Have you ever been driving down the interstate when it occurred to you that a sharp turn of the steering wheel in either direction would send you and your cargo flipping to an early grave? Not a pleasant thought, but it is surprisingly common.

We all have these moments of recognition where we are reminded and possibly frightened by the immense power we hold. Perhaps you’ve had similar thoughts when holding a newborn or a ladder for a friend. For most people, these thoughts serve as a useful reminder about the focus required for dangerous tasks and are quickly replaced by hundreds of more useful and pleasant thoughts. Yet, for me, it was not always that way.

I had become convinced that just because I had thought it could come true. At the time I could be overwhelmed by a momentary impulse that ruined my life. This then would prompt an internal battle to prove that the subject of my terror could never happen. And with each of these episodes my sense of confidence about the ability to override a destructive impulse diminished.

On one occasion while driving from Fort Worth to St. Louis to see my parents for Thanksgiving, I became so terrified that I would lose control that I pulled over at a rest stop and walked until I had the confidence to get back in the car. The rest of the drive I coached myself home like Maverick talking to Cougar at the beginning of Top Gun.

When I was 19, I developed a form of OCD called pure O. My fears grew increasingly bizarre and irrational, far beyond what any logical person would dream possible, until they eventually encompassed every area of my life. It was called pure O, but the brand of my particular form of neurosis was completely arbitrary.

This was a manifestation of anxiety that developed as a consequence of adopting norms that went against my most fundamental needs. Having no concept of how to train my mind or understand my emotions, I grew a self-destructive pattern of response to anxiety that fed itself with each of my attempts to explain it away.

While I hid it well, anxiety consumed every experience. Doubt grew as I wrestled with myself in an attempt to force my mind into submission. Over the next few years, I’d pull my way out of anxiety by channeling that obsessive mind towards a study of psychology, philosophy, exercise physiology, nutrition, meditation, history, and the human experience.

I began eating better, exercising for health, and practicing mental training techniques that radically shifted my perceptions, expectations, and responses to the world around me.

As challenging as the experience with anxiety was, it proved to be the most instructive trial of my life. By funneling my energy into a passion for self-development I formed a balanced, interconnected understanding of self-mastery and the human needs. And oh, how misunderstood these needs are.

Treating Symptoms Versus Treating Causes

Today, experiences like mine are more common than you’d think. In fact, when I wrote a more detailed account of my experience I was shocked by how many people reached out to say they’d been living with similar issues. We all have something calling us to self-development.

Even if it isn’t anxiety, it is depression, being overweight, a bad temper, an unsatisfying relationship, or, more likely, a combination of many factors. Yet, our schools gave us no context to train the one thing that really matters in a changing world: ourselves. With no context for self-development, the normal route for creating change tends to follow a failed pattern.

“I’m overweight and unhappy. I’ll start this diet and sign up for a brutal one-hour boot camp class three days a week.” But there is more at play than just the body. The mental and emotional realms are equally responsible for your current state.

Even more, that calorie-counting diet sucks and, having very little background in training, the boot camp is far beyond what you will actually be willing to stick to. With no understanding of the principles behind these programs, the changes will only be temporary. These efforts are doomed before they even begin.

It is well documented that technology has allowed us to let our bodies go, but it is now promoting the loss of mental capacity and emotional intelligence that are equally essential to any of our goals. The information economy depends on marketers using the latest neuroscience to hack your subconscious and keep you scrolling.

Incessant advertising and pop-culture compound to create a culture obsessed with avoiding fears in favor of comfort and seeking possessions or “likes” to fix all internal strife. Our minds are programmed to focus on what is wrong, where we are slighted, and what material wants we “need” to improve our situation. All the cliches about how to live best are still common, but they have no bearing on the patterns that drive most people’s thoughts and actions.

With the development of the smartphone and social media, our mental and emotional stability have both been stretched to the max. Our attention is constantly pulled to a million distractions. There is always the ping of a work email and the demand for more pageantry and self-promotion to keep up with the Joneses.

The ability to converse and connect has, ironically, been shattered by social platforms that feed confirmation bias all the while compiling more data to make their advertisements even more irresistible to your specific psyche.

While training the body will assist in inspiring learning and creating a change in emotions, now more than ever, this is not enough. Furthermore, we are less likely to persist in our efforts to train the body if we don’t account for the mind and emotions too. For sustainable success, we need to do more and do less.

A Broader Approach to Training

Our environment is engineered to reduce your productivity and increase your impulsivity. It is engineered to create impulse, not fulfillment. More than ever, our training can’t be reserved for just the body. In fact, physical training is far less likely to stick if it doesn’t include mental and emotional training as well. These three things must be linked.

Amid this world, most people will feel a sense of dissatisfaction, finding life isn’t what they wanted and so they are told to go workout for an hour a day. There are a couple of problems with this, however:

1. An hour a day of what and why an hour? For most people that’s really too much to start with.
2. The body is a portal to training the other things in your life, but you should also be training the mind and emotion or none of the changes are likely to stick.

We have to train mind, body, and emotion. Societies have always known this but we lost it in the pursuit of pleasure and comfort. Now more than ever this is the case because transformative benchmark challenges and rites of passage are not typical in our development.

Now more than ever we need physical, mental, and emotional training because an industry exists hell-bent on manipulating our emotions and pulling us into sedentary entertainments that preclude the use of mind and body. We’re allowing new technology to fill the needs our mind and bodies once filled and this, more than anything, is crippling our emotional well-being.

At IHD, we’ve long professed the power of three core habits—physical exercise, nourishing self-education, along with gratitude and meditation. These present a daily dose of training in mind, body, and emotion. But as nice as this sounds, the devil is in the details. How do you implement this approach?

In an attempt to improve your life, you could quickly overwhelm yourself spending hours each day going through every life hack of the successful all the while wondering if you’re doing it right. I picture a life-hacking junkie tweaking out in the corner of a room as they try to rush through more affirmations and calm themselves with more essential oils.

It is so easy to get overwhelmed by the scope of our goals or the immense number of ways we could go about trying to improve. The paradox of our immense number of choices is that this abundance of options has actually been shown to make us less likely to do anything. Paralysis by infinite analysis.

Train Your Body, Mind, and Emotion

In an effort to simplify this process and help you create change that can actually stick, Justin Lind and I have created the 30×30 Challenge. It is a clear, stress-free program for daily training in mind, body, and emotion.

There is nothing to plan or research and the steps give room for expansion, but won’t make you bite off more than you can chew. All you have to do each day is turn on the video and follow along as we lead you through 30-minutes of transformative self-development that progress over 30 days to hardwire willpower, create empowered perceptions, and stoke a personal sense of purpose to fuel your days.

The power of physical exercise, gratitude, meditation, and nourishing education are well documented. But finding time for all that can be overwhelming. Changing any one behavior is challenging enough, particularly when you are just trying to change one action without accounting for the principles that underlie that behavior.

All training must be supported by mental, physical, and emotional realms. All three are always present, but we typically train one while ignoring the other two. The 30×30 Challenge respects the whole of training and combines each element in a coordinated mutually supportive program where each realm enhances the others. In other words, our program features three core habits, but because of how we’ve structured it, 1+1+1= 5.

The 30×30 Challenge is the challenge that can actually create lifelong change by going to the core understandings that underlie lasting success. The challenge becomes available on September 15th, 2019. You can get on the list for a pre-sale discount now, by heading to the 30×30 Challenge page.

You Can Make The Change

We’ve always known that we have to train the mind, body, and emotion, but it is harder than ever to actually do it. Of course, the difficulty we have getting started is the only evidence of how much more important it is now than ever before.

Make it easy on yourself. Commit to thirty days of 30 minutes and challenge a friend to join. That commitment will kickstart awesome changes.

The post For Best Results Train the Mind, Body, and Emotion appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Recently, I made the transition to a bike commuting lifestyle. While I had often professed a desire to bike to work more often, the modest inconvenience of this deviation usually prompted me to drive. By removing the option for car convenience, I now always bike and am truly happier for it.

My peculiar lifestyle choice has elicited frequent eyebrow raises, perplexingly angry honks from large trucks, and daily question and answer sessions from colleagues mystified by the concept of this particular muscle-fueled transportation. Occasionally I have an interaction like this:

• Colleague: So, you bike to work every day, now?
• Me: Yes.
• Colleague: How far is that?
• Me: About five miles.
• Colleague: Aren’t you cold?
• Me: I bundle up well. The mornings are coldest, but they are truly my favorite part of the day. Usually, within a couple of minutes, I’ve forgotten about the cold and it is just refreshing to be moving outside.
• Colleague: What if it rains?
• Me: I have a waterproof bag with waterproof rain gear in it. I just have to take turns slower.
• Colleague: Man, that’s tough. Very cool. I wish I could do that.

If I only had a nickel for every time I heard variations of the “I wish I could do that” sentiment. Like most committed to a healthy lifestyle, an active approach is a consistent feature of daily life.

I often get comments when I go to a staff meeting and don’t eat the bite-size Snickers littering the table, or I often get asked when I find time to workout, or when I find time to write or meditate, or any of the other million, seemingly bizarre choices that characterize my life.

Our Limiting Personal Narratives

If you wish you could do something, then do it. Too often we know what actions would solve our problems—we see actions and skills that excite our imaginations and reveal a more dynamic existence and we talk ourselves out of them. We come up with excuses that keep us resigned to the patterns of a less fulfilling life:

• I wish I could do that, but I wasn’t blessed with a lot of willpower.
• I just can’t get out of bed.
• I just crave sugar too much.
• I just hate exercise.
• I just always talk myself out of it.

We make believe that these are fixed traits in order to distract from our real power to become a greater version. Our minds and bodies are malleable.

Two victimhood narratives are most destructive to personal empowerment. First is the belief that motivation precedes action. People wait for something to spark. That is rarely the case. Your psychology follows your physiology.

We must act regardless of mood in order to pull ourselves towards the type of actions that bring meaning and fulfillment. There are many ways to prompt desirable action, but inevitably this will require willpower. Which brings me to the second false narrative.

It is true that willpower is very much like a muscle. It grows stronger over time from consistent use and fatigued through use. Many neglect the obvious ramifications of this reality, that we should train willpower each day, and instead use exhausted willpower to excuse their inability to overcome inertia.

Life is busy and any of life’s inevitable challenges can easily be listed to excuse immediate impulsive desires to skip workouts or indulge that sweet tooth. Your willpower is just fatigued. There isn’t anything you can do, right? If you are honest with yourself you know this isn’t the case.

What if you had to work out or you’d die? You would immediately drop into some burpees.

What if you had to or your children would die? Mountain climbers sound nice. In that moment when you make the decision to skip, what if someone offered $1,000 dollars? You’d probably do it for $20.

In fact, you’d probably just do it if everyone else was. We are social animals quite concerned with being normal. If everyone else was doing it you’d bike to work, eat tilapia and veggies for lunch, hit the gym on the way home, and then re-read that Theodore Roosevelt biography so you were more informed for a lunchtime conversation. You skip these more fruitful pursuits because it is easier to skip and there is plenty of social confirmation telling you that indulgence and convenience are normal.

Willpower Is a Self-fulfilling Prophecy

Too many limit themselves by a self-fulfilling prophecy about the limits of their own willpower. How much more would we be capable of if we thought we had absolute responsibility for ourselves? Willpower may fatigue and natural ability may be a factor, but you’ll be far better off if you pretend both are myths.

The truth is that when it comes to feats of will or modest skill, you almost certainly have all the tools and willpower you need. Anytime you feel a desire to do something, take it as a call to become a greater version.

Rather than operating from a position of helplessness where you search for justifications and self-limitations, search for the way. It exists. These are simple actions. Gun to your head, could you find a way?

Ask yourself: Why can’t I do that? What obstacles did they face and have to overcome? What can I change right now?

We must be realistic. There is a limit to what can be done in the short run. However, with a commitment to self-development and dogged insistence upon the power of your own will you can do miraculous things over the long-term.

“Do not be afraid to exaggerate the role of willpower. It is an exaggeration with a purpose. It leads to a positive self-fulfilling dynamic, and that is all you care about.”

Robert Greene

Adopt Personal Goals and Challenges

For yourself and your children, you must always have personal goals and challenges. We cannot be our best for the world if we don’t commit to self-development first. You’ll never fully optimize your environment, but your actions are still your responsibility.

This is why our children must have expectations and responsibilities. They must grow willpower on a daily basis. Personal responsibility is the only avenue for sustainable health and a fulfilled life.

If you need help making or sustaining any change, try my free e-book, The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery, complete with a personalized self-mastery training plan.

The post I Wish I Could Do That appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, you need to be able to zoom out from those countless nitty-gritty details and see how it all fits together. You need to make sure that all your goals and sub-goals harmonize and align into a single, unified, integrated whole. Without that singular coherence of vision, one goal fights against another, cancelling each other out in an internal battle that steals your power and momentum, and splits you in two. One hand reaches for the kettlebell, and the other for a desperate and undignified fistful of supermarket birthday cake. We’ve all been there, right?

The instinct toward a holistic scheme is the mind’s natural defense against overwhelm. Like all instincts, it arises spontaneously. I remember one evening in high school feeling a sudden, urgent need to zoom out and get a bird’s eye view of everything I was up to. So I drew a pie chart of all the aspects of my training at the time (football, lifting, school, music), and tried to organize it into a whole picture. Later, I found out that this kind of image, or “mandala,” is often used as an image of focus in meditation and psychological work.

There were lots of open spaces and a lack of balance to the whole thing. Of course, I was a young kid in high school, barely knew anything, and didn’t have a lot of options. But it worked as a diagnostic, anyway: those empty spaces started me searching down a path of experimentation that led to many of the more obscure and underground practices that are now central to my training.

What follows is the broad outline of my own current training mandala. It’s just one example of how you can divide up the categories, but it’s what I’ve found most useful, and what I suggest you try as the basis for your own work. I call it the Holy Trinity of Holistic Training, and as you might guess, it’s made of up three parts: physical training, mindset training, and mental toughness training.

Physical Training: The Son

If you’re on this site, you already understand the importance of physical fitness. That said, understanding its importance is just the beginning of the adventure of finding what works best for you. I’ve explored all sorts of ways and means of physical fitness over the years—football, classical weightlifting, judo, jiu jitsu, kettlebells, bodyweight exercises, distance running—before settling into what I’ve found works best for me in terms of staying motivated and getting the results I want.

Everyone has to find their own sweet spot, and that sweet spot may continue to grow and expand over time. In fact, that’s important to keep that spark alive in your love life with your training. This may seem obvious, but it’s really easy to get lost in details and end up sleepwalking your way through a workout routine that you’re only doing because you feel like you have to. Zoom out, take a look at what you’re doing, and decide if it’s exciting and productive for you. If not, experiment. Play around. See what else is out there.

Mindset Training: The Holy Ghost

Everybody knows about the importance of physical training, but mindset training is a little less common. Regardless, it’s an area where you can make enormous gains. Your mindset is your filter for how you see the world and how you see yourself. If your mindset is that you’re insecure and the world is a scary place, then all you experience is yourself as an insecure person, and the world as a scary place. You don’t see the lightning-quick filtering of your perception through your mindset that results in that experience. All you see is the result. Similarly, if your mindset is that you’re confident and the world is a safe and fun place, then you just see yourself as confident, and the world as safe and fun. Mindset is so important and so central to how you experience everything that it’s almost invisible, like water to a fish.

Of course, if you could just wish your way into a new mindset, everyone would do it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, despite what certain “positive thinking” gurus might have you believe. You can train new mindset on a deep level, but like physical training, it works the way it works, and you have to follow certain specific rules and protocols to make it happen. Techniques like hypnosis, self-hypnosis, visualization, and experiments that affect your actual behavior can be very effective, but like with physical training, you have to find the methods that work best for you, and that get you the results you’re looking for.

Mental Toughness Training: The Father

Mental toughness is where the mental and physical come together. The root of both is in your autonomic nervous system, the most primal part of you, which regulates your stress response. If you’re relaxed most of the time, even in stressful situations, then you’re mentally tough. If you’re stressed most of the time, even in relaxed situations, then you’re not. The tendency toward either stress or relaxation expresses itself in body tension, body posture, and body language, helping determine your status as either submissive or dominant in the ever-present, if unconscious, pecking order on planet Earth.

As the meeting place of mind and body, mental toughness is an enormous, powerful lever, and training it is a must. If your nervous system is chronically stressed and tense, it’s not going to let you tinker with your mindset, and it’s going to sap your energy continually, making it hard to motivate, initiate, or sustain physical training. Again, different mental toughness training methods give different results, and some are far more powerful than others. You have to find out what works for you, but unless you’re doing something, you’re missing a massive training opportunity.

Create Your Own Training Mandala

At this point, you can probably see how these three elements work to complement and accelerate each other. More mental toughness means a greater ability to program your own mindset. Better mindset means (among other things) more motivation for physical training. More physical training means (among other things) more forceful energy for everything else, and the whole thing feeds itself and grows exponentially. When all the parts are working as a whole, you end up doing less to accomplish way more.

My own holy trinity is just one example of how this can all shake out. But whatever way you divide up your training, keeping a conscious, coherent meta-perspective is essential.

So here’s my homework for you: Come up with your own training mandala. Draw it out. It can be a pie chart, or just a list, but take the few minutes necessary to scratch out the basic outline right now, and then take a look and ask yourself, how does this all fit together? What’s working? What’s missing? What’s next? Don’t try to answer too quickly. Let it be an open question. Put it up somewhere you can see it, or draw it on a whiteboard. Check in with it every day, even if just for a moment. Just glance at it, let it sink into the deeper parts of your awareness, and let your intuition provide you with insights in the coming days, weeks, and years.

Remember, your training mandala is a living, breathing, dynamic organism, not static thing. It’s also a reminder that no matter how many details have to go into training effectively on any level, you’re never chopping yourself into parts and training them separately for separate ends. You’re always training yourself as a whole, unified, individual being; the center of your own personal solar system.

The post The Holy Trinity of Holistic Training appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Over the past few decades, toughness has gotten a bad rap. It has been caricatured as an archaic, grumpy old man, and correlated with anger, pessimism, and grumblings about “back in my day.” It’s often equated with styles of upbringing that are emotionally distant and lack compassion. More evolved humans, we are told, are kinder, softer, gentler creatures.

Sure, there is a subset of society that gravitates towards Jocko Willink quotes and mud runs. We love to watch Clint Eastwood exude toughness on the screen, even as we eschew it in our personal lives.

But the tools we use to shape our society—schools, P.E., youth sports, parenting, popular psychology, and modern media—promote a very different perspective. We are given a billion messages a day that we are victims of our circumstances, who would flourish if only coddled just right. We just need a better pillow, a better pill to manage our physical or emotional pain, or a better car to underline our social standing. Our problems, we are told, need external solutions, rather than internal fortitude to overcome.

Your Grandma Thinks You’re a Wuss

It is easy in a culture that denigrates toughness and self-reliance to become consumed with self-pity. We have a ready-made list of reasons to justify why we act the way we do, and how our circumstances have stripped us of the capacity to do what we know we should.

Bill Maher astutely noted the underpinnings of this shift:

“Feelings are more important than facts. Sensitivity is more important than truth. … And safety is more important than fun.”

These are the dogmas of modern society. While they are rooted in good intentions, they’ve had terrible repercussions, most notably the elimination of the ingredients necessary to create toughness and resilience. Growth requires discomfort, which means the removal of struggle cripples people’s ability to develop.

Fifty years ago, my grandmother had to sleep outside during the summers because the Texas heat made the indoors a stifling, muggy hot box. Believe me, I love that I can escape indoors to 70° temperatures in the summer, that I can take a warm shower when it’s freezing outside, and that I don’t wake up wondering where I’ll get my next meal. But the cost of all our modern comfort and convenience is that we’ve lost the ability to handle anything that isn’t comfortable or convenient.

The Social Eradication of Toughness

Our inoculation against toughness starts at an early age. Parents, in a misguided attempt to create fairness, instead remove any semblance of challenge from their children’s lives. In the name of safety and protecting tiny egos, we eliminate almost every beneficial element from P.E. We don’t keep score, we hand out trophies to everyone, and we discourage anyone from standing out based on their own merit or effort.

Not only do we aggressively eliminate discomfort, we use pop culture to promote self-pity and blaming others for our problems. Every Disney show seems to feature kids who are mad at their parents, and ends with the insensitive caregivers realizing the error of their ways and apologizing. Last year, Netflix released the extremely popular 13 Reasons Why, in which a girl who committed suicide leaves tapes explaining why it was everyone else’s fault. The subtext of suicide justification and reinforcement of privileged, adolescent self-pity was appalling and irresponsible, especially with teen suicide rates on the rise.

The messages we send kids are training them to feel every perceived slight as an existential crisis, and to expect constant comfort, entertainment, and instant, effortless solutions to their problems.

Toughness Is Required for Health

The costs of this approach are not just that I have to listen to more whining when I teach freshmen to front squat. We have created entire generations of deeply self-interested humans who cannot achieve fulfillment because they are not able to stomach the difficulty necessary to reach it. We are an increasingly feckless, weak-minded population, who believes that they are morally entitled to comforts.

The cost of a culture that devalues toughness is a people unwilling to persist through the physical discomforts of exercise or nutritional discipline, and thus face the far more painful life of poor health and unrealized dreams. The cost of not valuing toughness is an entire population that is not mentally or physically healthy.

By valuing toughness, we have the opportunity to help our youth develop the qualities necessary to overcome future obstacles, rather than training learned helplessness: the expectation that others will solve their problems.

Physical toughness is a prerequisite for health because exercise and proper diet often induce a degree of discomfort. For those unexposed to this, it can be overwhelming, but experience lessens how much you notice it, if at all. Over time, you will grow in your ability to handle and even enjoy discomfort.

Mental toughness precludes selfishness and self-pity and orients you toward solving problems instead. It is not pessimism and lack of empathy for others; on the contrary, it gives the opportunity for empathy. When we stop wallowing in our own problems, we increase our ability to understand and sense the needs and struggles of others.

Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest multi-sport athlete of all time, grew up as a Native American in a time of institutional and social racism that we can’t begin to comprehend today. Representing the United States in the 1912 Olympics, he awoke on competition day to find his shoes had been stolen. Thorpe and his coach found two mismatched shoes in the garbage. He wore an extra sock under one shoe that was a size too big and proceeded to win two gold medals. It would have been perfectly justifiable for him to spend the day bitter and angry about the opportunity that had been stolen from him. Instead, in a most courageous, disciplined manner, he stayed focused on the objective, innovated, adapted, and overcame.

Cultivate Toughness by Owning Discomfort

If you’re going to get tough in the middle of a world that encourages the opposite, you face an uphill battle. The food industry, the media, and the pharmaceutical industry all conspire brilliantly to addict you to increasing comfort. To combat them, you need to practice habits that create greater discipline and opportunities for discomfort.

I believe the key to the development and appropriate use of toughness lies in stoic optimism, as popularized by Ryan Holiday. Stoic philosophy is the belief that every moment develops us, refining us for greater personal realization. It teaches that the resolution of each challenge will only happen if we seize the opportunity presented within it. The great philosopher Seneca sums this up best when he asserts:

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

Our developmental systems should create this mindset. They should make people so mentally resilient that they can focus on objectives despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

Now that I’ve convinced you that toughness is a virtue, what actions can you take? I recommend committing to one of these habits. Once it becomes automatic, consider adding another.

• Work out daily upon waking, even if it’s just mobility work. Consider grease-the-groove-style training for this.
• Intermittent fasting. Start by skipping breakfast, and don’t overeat at the next meal. You will be surprised by how this shifts your perception of hunger.
• Cold showers are a simple way to increase your ability to face discomfort. They also come with a host of side benefits, including reduced muscle soreness.
• Meditate. It is the antidote to the stress and anxiety of our accelerated 21st century lives. A true game changer if added on a daily basis.

The post Rekindle the Lost Virtue of Toughness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

He described it as a psychological edge that has the following seven dimensions: self-confidence, attention control, minimizing negative energy, increasing positive energy, maintaining motivation levels, attitude control, and visual and imagery control.

Loehr’s work was unique and it led to many athletes trying to improve on those seven dimensions. Meanwhile, other researchers attempted to determine whether those were actually the correct dimensions. A long literature has continued adding or subtracting dimensions to the model of mental toughness (I have seen models with three to fourteen different dimensions; in academics these disputes can play out like the Wild West until one model becomes law). Furthermore, no one has yet determined which of those factors are most important to sports performance.

Mental Toughness in the Non-Athletic World

Recent research has been conducted on one of the models to determine whether athletes and non-athletes differ on mental toughness.³ It is an important question as one of the many reasons we have kids participate in sports is that we believe it will give them more mental toughness that they can apply in other areas. Furthermore, mental toughness has mostly been tested in the sporting area. Thus, do the same dimensions apply to mental toughness in other areas (e.g., the business world)?

The researchers asked almost 1,900 adult athletes and non-athletes questions related to mental toughness. The non-athletes had never been involved in sports training or competition. The sample consisted of a balance of men and women and represented 34 different types of sports (team and individual). All the athletes were actively involved in competitive training.

The researchers had two questions:

1. Does the structure of mental toughness stay the same for athletes and non-athletes (i.e., is it made up of the same components)?
2. Is the level the same for the two groups (i.e., does one group have more mental toughness than the other)?

For the first question, the researchers found that athletes and non-athletes did have similar components that make up mental toughness. That is, there did not seem to be any differences in how mental toughness was defined. These components were:

• Hope (I might rename this factor as it seems like it relates to the knowledge that one can handle him- or herself in tough situations; example question: I can think of many ways to get out of a jam)
• Optimism (example question: In uncertain times, I usually expect the best)
• Resilience (example question: I do not dwell on things that I can’t do anything about)
• Perseverance (example question: I am often so determined that I continue working long after other people have given up)

Perseverance and hope (belief in the ability to get out of trouble) seemed to be the most important factors in determining a person’s mental toughness.

As for the question as to whether athletes and non-athletes differ on the amount of mental toughness, the researchers found a big difference – with athletes having much greater amounts of mental toughness. That is, athletes had about five times more mental toughness than non-athletes (my rough conversion of their effect size to an odds ratio). This effect is very large and says a great deal about mental toughness in athletes.

What We Can Learn From This Study

One potential issue with this study is that athletes were asked questions about their mental toughness. Completing a questionnaire is much different than being in the middle of a stressful competition. Athletes may not be the best judge of their own mental toughness. As Willa Cather said, “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”¹ Filling out a questionnaire in the calm could be different from what happens in the storm.

Furthermore, as mentioned above there is still quite a dispute of what makes up mental toughness. The four areas tested by the researchers were identified in previous research, but there might be constructs that were not measured (e.g., Loehr originally described attention, which is not included in this study).

On the surface, it seems that participating in sports has some effect on mental toughness as there is a strong correlation between the two. However, this correlation does not equal causation as people with more mental toughness might be drawn more to sports.

In an upcoming article, we will examine what factors are thought to lead to more mental toughness and whether it is a characteristic that can be developed. Please feel free to comment below on whether you think it can be developed and what are the most important components of mental toughness.

References:

1. Cather, Willa.. “Song of the Lark.” Radford: Wilder Publications, LLC. 2003.

2. Gould, Daniel, Ken Hodge, Kirsten Peterson, and Linda Petlichkoff. “Psychological Foundations of Coaching: Similarities and Differences Among Intercollegiate Wrestling Coaches.” Sport Psychologist 1 (4). 1987

3. Guillén, Félix, and Sylvain Laborde “Higher-Order Structure of Mental Toughness and the Analysis of Latent Mean Differences between Athletes from 34 Disciplines and Non-Athletes.” Personality and Individual Differences 60 (April): 30–35. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2013.11.019. . 2014.

4. Loehr, James E. “Mental Toughness Training for Sports: Achieving Athletic Excellence.” New York: New American Library. 1986.

Photos courtesy of CrossFit Empirical.

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Setting the Limit

The physical work in the gym is easy for most. It is the psychological aspects of training that most people struggle with. The single greatest area where I see people struggle is in overcoming their self-imposed limitations. Self-imposed limitations are shackles that hold us down and prevent us from achieving our potential. When a person sets a limit, he or she puts a limit on what is achievable. That person will never evolve beyond the arbitrary standard set for him or her. People never evolve beyond their self-imposed standards, even if they are fully capable. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if people regularly set their limits high – but most do the opposite and set their sights far too low.

Limitations and Self Image

Self-imposed limitations are tied to a person’s self image. The lower the self image, the lower the expectations the person has for himself or herself. Until that self image improves, until that person believes he or she will be successful or is capable of more, then he or she will continually underperform no matter what program or diet is followed.

The self-limiters are easy to spot. They say things like, “I’d be happy to have a 400lb deadlift.” Since when is a 400lb deadlift good? Why not aim for a higher standard? They say things like, “My goal is to run a sub-four-hour marathon.” Since when is that an accomplishment? Why not aim for a sub-three? Why not go faster?

Sometimes these self-limiters also make excuses for their lack of success. They will blame a lack of time, lack of equipment, or anything else they can use to explain their poor performance or state of fitness. They’ll also try to diminish another person’s accomplishments by telling themselves the successful person was lucky, or had a better program, or better genetics, or special equipment. They will tell themselves whatever they need in order to stay in the cage they’ve constructed for themselves.

The simple reality is these people will always be spinning their wheels until they adjust their expectations and break free of their limitations. The question is – how do you get rid of your limits? It certainly isn’t easy but there are some strategies that can be employed.

Strategy #1: Adjust Your Standards

The first strategy is to adjust your standards and adjust to whom you compare yourself. Don’t look to your peer group when determining what standards are good. Look to people who are actually good at what they do.

For example, if the best runner in your peer group can do a four-hour marathon and everyone in your peer group has established him as the “runner,” do you think you will ever do much better? Why not look elsewhere for guidance and inspiration in coming up with your standard? Take the Boston Marathon. Over 20,000 people qualify each year. Why can’t you be one of them? 20,000 is a large number. Understand that if so many people can qualify, then it certainly is possible for you to qualify as well. Set your standards higher than your local peer group. Aim higher.

Strategy #2: Use Trickery

The second strategy is to employ some form of trickery. When trying to help a person overcome his or her self-imposed limitations some form of trickery may be the best tool at your disposal. At a recent seminar of ours we had the participants test their deadlift 1RM. One of the members of the group mentioned how he had never been able to deadlift 405lbs. Looking at the gentleman I was shocked that he was not able to lift more than that. He was a large, fit, capable, person. I decided to employ a strategy with him that we have used at Gym Jones in the past with others.

Rather than place the standard 45lb plates on the bar I placed a “random” assortment of ten, fifteen, 25, and 35lb plates on the bar so he lost track of the weight being used. When we got to 405lbs he lifted it with relative ease. I then had him try that same weight using the standard configuration of four 45lb plates per side. Using that bar he failed the lift. It was almost as if it was glued to the ground. There was something about that visual image of four plates per side that was holding him back. There was some limitation he had set for himself associated with that weight.

When I advised the man that the weight on the bar with the assorted plates was actually 405lbs he was shocked. It was quite a learning lesson for him and changed him for the better. The caveat to this strategy is that it is hard to trick yourself so you may need to ask someone for help.

Strategy #3: You Become Who You Hang Around

Surround yourself with people who are better than you. Surround yourself with people who work harder and who have more dedication. Surround yourself with people who inspire you. If you are always surrounded by those you are better than, there will be no motivation to improve and you’ll quickly plateau. You’ll set lower goals for yourself and you’ll find yourself limited. In the long run, it never helps to be the biggest fish in the smallest pond. Find people who challenge you, motivate you, and help push you to become better. You’ll be focused more on keeping up with the group and less on your own limitations.

Regardless of how you overcome your limitations the key is to remember that doing so is an essential part of the process of improvement. And these self-imposed limitations are perhaps the thing that is truly holding you back – not actual limitations. Are you fulfilling your potential? Are you capable of more? Are you a self-limiter? Give it some thought. Chances are you could be better or do more. All of us can.

Photos courtesy of Rob MacDonald.

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