The Stronger Revolution

Through our Podcast, the Stronger Revolution, we try to maximize our life by advancing 1% everyday. However, there are unforeseen forces at work that are holding us back. Throughout our life, various experiences shape who we are, and who we will become. These experiences form our personalities, our morality, and our beliefs.

A belief is an acceptance that a statement is true or something exists. Beliefs may be rooted in fact, but are often not. Because beliefs are often based on assumptions we make about reality, they can be limiting. Our beliefs can hold us back and prevent us from advancing 1% every day.

The only way we can overcome limiting beliefs is by recognizing and accepting that they exist. With that new awareness, we can take steps to change them. It is very hard to recognize limiting beliefs in ourselves. Thus, we need to be open enough to accept when others bring them to our attention. Here are three common limiting beliefs you may be suffering from:

1. What Does Kill You Makes You Weaker: This is rooted in the belief that life should be easy. Humans are creatures of comfort. We don’t like it when things are hard. So, we often take the easy route and complain when life seems harder than we expected. However, we don’t grow when life is easy. We only grow through adversity.
2. Always Trust Your Feelings: Feelings are simply our response to a situation. Feelings are often irrational and spontaneous. We cannot measure feelings and they are easily influenced and changed. The way you feel about a situation is not the reality of that situation. Question your feelings and put them to the test.
3. Life is a Battle Between Good and Evil People: We love to place labels on people. We like that person, we don’t like that person. That person is good and moral. That person is evil. The problem is that we often take one characteristic about a person and use that as their permanent label. We then gravitate only toward people who share our same opinions and beliefs. This has a snowball effect of increasing our limitations. Instead, we should focus on the good in people and avoid initial judgments of others based on our feelings (see #2 about feelings).

Take some time to reflect on these limiting beliefs and pay attention to your life each day. Do you suffer from these beliefs? If so, awareness is the first step to change. For more information about this topic, check out our podcast episode.

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The great Stoic philosopher, Seneca, once said, “Leisure without study is death – a tomb for the living person.” Readers widely accept the quote as a reminder that time off from your busy life should be an active pursuit, not an idle one. Vacation, in other words, isn’t a time to sit on the beach and turn off your brain. On the contrary, you should be observing the world around you, taking it all in, and working for a better understanding of the universe.

We like to reflect on this quote as a reminder to do everything in life with intention, even take a vacation. You need a purpose behind your decisions and actions. When we are talking about getting away in relation to the aggregation of marginal gains, we are intending to cause separation from our regular life. We need an opportunity to turn off our regular life and focus on something else. Only then can we recharge our minds to come back stronger.

The first problem we have to solve is figuring out when we need to get away. For those with widely varying work schedules, this can be easy. An accountant, for example, will be busier between January and April 15th than at any other time of the year. A school teacher will be busiest between August and May or June. These individuals can definitively say, “Phew, I’m glad that busy time is over, I need a break.”

For the rest of us, with steady flows of work, this isn’t so easy. Even the most self-reflective among us will have a hard time feeling like we need to get away to recharge. This is because the fogginess that needs to be cleared comes on slowly. We don’t realize that we are not firing on all cylinders and some things are irritating us more than they should. We don’t see the rut we are in until we can pull ourselves away.

The second problem we have to solve is figuring out how long we need to get away. As long as you are focused on your regular life, you aren’t away for long enough. Thus, we suggest at least two days. We’ve found that one day off isn’t enough because we still think about what is going to happen when we return the next day. However, with two days, you can completely separate yourself the first day. If you can add more days, even better.

It is almost impossible to duplicate the full recharge you need without getting away. It doesn’t matter how much you love your job or your life. You need a change of scenery. You need to fully unplug. It may seem unnecessary or daunting, but it’s worth it on the other side, we promise.

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Failure can be a devastating thing in our life. We prepare and prepare for something coming up in the future only to have it turn out different than we planned. Failure can cause set backs, delays, or cause us to give up all together.

But, what if there was another way to look at failure. Instead of approaching life with a pass/fail attitude, what if we looked at life as a constant opportunity to grow? In her book Mindset, author Carol Dweck distinguishes these two outlooks as a fixed vs growth mindset. The fixed mindset has the pass/fail outlook. The growth mindset looks at all part of life as an opportunity to learn and grow.

To help define the fixed mindset, Dweck uses a series of examples throughout the book. Individuals with the fixed mindset assume that you are born with certain traits that will determine your success in life. You are either smart or dumb. You are either strong or weak. Those who are successful in life got there because of luck or because of some advantage you don’t have access to. If you fail, it means you are no good and should move on to something else.

The growth mindset is the exact opposite. Here, you look at someone’s effort and determination as the primary factor of what happens in their life. Someone isn’t successful because they got lucky. Instead, they are successful because they tried hard at every step of the way. You aren’t born smart or dumb, you always have a chance to recognize your weaknesses and work to strengthen them. When it comes to failure, there is no pass or fail. When someone doesn’t go your way, it is an opportunity to learn why and fix it for the future.

To help summarize Dweck’s message, motivational speakers will say things like, “It isn’t a failure if you learned something.” There are practical steps you can take in life to make sure you have a similar mindset when approaching challenges. Instead of playing the blame game when something doesn’t go your way, write down what you learned from the experience. Take responsibility for the outcome and make sure you grow better from it. Effort over everything. That is the way you succeed.

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Responsibility is an interesting concept. People love to talk about taking responsibility and passing responsibility. Sometimes, people use it as a badge of honor, “It was my responsibility, not yours.” There are a few definitions for responsibility, but the one we like best is: the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something.

From the time you are capable of making decisions, almost everything that happens in your life is the result of a decision you made. Because of this fact, almost everything that happens in your life is your responsibility. Let that statement set in for a moment. Everything that happens to you today is a result of a previous decision you made. Once you see this paradigm shift, you can start moving forward.

In the book “Extreme Ownership,” authors Jacko Willink and Leif Babin use military experience as examples of taking responsibility in business. According to the authors, as a leader, you are responsible for everything that happens below you. It doesn’t matter where you are in the corporate structure. If you have people working below you, you are ultimately responsible for everything they do. If something goes well, you managed them well. But, if something goes wrong, it is because you didn’t communicate something properly. Failure to take responsibility can stop a business from progressing and growing. This is true regardless of where the kink is in the chain of command.

These same principles apply to you in your regular life. If you get caught in traffic on the way home, it isn’t because someone else messed up. To the contrary, you chose to leave when you did and take that path home. You are responsible for being caught in traffic. If you have a fight with your spouse, it isn’t because your spouse necessarily did something wrong. You chose to be in that relationship. You chose to be in that situation and the words you used. Let’s assume for a second that your business failed. If you are honest with yourself, you will be able to look back and see the decision you made that led to its demise. When you get in trouble at work, you are probably the person to blame.

Those who blame others go through life as the victim. When the victim mentality controls you, you cannot progress. You have to stop pointing fingers at others. Look at what is happening to you today. Trace the timeline back to the decisions you made. Analyze those decisions and use that to guide your decision in the future. Once you take full responsibility to everything that happens in your life, then you can move forward and progress to bigger and better things.

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In the final installment of our series on Mental Toughness, we are going to talk about confidence. If you’ve followed this series on Mental Toughness, hopefully you have implement some of the practices we’ve talked about. If so, you should find yourself feeling more confidence than ever. But, what is confidence? How do we define it when it comes to Mental Toughness?

Confidence is different than ego or arrogance. Confidence is looking like you know what you are doing because you have done it before in the past. Ego or arrogance is trying to look like you know what you are doing so no one realizes you’ve never done it before.

When we are confident, we are mentally tough. Confidence allows us to understand the circumstances and respond thoughtfully to the situation. If you recall from earlier installments in this series, that is the definition we are using for mental toughness.

To gain confidence, we have to gain experience. That means exposing ourselves to as many situations as possible. We cannot shy away from what we don’t know out of fear. Check out our post on Fear. If we avoid a situation, we can’t learn from it. Your ego tells you that you already know something, so you don’t need to do “that.” Destroy your ego, embrace every possible situation and reflect on what you learned. Sure, you may screw up. However, you will learn what not to do next time. Then, when you encounter the same situation again in the future, you can do so with confidence because your experience tells you what to do.

So, get out in the World and accept anything that comes your way. The more you experience, the more confident you will be.

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If you’ve been following along with our posts on mental toughness, you are ready to start to use your mental toughness to overcome fear. You’ve developed the self-awareness you need to establish your values, and you’ve started to develop an unshakable happiness. So, let’s start removing fear from your life.

First, understand that fear is a projection of something you predict may happen in the future. It is impossible to be afraid of something in the present. Fear is always something you think will happen. Therefore, a quick way to start fighting against fear is to realize you have no control over the future, and humans are terrible at predicting the future.

When we are relating fear to mental toughness, we are trying to control our thoughts. This will allow us to remain in control at any given moment, regardless of the circumstances. There are four ways you can develop mental toughness to control you fear:

1. A Reserve Clause – When you decide to take action on anything, always reserve a small part of your expectation that you might not succeed. Again, you have no control over the future. Really, you have no control over the outcome of anything. Manage your expectations and be realistic. Do you best and accept that anything can happen outside of your control.
2. Premeditate on Adversity – If you approach every situation with a reverse clause, then you are accepting that anything can happen. That means you can anticipate a whole range of setbacks that could happen. If you premeditate on potential adversity, you can essentially build emotion resilience by realizing most setbacks are no big deal. You can also develop contingency plans.
3. Emotion Habituation – this are big words that basically mean desensitizing yourself to your fears. The more you expose yourself to what you fear, the less you will fear it. You can actually expose yourself. Or, you can do so in your imagination. The goal is to expose yourself until you no longer feel fear.
4. The Inner Citadel – Accept that nothing is inherently good or bad. You judge situations as good or bad. The more you accept this, the more you can retreat into your head to regain control. Everything is changing constantly. Your current situation will also change. What is happening right now cannot influence you emotions. Emotions arise from within your mind as you judge the situation. Build the wall and protect your impressions.

A final practice that we like to engage in to help manage fear is journaling. If you are feeling particularly fearful over an upcoming situation, journal about that fear. Write down what you think is going to happen. Then, after the event has come and gone, go back to your journal. Did it happen as you predicted. Chances are it did not. The more you do this, the more you will realize fears are all in your head.

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In this post, we are continuing our pursuit of mental toughness. As a reminder, mental toughness is not about how physically strong you are. You are mentally toughness when you remain in control regardless of the situation surrounding you.

In our first installment, we talked about developing self awareness. Next, we talked about defining the neutral set of values that guide your decisions in life. In our last installment, we started applying those values to situations we encounter day-to-day. In other words, mental toughness requires preparation.

A common misconception is the mentally tough people never have fun, never cut loose, and are boring. Fortunately, that isn’t true at all. In fact, mentally tough people have a calm authentic happiness about them. It’s like they are constantly fulfilled in all that they do. But, how is this possible?

For starters, when we are talking about happiness associated with being mentally tough, we aren’t talking about experiencing super highs and super lows. That impulsive happiness is like getting angry when you get caught in traffic on your way home from work. We are not mentally tough when we have big swings in mood and emotion.

Instead, we are talking about a long lasting happiness that we choose to experience. This kind of happiness has two primary charateristics:

First, it is a happiness that is a by-product of living through our values. It isn’t a goal in life. Second, it is an active happiness. This is in contrast to mere pleasure that happens to us like eating, drinking alcohol, or indulging in things like sex.

So, how does happiness really fit with mental toughness? Mental toughness is living life under control. You do this by defining your values. Living through your values creates long term happiness in your life. Thus, being mentally tough also means having an unflappable happiness.

Here are three steps you can take to increase your unshakable happiness while you develop your mental toughness:

1. Plan activities that are consistent with your values. Maybe this means finding ways to volunteer your time.
2. Spend time contemplating and emulating the qualities you admire in other people. We don’t admire empty qualities in other, like someone’s ability to manipulate others. The qualities we admire are wholesome and genuine.
3. Practice gratitude for EVERYTHING you have. A good rule of thumb, if you can imagine someone who wants what you have or what you get to do, be grateful for it. It is impossible to be grateful and angry at the same time.

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It is time for the third installment of developing mental toughness. For a quick review, we are working on your ability to maintain your composure and control regardless of the situation in front of you. We started with examining ourselves to develop self-awareness. Next, we wrote down specific values about each of these role models that we want to exhibit in ourselves. Finally, we started applying those values to small situations in our life to practice being self-aware in those situations that might cause us stress.

The more you analyze situations from the standpoint of how you think your role model would handle it, the more you start to look at situations with those values. Practicing values by imagining how a role model would do it is called Modeling. The more you model, the more those values become your own. A great way to know that you are living through your values is when someone else starts to use you as a role model.

To help make values your own, you need to combine modeling with self-awareness. Adopting a system of preparing, acting, and reviewing will make this most effective in your life. This is the “learning cycle.”

Each morning, you need to prepare for the day ahead. There is no right way to do this as long as you are taking the time to do it. First, take a moment to layout the coming day. What meetings will you have, will you be traveling, do you have phone calls scheduled all morning? What you are doing is looking for upcoming situations that may not be “easy.”

Next, analyze that upcoming situation and what you think is going to make that situation hard. Apply your values to that situation and determine how you want to respond. Prepare for the worst, prepare for the best, and prepare for everything in between.

As you go through your day, reflect back on your morning preparation. Recall how you planned to respond with your guiding values. Try to remain aware of yourself during each situation you encounter during the day.

The more you practice, you will start to keep an eye on your mind throughout the day. Particularly, you will notice your value judgments and watch out for subtle feelings of anger, fear, sadness, or unhealthy desires and bad habits.

At the end of the day, take another moment to reflect on your day. What situations did you prepare for, how did they go, and are you happy with they way you responded?

During this evening mediation, you may want to ask yourself three simple questions:

1. What did you do badly today?
2. What did you do well today?
3. What could you do have done differently?

Remember, mental toughness means you are unflappable. Whether you drive home from work with no issues, you get caught in traffic, or you get a flat tire, you arrive home with the same attitude. It doesn’t matter if your day went as planned, or fell way off track, you move forward like nothing is bothering you.

If you want to develop this kind of outlook and control in your life, you need a series of values that are unbiased in every situation. Then, when you are faced with a stressful situation, you can approach it with a cool mind, always in control, and never reactive.

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In our last post and podcast episode on Mental Toughness, we started to lay out the steps it will take to develop a strong mind. We defined mental toughness as maintaining an even demeanor regardless of the circumstances. This isn’t the same as being able to push hard through a workout, or give 100% in your sports practice. That is physical toughness. Mental toughness is having your business shut down by COVID-19, losing some of your customers, yet maintaining a positive mental outlook despite not knowing when you can reopen your livelihood.

To start developing mental toughness, you need to establish the values you want to drive your actions. These values act as an unbiased determiner of action. Whether you are having an easy time of life, or your world is crumbling around you, acting within your values will keep you on a steady state of moving forward.

In our last post, we suggested that you create a list of role models who exhibit how you want to act. We told you to start imagining these role models see you in your everyday life and offering their opinions on how you should handle certain situations. With that list, follow the following steps:

STEP 1: List the virtues or values exhibited by each of these role models that want to emulate.

STEP 2: Write down how you are going to apply these values to your life. For example, regardless of how busy and/or successful I become, I want to make time to help others like my father has always done.

STEP 3: Start to mentally rehearse how you will act more like your role models or imagine what their advice would be in a given scenario. Start this exercise with small scenarios of little importance and grow from there.

In our next post, and podcast episode, we will cover some practices you can use daily or weekly to enhance the effectiveness of these three steps. It isn’t enough to sit around thinking about values and actions. For a bit, you need to write them out or talk them over with a friend. That way, you have a record of how you wanted to act in a given scenario to compare to how you really acted. When you go through truthful self-reflection, you stand the best chance of growing.

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We are leaving the series on forming better habits and entering a new series on developing mental toughness. This is a topic that has intrigued me for a long time. It seems like such an important trait to develop, especially in light of recent events with COVID-19 flipping most of our lives on their heads. However, developing a system for teaching someone how to develop mental toughness has been elusive in the past.

The first difficulty is defining what I mean by mental toughness. Commonly, what is meant as grit or perseverance is misconstrued as mental toughness. Someone looks at a person who climbed Mt. Everest through really harsh weather conditions and might say, “Wow, that person has so much mental toughness.” Or, we look at someone who completes a great physical challenge and say, “I don’t know how that person had the motivation to keep pushing, they must be so mentally tough.”

However, for our purposes, this isn’t what I mean by mental toughness. For me, those events that I just described demonstrate a lot of physical toughness. Yes, there may be some mental toughness involved, but not necessarily. I define mental toughness as being consistently in control of our thoughts and emotions regardless of the circumstances. Being unflappable from a calm demeanor regardless of how hard or easy life seems. That is the kind of mental toughness I hope to help you develop through this next series.

To start developing mental toughness, you have to develop self-awareness. You have to develop the ability to see yourself, and your thoughts, from a third party prospective. It isn’t enough to be feeling angry. You need to be able to analyze that anger and figure out what is causing it.

Once you develop self-awareness, you can start to analyze your thoughts and emotions. You will learn what triggers your impulses. Additionally, you will learn where you are mentally weak. Once you know where you are weak, you know where to focus your efforts to become stronger.

An easy way to develop some self-awareness is to imagine someone you admire seeing your thought at a particular time. You might think to yourself, “How would I feel right now if my mother was here with me?” You may also imagine this person questioning your emotions in a certain situation like, “Why are you worrying about this? What do you hope to accomplish through worrying about it.”

In future posts, I will talk about more practical exercises you can take to develop mental toughness. For now, start looking at yourself. Pull out a journal and write down how something makes you feel. If a traffic jam today makes you angry, write about it and try to figure out why. You may start to realize that things that seem like a big deal aren’t really a big deal. Congratulations, you are developing mental toughness already.

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