Mental Toughness

Today we start our section on mental toughness. The phrase can mean many things to different people, so let’s start by clarifying what it means to me and the topics we’ll cover over the next few days.

In a nutshell, mental toughness means resilience. It’s an uncompromising march toward your goals, with a refusal to give in to temptation or luck. This is best accomplished by creating habits. Once formed, habits provide consistent daily, forward momentum with no extra effort on your part. Another benefit of habits is a concept popularized by Tony Robbins called “stacking.”

Think back to when you learned how to drive. You had to operate the steering wheel, the gas pedal, the brake, and possibly the clutch. When you encountered an intersection, you had to find and use the turn signals (though some of us have yet to master this).

Over time, these independent actions became “stacked” into one task you now call driving. We can also leverage this same technique in other areas of our life to accomplish our objectives and goals.

That’s mental toughness.

It’s building those stacks so they become “what we do” without thinking about it.

“It’s raining and cold; why are you outside running?”

“I always run on Sundays…”

We’ll begin our section on mental toughness with morning and evening rituals. You’ll learn what they are, see some examples, and learn how to create your own. You’ve already started this process by building a daily routine around reading your ten pages, drinking a gallon of water, sticking to your meal plan, and updating the tracking spreadsheet.

From there, we’ll introduce meditation. Many struggle with this or assume it’s not for them since their goals don’t involve becoming a monk on a secluded mountain. We will break that myth and the myth that meditation means blocking all thoughts from entering your mind.

Goal setting will be our next topic. There is a saying “if you have no destination, any direction will do.” You do have goals, but you may not have articulated them or even thought of them as goals. We’ll define real-world, achievable goals and learn to put them into a context that is meaningful to you. Goals don’t have to be becoming a millionaire, achieving world peace, or becoming president (though if you’re interested, we really could use some solid candidates…)

Next, with our goals in mind, we must acknowledge that there will be obstacles along the way. How we deal with those obstacles ultimately determines our success in achieving our goals. We will talk about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, and I’ve got some really fun challenges to help with that.

Finally, we’ll wrap up the section with a segment on box breathing that helps center and focus you, and for many, it is easier than meditation because it is more structured. We’ll also cover sleeping: how to improve the quality and determine how much is needed.

That’s a lot to cover, and I’m looking forward to it. I hope you are too, but for now, it’s time to focus on our daily tasks. Head to the tracking sheet to mark them as completed once done, and tomorrow we’ll dive into morning and evening rituals.