Pro Tips with Olaf Kolzig: Focus Lessons that Helped Turn My Career Around

How focused are you right now? How about now? Did you glance away from this article to a text, or another open tab, or out a window? You’re back now, I hope.

Losing and regaining focus is something humans do constantly.

I lost focus partway through writing the preceding sentence. For most of us, true, locked-in focus for 60 minutes is not possible. But don’t take it from me. Take it from some guy named Olaf Kolzig, who focused through more than 700 NHL games.

“Sixty minutes is a long time to keep your focus. And there’s opportunities to kind of just let your thoughts linger a little bit. But then once the opposition hits a certain point on the ice, then it’s like, ‘Okay, re-engage.’ You know? We’re all human, it’s human nature to kind of just drift off,” Kolzig said during an in-depth interview on Episode 299 of the InGoal Radio Podcast. “Some guys have to work at it harder than other guys, but we’re all victims of it at some point.”