulary. You never say this again. I can't. You're not allowed to say that. If you want to follow my content, if you want to be one of my players, you're not allowed to say that. I can't. You can't say that anymore. That's the only way that you say that. You can't say I can't. Okay, if you're, if you catch yourself and I need you to catch yourself, it's like, oh, can you do this? No, I can't. Do you have the ability? If you improve enough? Yes, you can. I can do this. I will do this. I'll find a way to do this. I'll become good enough to do this. Okay, so stop saying, oh, you got to score a goal today. I can't do it. You got to defend this guy. I can't. You got to go to that trial and make that team. I can't. 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.