23: Author Ryan Munsey – Awareness Creates Choice

How do you create an unbeatable mind that provides the fortitude, grit, sisu, invictus, and mental toughness to overcome adversity? How do you positively alter your mental state? This is the episode that answers those questions. 

The goal of this episode is to bring awareness on how we make decisions and how we take action and responsibility for our lives in an intentional way.  Self-awareness is something we can develop.  This awareness is what creates choice.

My guest is Ryan Munsey, author of the book, F*ck Your Feelings.  Ryan is an artful scientist who has the drive, curiosity, and compassion to explore the  reason of why some people succeed and others do not.  He is also a high performance consultant, speaker, and host of the podcast, The Better Human Project.  We discuss how to master your mind, accomplish your goals, and become a better human while being rooted in gratitude and lifted by awareness.

Show Notes:

Invictus

Moments – You are writing you’re own eulogy. When you’re gone, People will think and speak of you in the way that you live your life. We have the ability to shape how that conversation goes by the way that we move through the world.  Those moments are a choice.

7:16  Line in the sand – What are you going to do?

15:20  Who are you and what does it mean to be a good human?

18:34  You can control your Attitude and Effort.

19:50  Your life is perfectly designed for the results that you are getting.

23:15  How do you measure success? Hint: It shouldn’t be extrinsic.

Chris Dancy – We don’t know how to measure what we value so we begin to value what we measure.

The Rocking Chair Test – Health, Happiness, Performance

28:00   Can you measure happiness?  Heart Rate Variability

31:18  The 85 year-old Challenge.  Memento Mori

Appreciation not Expectation.

36:00  How do we positively affect our mental states? How the brain makes a decision.

44:20 95% of our decisions are based on how we feel in any given moment.

Feelings – a mental experience of a physiological state.  If we change our physiology we can change our feelings.

46:30  Limbic System – emotional ego driven teenager – feelings – the now

Prefrontal Cortex – the sage. – awareness

58:50  What is the vagus nerve and how does it affect you?

Emotional Resiliency – Bandwith

1:10:35  How to stay relaxed in traffic.

1:12:00  Wim Hof Method

Breathwork – how to stimulate your vagus nerve and why its important to exhale longer than inhale.

Cold Exposure – Stay parasympathetic in an environment that normally makes you sympathetic.

1:19:00 What you can do right now to improve mental resilience and toughness.

Developing grit though: Cold showers – look towards the sky and focus on the breath.

Be kind, be rooted in gratitude turn off defense mechanisms, etc.

Posture – Don’t sit or stand like a victim.

1:39:05 Playing – Don’t be the reason you stop playing.

2:03:08  The 360 sphere – Do not be out of round

Links:

F*ck Your Feelings – By Ryan Munsey