Hero

Have you ever noticed that our favorite stories about mental toughness are the ones in which the protagonist is forced, often tragically, to overcome a situation for which he or she is seemingly unprepared and unequipped? Ever notice that our favorite mentally tough hero has beaten odds even she didn’t believe she could overcome?

When discussing stories of triumph over adversity, I constantly hear people say things like, “I couldn’t do that,” or “I couldn’t handle that.” The truth is you could and you can. We are all capable of much more than we understand. You are as mentally tough as you need to be. Right now, you are capable of mustering as much toughness as you need in any situation. Mental toughness is revealed. It does not need to be built. The only thing blocking you from accessing this mental toughness is your belief in whether it A) already exists, or B) needs to be built.

I used to believe that mental toughness had to be built. I was a big believer in mental toughness training. I spent years of my life earning a Ph.D., writing a 313 page mental toughness training manual, and working my tail off to help people build mental toughness. So what has changed? Why do I now believe mental toughness is revealed and not built? Why have I changed my practice in profound ways in recent years? Some ideas are irrefutable when you apply logic to experience.

On Halloween night 1973, two Michigan State Troopers greeted my mother, hats in hand, to inform her that her husband had just died in a car accident. My mom was devastated. Here she was, 23 years old, a mother of a seven week old baby, and a now she was a widow. She felt like she couldn’t go on, like she’d lost the will to live, the will to parent her newborn. She wondered, “Why did that happen to me? Why my husband? Why didn’t I die instead?” She even wondered at times, much to her own horror and guilt, “If I had to lose someone, wouldn’t it have been easier to lose the baby than my husband? At least we could support each other and rebuild our family together.”

In those moments, it felt like the situation was too much for her and that she didn’t have what it would take to carry on. But then, one day early in her mourning, a thought occurred to her: “I can curl up and die, or I can get on with my life.” Thankfully for me, my mom was capable of choosing to get on with her life. She decided she could rise above the tragedy that occurred and the situations she believed she was up against. The toughness that was in her all along shone through like a light from heaven, and her love created a new world, a world that was unimaginable before tragedy struck.

The personal weight of some tragedies is proof that toughness doesn’t have to be built. It is there when we need it. My mom wasn’t prepared for my dad’s death, and she wasn’t able to build it slowly as she needed it. She needed it revealed in an instant, and it was there for her. To access her toughness, my mom only needed to acknowledge its existence.

For this reason and many others, my mom is my hero. Who is yours?

My guess is that you don’t need to look any further than your own family or friends to find similar examples of someone who beat odds she once believed were insurmountable. If you can’t think of a story off the top of your head, ask around. My guess is you won’t have to look outside your own family. There is a chance you will gain new appreciation for someone close to you, and you might also prove to yourself that you are capable of more than you realized when you woke up today. Mental toughness is yours if you just acknowledge it.

Mental Toughness Reserve

“We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.” – Dale Carnegie

I love this Dale Carnegie quote. It’s a concise and elegant way to state the second key factor in making the play: Be awake to possibilities.

Yesterday I wrote about the potential to realize or actualize greater mental toughness in an instant (read Going to Failure here). Imagine how strong you could be right now if you gave up the notion that mental toughness has to be built and instead adopted a new understanding: Great levels of mental toughness are available to you this instant no matter what you’ve accomplished previously.

This is the essence of being awake to possibility. If you love the way things are going, great, but if you want change, be awake to the possibilities that exist for you right now. One of those possibilities is that you have a mental toughness reserve that you’ve never tapped into. You are stronger than you’ve ever imagined. That isn’t a cliche. It’s true.

Be aware that even when the situations don’t seem right for you, it’s just an illusion. You are incredibly strong and can persevere. You live above those situations and are surrounded by opportunities hiding in plain sight. All it takes to see them is a change in perspective, an awareness that the outside world doesn’t control your vision. Get attuned to seeing those opportunities and making the plays that exist. Do what you can, now. Be aware, be awake, and be alive.

Going to Failure

I am fortunate to have some great bosses, and one of them is Steve Hawley, Principal at Lake Orion High School. Steve and I usually have a few short conversations each day, and in addition to education, some of the most frequently touched upon topics are sports and fitness. In particular, we often turn to a topic near and dear to each of us: Middle-aged men’s fitness (insert canned laughter).

The other day, Steve mentioned that he recently read an article on the importance of going to failure (doing repetitions until you cannot do anymore) during resistance training. Naturally, I decided to incorporate failure into my next workout. I started with pushups (because it is a relatively safe way to get to failure), and here is what I noticed:

It wasn’t as easy to get to failure as I imagined (even not being in great shape). It took a great effort, yet as soon as I reached failure and stopped, I realized I had more to give. In other words, rather than reaching my true failure point, I simply gave up. It wasn’t that I could not do any more pushups. I simply would not do any more.

Two days later I gave it another shot. This time, I realized I had more to give, and I gave it. Yet something tells me that even though I thought I got to failure, I still probably had more to give.

Now, from the outside, it appears as if I am training mental toughness, but I doubt this is what is happening. What I am really doing is realizing mental toughness. I’m not training mental toughness as much as I realizing it through the medium of pushups. Experience provides the opportunity to realize what I have inside, but it is an illusion that the experience is the actual trainer.

Because we can’t separate ourselves from time and experience, mental toughness appears to be built, but in reality it is actualized or realized more than it is built. I happen to believe that if we are being honest, this is the only explanation that makes sense. Not only does my understanding of my experience with the pushups help illustrate this for me, daily life is filled with countless examples of mental toughness that is actualized without prior training.

Think about parenting or persevering after the unexpected death of a loved one. I think we can all agree that within an individual these require new levels or dimensions of mental toughness. People persevere through these situations anew every day, and where is the training for them? It doesn’t exist, and yet on a daily basis people display incredible untrained toughness and persevere.

It’s my hope that you realize that you do not need to build mental toughness before you actualize it or realize it in your life. It is available to you right now, and that is an incredibly valuable insight that requires no training or skill.

Everything You Need

Even if I don’t know you, I can say for sure that if you are reading this you have always had everything you needed. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying your life has lacked tragedy, pain, or loss. Those are for you to define, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all experienced some level of hardship.

What I am suggesting is the simple idea that even when things didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you trudged on. You persisted. You had as much toughness as you needed to survive. Your presence with me is proof of that.

I often point this out to my clients. Typically, it seems as if they have never considered this fact before. They usually show one of two responses.

The first is that they challenge my statement. “No, I didn’t always have everything I needed. Such and such didn’t turn out the way I wanted.”

My response to their challenge usually goes like this.

“Nobody is guaranteed success or a smooth ride, and I am sure you have not always gotten what you wanted. You have seen difficulties in your past, and yet you survived. You have always had everything you needed to keep going.” This doesn’t always sink in at the moment, but perhaps a seed is planted that will bloom into understanding someday.

The other reaction is that they nod or break into a smile. They realize that although they have experienced what seem like failures, they absolutely had everything they needed to move on to new experiences, new challenges, new plays to be made. It’s amazing how resilient people become after this idea is understood.

My thought for you today is this: What will you do, what plays will you attempt to make, if you know that you have everything you need right now? Best wishes on making those plays.

Open Expectations

In yesterday’s post about grit, I mentioned that a way to increase grit is to be aware that the conditions/situations of the world have no control over you. One great way to do this is to remind yourself that outcomes have no control over you. This is true whether outcomes are positive or negative. To point yourself in this direction, see if you can have open expectations.

Open expectations are neither high goals nor low goals. In a way, they are a sort of anti-goal that should help create a mindset for all types of possibilities.

Open expectations set no ceiling nor floor for what can happen. It’s an expectation that, “Anything can happen, and I can handle it all.”

With open expectations, I have found in myself and my clients the following:

No fear or anxiety when high performance occurs. There is no glass ceiling. Performance can soar without the restriction of high expectations. In essence, performance can surpass one’s wildest dreams.
An opponent playing well doesn’t phase us because we know it has no bearing on our own mindset and emotions. Their playing well was within our expectations all along.
The unexpected does not phase us. We were completely open to anything and everything happening. However, the more possibility we can imagine, the more we can prepare for, and the smaller the unexpected world becomes.
We are filled with supreme confidence that comes from an understanding that we are not our outcomes nor our performances. These are temporary and fleeting, and we are greater than that. We always have an opportunity to make new plays. We can handle anything that comes our way.

When I start explaining this idea, some people jump to the conclusion that I am suggesting abandoning high expectations or goals of any type. This is not the case.

If you want to set goals or have expectations, do it. After all, I’m a proponent that we don’t control our thinking (though I do believe we influence it, thinking is sort of like paddling a canoe in a river, we have some influence, but so does the river, which limits and influences us to some extent), so how could I suggest you abandon a goal that has occurred to you. It may not be possible for you to unsee the goal once it is clear in your mind. I might just suggest that you not become so attached to the goal that you ascribe it some magical power to make you happy. The world doesn’t work this way, so I like to point in the direction of clarity.

Also, understand that having high expectations does not mean you will reach them, just as having doubts doesn’t mean you won’t reach them. Having doubts and high expectations are states of mind, not objective indicators about what is possible. Understand that your thoughts create your experience of the world and all the possibilities it entails. If you want to have high expectations and find it possible to imagine, by all means, do it. I would simply point out two other things: 1) It might also help to have open expectations about what could be possible in both a negative and positive direction. 2) Both doubts and confidence are normal and temporary. If you like confidence, try to steer in that direction when you can.

I hope you give open expectations a try. I hope you find, as I have, that it is a tremendous mindset for allowing our inner fire to burn brightly.

Grit: A Different Label for Rising and Shining

Grit seems to be all the rage these days. It’s a popular word, and it is – and always has been – an important concept. Call it grit, perseverance, tenacity, stick-to-it-iveness, whatever you want, it’s good to have. So let’s think about it more.

Some folks think grit is a characteristic some people have and others don’t. I don’t think that’s accurate. To be sure, some of us show grit more often than others, but that doesn’t mean there is a population of people who have no grit. More than likely, we all fluctuate in our own understanding of our personal grit, and some people simply think in ways that keep their natural grit hidden or covered up.

If you think about it, grit may be an aptly named but misleading term. Grit is a term we apply to people who excel through all of life’s dirt and grime. So on one hand, it certainly appears aptly named, at least for onlookers gazing at gritty individuals.

To the individual, grit often appears very different. Someone who is gritty has become aware of illusions of control and resists them (see Be Aware for more on illusions of control). They have begun to see that the outside world of circumstances has no power over them, and they understand they are free to think and feel as they can, as they feel they must. In essence, they are shining with their inner brilliance and fire despite the appearance of what we call the dirt and grime and life. When we realize the dirt and grime is just a filter, a label if you will, created by one’s own belief system, we are free to rise and shine.

The gritty individual appears to rise above the circumstances of her life. The truth is, we all live above the circumstances of our lives. Only some of us realize it.

There is one sure way to have more grit, persistence, and mental toughness in your life: Be aware that the conditions/situations of the world have no control over you.

To put it another way, nothing outside of us can make us think or feel any certain way. We think and feel certain ways about things. We project our mindsets (and the thoughts churning within them) onto the world in front of us, and this creates our experience of the world. The more we realize this process is free from external control, the more freedom we gain. The more freedom we gain, the possibility opens up to us.

I want you to imagine for a moment that the dirt and grime of the world is not controlling you. Sure, you can feel badly about it. There’s no blame to be cast your direction for feeling down, sad, anger, or fearful, but never lose sight of the fact that you are free to evolve when you are ready. When you realize you are free to do so, when you realize you live above those situations, you will naturally rise and live a life of greater possibility (see Be Awake for more on possibility). You may also see that despite negative feelings and thoughts, you need not act in a negative way, and indeed you may realize you are quite capable of greatness even when not feeling your best.

So my question to you is: What will you do when you awaken to your freedom and possibility? What plays will you make with your newfound sense of grit, or as I like to call it: tenacity, perseverance, mental toughness, shining, brilliance?

As you make plays today, please share with me if you like. Use #madetheplay as your hashtag.

As always, thanks for reading, and I greatly appreciate all your shares and spreading the message.