What do you hang your hat on?

I remember sitting in a team meeting after one particularly grueling off-season training session when my coach, eyes wide and ever passionate, asked: What do you hang your hat on?

My teammates and I were exhausted and busy peeling dirt from the bottom of mud-caked cleats while pondering this unfamiliar phrase. It was a rhetorical question—coach didn’t want an answer right then—but he did want us to think about it, and our blank faces clued him to the fact that we were unfamiliar with this idiom.

“Think about yourself and your game. What can you depend on no matter what? What can you always rely on?”

I remember immediately turning inward and visualizing a carousel of my most prominent athletic traits. I was fast, I was skilled with my left foot (my right was hot garbage), and I was a prolific goal-scorer. But just as I thought about these traits, my coach hit us with another layer to the question.

He asked us to try and identify something about our game that was within our control—something unique to us as individuals that we could be proud of.

“What you identify is what you’ll come back to over and over again when things get tough. What do you believe about yourself? What do you hang your hat on?”

I thought back to my carousel. What did I believe unequivocally about myself in the context of my sport? What was that constant thing about my game that I could place here?

So I did the mental homework. I decided to focus on my speed—something I’d gotten complimented on my entire life. I used my speed to win plenty of 1v1 battles over the years. The trouble was, it wasn’t specific enough. I could have just stuck with a statement like “I’m fast” and there would be nothing wrong with it, but plenty of others could have said the same about their game. I wanted something unique to my game. Then I remembered the real reason behind my success in 1v1 battles: I wasn’t just fast, I was explosive.

I could beat anyone in the first five yards. Even if a defender was faster than me over 20 or 30 yards, they still had to react to my movements with the ball. Often by then, the damage was already done. My first steps were powerful.

This thought was accompanied by an image of me beating people 1v1 and this specific mental rehearsal became part of my pre-game routine. I could see myself tearing past my opponent and leaving them struggling to catch up.

I’m not sure if I ever actually answered my coach, but my explosiveness is what I decided to hang my hat on.

In my second course, we dive deeper into both affirmations and visualization techniques and I hope to see you there. In the meantime, I’m going to give you a little mental homework by posing the same question:

What do you hang your hat on? What aspect of your game do you rely on?