Hi Everyone and welcome back to the Hockey Journey Podcast, episode number 90, My Extreme Daily Schedule, Presented to you by Online Hockey Training dot com. I'm your host Coach Lance Pitlick. If you're new here, please make sure you subscribe, so you won't miss out on any future episodes.Â
Before we settle into the next chapter of the Hockey Journey Podcast and begin the conversation, if you want to learn more about me, my hockey experiences, that I have the world's largest database of off-ice stickhandling, passing and hockey shooting drills, what I know, and most importantly, how I've been helping hockey players get really good with a stick and puck, just head on over to onlinehockeytraining.com and gain instant access to my 10 part video series where I'll show you everything. Consider it my gift to you.
Lastly, if you live in Minnesota or are visiting the State of Hockey sometime soon and you want to schedule an in-person off-ice stick skills lesson, I'd love to have the opportunity to show you my little world. Go to sweethockeycoach.com, and watch the video on the homepage for instructions. Thanks and I look forward to working with you sometime soon.
Have you ever had a moment in time, where your trajectory or life direction completely changed in an instant? Sometimes it's for the good and other times it's on the other end of the spectrum. I don't know if I've been unlucky, or lucky, but I've had several occasions during my life where my back was against the wall, and the only way out was to batten down the hatches, come out swingin and get to work until the challenge has been resolved.
Every situation or opportunity (as I like to call them) had a resolution, but that didn't mean I was happy with how things turned out. The title of this episode is My Extreme Daily Schedule, and we'll get to that soon enough, but I think it's important to set the stage (so to speak) on how I got to my current daily routine. There's a bunch of players I work with that have been bugging me to do podcast episode on my, as they put it, weird schedule, so this is for all of you.
I don't know exactly who influenced me the most, was there one person that showed me the way or were there many, but for as long as I can remember, I've always had a strong work ethic. If I commit to something, I'll generally shut off the world for a while and focus on that one thing until it's accomplished. I'm grateful I somehow made the connection early in my life, that if you want something, you have to work to get it.
The first time I experienced some real heaviness in my life was when I was 9 years old and just finished the 4th grade or grade four for all you Canadians out there. My brother and I were planning on fun filled summer with a neighborhood full of kids, so there wasn't going to be a shortage of things to do each day. But those plans quickly disappeared as my Mom informed my brother and I at the end of the school year, that her and my Dad with splitting up and getting a divorce, resulting in my Mom, brother and I moving across town to live at my Grandparents place and our new beginning began.
My Uncle Todd was home for the summer from college, and one of his friends Dad owned a putt putt golf course that I ended up working at part-time that first summer. It was a 30 minute bike ride and since I hadn't made any new friends yet, it was something I looked forward to doing, as I was bored a lot of the time.
It really wasn't work, as it was only for a couple hours. I'd retrieve balls from water obstacles (there was only 2), emptied the ball holder from the last hole, you know, if you made a hole in one, you earned another free round of golf. If you didn't, the ball was gobbled up and stored in a big plastic garbage container until I came to empty it. I had a few spots to clean up and then I could play a couple rounds of golf before I headed home.
Soon after I started working there, I met a couple guys that lived near my grandparents house, we became friends and things then started to calm down as we were settling into our new normal. I don't know if this happened to my brother as well, I guess I've never asked him the question, but that was the first time I thought my family and I became really desperate, and it scared me. But once we got through it and there's some time to reflect on the experience, it really changed me, and for the better!
It thickened my skin, callused me a bit, but once the dust settled I realized at that moment, that I can get through pretty much anything, if I'm willing to fully commit to the outcome I'm hoping to achieve. I have no idea if that experience was the reason I ended up playing college hockey or was a major factor in making it to the NHL. All I can say is that it definitely altered my life course for-sure!
The most recent life altering event that happened to my wife and I, was back in 2018 and things got off the rails in a hurry as you'll hear. I can't tell you the whole story, but can give you the gist of it. Please note, that for the second time in my life, I was genuinely frightened for my family and l's wellbeing as one of our business ventures was close to bankruptcy.
Here's it in a nutshell. My wife and I and the time were basically out of the day to day operations of that particular business. Found out the ship was in shambles, lawyers had to get involved and after several months of hanging on financially by a thread, we resolved the situation without having to go to trial, and ended up selling the entire business (for pennies because we were desperate) but we made it to the other side and survived. We will forever be grateful to our lawyer and his team for resolving the case as quickly as possible. Thanks again Mike and Team!!
The one thing I had to do once this whole thing was set in motion, and I mean the number one thing, was to try to do as many in-person lessons as possible, because all our liquid cash was used to keep the company afloat until the dispute had been resolved. My wife was contributing in so many other ways as well, we just buried our heads in the sand, blocked out as much of the world as we could and focused on reaching that final objective, not being broke!
Once that fiasco was behind us, as I look back, I had been doing in-person lessons heavy for 6 to 7 months. I'd try to get 3-4 lessons on most days during that time, the record for me was 9 and I only accomplished that once and immediately said never again, I was exhausted.
During this hard push, my body showed me a sign, which it often does, letting me know things have gotten off the rails and there needs to be a major adjustment in my day to get some balance back again. I wasn't working out, I was always rushed, so my eating habits were not good to say the least, resulting in me being in constant pain and not very happy. My brain was overloaded constantly with too many inputs, it was like I was swimming upstream and the days were always long and hard to get through.
As I started the process to reconstruct my daily routine, I realized that in order to have a consistent schedule that aligns with all the important things I wanted to include in my 24 hours, I had to make some deletions so I could effectively get everything done each day, have a little more time for family and try to quiet a mind that was on fire all the time.
And finally, here we are, how I accidentally stumbled on what I now call "my day!" I couldn't operate on this schedule when I had kids in the house, because that time of my life had different responsibilities that ate up a lot of my day. Team coaching, lessons and running camps & clinics gobbled up many hours. But now that I'm retired from team or group coaching, don't have the parenting obligations as my wife and I once did, and since I work for myself and am my own boss, I get to make the rules and set my own schedule.
So here's what happened. I had a long day and wasn't able to have a nap that particular afternoon, so I ended up going to bed really early for me, 8:30pm. Normally, I'd shut it down for the day between 11pm and 12am. This night was odd, because it usually takes me a while to wind down, but that night I fell asleep right away and slept hard. But the problem was, I woke up 3 hours later completely wide awake. After wrestling around with my pillows and blankets for about 20 minutes, I decided to just get up and go to the gym, get something accomplished and hopefully it will tire me out so I could sleep from like 3-9am and get back on track.
So that's what I did, I got up, packed up my gym bag, headed out and arrived at the gym around 12:30am. Got my workout in, showered up and headed home. My original plan of tiring myself out didn't work, as when I arrived home, I was still amped up. I had 3 choices at that moment when it was 3am, force myself to go to bed when I wasn't tired, watch something on Netflix's, or try to get some work done which usually involves working on a script for a video at the time, or recording a chunk of a video. Now it would be working on a podcast script or recording a portion of an episode.
I was pretty motivated that early morning, so I chose to get some work done and started. The next thing I realized was that 90 minutes had just disappeared and I was yawning constantly and my eyelids were getting heavy.
An hour and a half of solid progress and off to bed I went around 4:30am-ish.
Once I crawled in for a recharge, I had lessons starting at 11am, so I set my alarm for 9:30am, just over 3 hours of napitations and I slept hard again. Woke up, had something to eat, answered a few emails and texts, had my 2 lessons at 11am and 12pm, responded to a few more texts, return calls, and emails and went down for another quick nap around 1:30pm before my late afternoon lessons began, as I was getting sleepy again.
Woke up at 3pm, washed the dishes, vacuumed part of the main level of our house, had my 4pm and 5pm lesson, wrapped up the work day, rolled out for 15 minutes, settled into my easy chair while the wife and I vegged out on some Netflix. For some reason, my thoughts weren't on what we were watching, but rather on the day I just completed.
I felt great about everything I accomplished in the last 24 hours and the next thing that popped into my head was, let's try to repeat it again. To my wife's surprise, once 8:30pm rolled around, I told her that I just had one of the most productive days I've ever had and I'm going to try to duplicate it tomorrow. So off to bed I went and that's been my schedule now for 5 years and counting.
I actually enjoy the quietness of the night. Rarely is anyone at the gym. I now do my grocery shopping around 3am and man is that a quick process when only a handful of people are in the store, most are workers stocking the shelves. It's also amazing how much work you can get accomplished when you have zero disruptions because the rest of the world is still sleeping.
It wasn't my intention to create a podcast of how I go through my day, but now all you players I train can quit bugging me to this episode, because it's done now and I hope you liked it. Is there a conclusion to this story, a lesson to be learned or some new cutting edge strategy you can apply to your life today and things will automatically change for the better?
I guess I don't know, but would respond like this. I'm 55 years old, married and have 2 boys that are in the 20's. Over the years my schedule has changed. When the kids were young, once my wife and boys went down for the night, I'd spend 2-3 hours working on whatever at the time going to bed somewhere around 2-3am. Then as they got older, it shifted to going to bed earlier, but now getting up earlier. There were a number of years where I was getting up at 4am.
My schedule changed and evolved over the years based on what was going on in my life at the time. All I can say is that some may view my current daily schedule as weird or extreme, that's ok, because all I know is it works for me and I've never felt better or get more done in a day than I do right now.
Be flexible, never get too set in your ways and know that whatever your normal is today, the odds are pretty good, that at some point it's going to change and then change again, and again and again!! At least that's how it's worked for me so far over the years.
Well that concludes another episode of the hockey journey podcast.  I can’t thank you enough for stopping by and listening. I hope you enjoyed hearing about my extreme daily schedule. If you think there’s someone in your circle of family and friends that might like this episode as well, please share it with just one person, it will really help me in growing this hockey community.
Again, I appreciate you being here, don’t forget to subscribe, rate or submit a review, I hope to see you back here soon, and do me a favor, make someone close to you smile today. All the best my friends!!
