How to Be Mentally Strong

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1:58Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you want to learn and grow and improve yourself so that you can improve your life, I put out episodes four times a week. So if you want to join this journey, it's absolutely free. I would love for you to join this journey and listen four times a week. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to be mentally tough. Because everybody thinks that they're mentally tough until their entire plan falls apart.

2:31Until their emotions and their fears and their worries hijack their brain. And nothing is working the way that it's supposed to. But that's when most people either shut down, numb out, or start blaming everybody else. But real mental toughness isn't how long you can pretend like you're fine when everything's on fire. It's really how fast you recover when life punches you in the mouth. And you don't build that mental toughness in the easy seasons of your life. You build it in the middle of the storms. When quitting is way easier than fighting through. And when self-doubt and fears are just screaming at you louder than your ambition is.

3:13And so today, I want to talk to you about how to actually become more mentally strong and how to train your emotional recovery system and become somebody who actually grows under pressure and not somebody who crumbles under it. When you look at mental toughness, let's talk about what it is first off, right? I want to get something straight with you. Mental toughness is not about not feeling things. It's not about acting like you don't have feelings or fears or emotions. It's not about shoving your emotions in the closet, locking the door, and then just white knuckling your way through life. It's about building your own internal capacity to sit with discomfort, to make decisions under intense pressure, and to learn how to actually take forward steps even when you're swimming in fears and limiting beliefs.

4:07And so I want to dive into that real mental toughness with you today and talk about how to train it and why it's the opposite of what we've probably been taught. So let's talk about a whole reframe as we dive into it, right? Mental toughness, as we're going to talk about today, is not emotionlessness. It's more than anything else. It's actually almost like a mastery of emotions. It's this emotional fluency. Like if I were to put a visual to it, it's kind of like being a skilled surfer that can ride any wave. And like you don't become a skilled surfer from saying no to the big waves and just staying on the little ones, right?

4:49And that wave that I'm talking about is feelings and emotions and fears and limiting beliefs. It's like, hey, no matter what comes at me, I'm gonna ride this wave. I'm not gonna get bashed underwater and held underwater by it. I'm gonna learn how to ride this wave. And so it's definitely not suppression of emotions. If you suppress or ignore or bulldoze over your emotions long enough, your body will keep the score, literally. Like there was a study in 1997 that was in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by James Pennebaker and found that suppressing your emotions, especially negative emotions, actually increases your physiological stress markers.

5:33So things like elevated heart rate, cortisol levels, and cortisol is your stress hormone, and it actually compromises your immune system as well. And so what does that mean? If you ignore your feelings long enough, it actually makes you weaker and more sick over time. And so mental toughness means emotional regulation. Like, what do I mean by that? Can you name what you're feeling without judgment? Like, can you stay in your body while feeling the discomfort rising inside of you? Can you learn to pause yourself before you react when you really just want to explode? Like, this is the stuff that they don't teach you in school.

6:16And I'm like, why is this not taught to children? Probably because the people who are teaching it wouldn't be able to learn how to, they don't know how to do it either, right? So it's like, this is way more important than trigonometry? Why are we not teaching this in school to children? And so what you want to do is you want to learn to master what I call the space between, like this little tiny space between. Mental toughness grows in this space between stimulus and response. And one of my favorite quotes I've said probably hundreds of times on this podcast is from Viktor Frankl, who is a psychologist who lived through Nazi prison camps, and he lived in Auschwitz, and he has an amazing book called Man's Search for Meaning.

6:55And he says, between stimulus and response, which means between something happening and you responding to it. So between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. Let me just say that one more time because it's such a powerful quote, right? Right. Between stimulus and response, there's a space. And that space is in that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. That moment where life throws a punch and you choose to breathe instead of explode and going on a, you know, an old pattern that's been with you since childhood.

7:38And so how do you practice this? Well, next time you feel like life is starting to spiral, which it does, right? You don't want life to become easier. You want to become stronger. And so next time you feel life starting to spiral, you just say this out loud to yourself. Just say, hey, this is a moment of stress. Stress is not meant to break me. It's meant to build me. And so you reframe the point of the stress in the moment right now. You give it a different perspective. Because a lot of times when we're stressed and life becomes too much, we just think, oh my gosh, this is going to break me. It's going to be like this forever.

8:11But you need to reframe in that moment. You say, no, this is meant to build me. I'm going to become stronger from this. And that language reminds your brain and also your nervous system as well, that you're training yourself, not that you're drowning, you're training yourself. You're building your strength and your capacity to hold and feel all feelings and emotions, not just react to them like most people do, right? And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to make yourself anti-fragile. And so if you've never heard this phrase of anti-fragility. There's basically different things in life.

8:46So let me explain them to you, right? There's fragile. Fragile just basically means that something will break under stress or pressure, like glass, for instance. There's resilient, and these are things that resist stress, but stay the same. So for instance, like rubber, if you want a visual, it resists stress, but it will actually stay the same. And then there is anti-fragile, which is something that gets stronger with stress. So a muscle is anti-fragile. It breaks down and then grows back stronger when it is stressed. Your immune system, it breaks down and then comes back stronger when it's stressed.

9:23And your mindset can do the exact same thing. And so this term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Tlaib in his book called Anti-Fragile. And your mind basically is like your muscles. It's anti-fragile by design, but it only actually works if you let it be stressed in the right way and then you actually recover from it in the right way. And so if you want to build yourself to be more anti-fragile, to grow from the things that are happening to you and become more mentally strong, you basically need four things, okay? The first thing is you need safe exposure to challenges. And so you don't build mental strength by avoiding stress or by avoiding hard moments.

10:07You build it by leaning into the discomfort and knowing that you can still survive it. And so this can be life throws these things at you, but there's also a thing where you can actually go out and I recommend that everybody do this is start to train yourself to be in stressful situations. So you can start with like low stakes challenges with yourself, Cold showers, really good one, right? Honest conversations, like hard conversation with someone, really good one. Trying something that makes you feel uncomfortable, like maybe you wanna go do improv and you're afraid of being in front of people and being on stage and having to react immediately.

10:43It's about putting yourself into places that make you uncomfortable in learning how to actually grow from them. You're training your system to stay calm under pressure. And we will be right back. iXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning, whether they're building math confidence, strengthening reading and writing skills, or reviewing science concepts. iXL is used in 96 of the top 100 school districts in the U.S., and studies show kids who use iXL score higher on tests, proven in all 50 states. That's why I've been using iXL Learning.

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13:52And so like if you look at cold showers or cold plungers, I did a cold plunge yesterday and I did not want to do it. I've never wanted to do it. I've never enjoyed one. I just enjoy the feeling after and I enjoy the building of my mindset, right? And so I got in and I was freaking like my body, my body, my mind are freaking out. And it's like, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out. Right. But what I'm trying to train is I'm trying to, to train myself to find the stillness that's within me when every, when shit's hitting the fan. And so my body's freaking out. My mind's freaking out.

14:25It's trying to get me out. And I kept saying to myself in my own head, find the stillness inside of you, find the stillness inside of you. And so it's like, it's kind of like a hurricane, right? Everything's going nuts, but in the center of the hurricane, there's the eye of the storm where everything is still. And so I'm basically reminding myself, I'm trying to see everything freak out, but find the eye in the storm within myself. And so this is like what they call in psychology and physiology, eustress, which is EU stress. It's positive cognitive responses to stress that's healthy and then gives you the feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings.

15:04That's what eustress is. And so that's the first thing you want to do is you want to be able to have safe exposure to challenges. The second thing that you want to do that's really important that most people don't do is they don't take time to integrate the lesson after, right? Growth doesn't necessarily happen during the chaos. It happens after when you have a moment of silence where you can pause and reflect and see what you got from it. Like this is where most people want to just like brush it under the rug, move on, forget about it, act like whatever just happened didn't happen. If you do nothing, then you learned nothing and you gained nothing.

15:39And so in these moments are the opportunities for you to actually grow. Growth doesn't happen from listening to this podcast. Growth doesn't happen from reading a book or going to a conference. It happens when you realize that your life is your classroom. And that is when you actually start to step up and change. Like you can get the knowledge from this. You can get the knowledge from going and reading a book. But the classroom and the actual practical application of what you learn is in life. And so after you have a hard moment, what did that moment teach me about myself? And you start to ask yourself these questions.

16:13You know, why did I react that way? How can I make sure that I do better next time? And so you don't just move on. Like you digest the experience so that it becomes part of like your internal toolkit. And this is really what integration is all about. Okay, so that's number two. Number three, a really good thing to have would be a support system, right? And that support system, it could be a coach, it could be a friend, it could be significant other, it could be journaling in your own practice if you don't have anybody. But I would recommend somebody that can hold space and talk to you as you're working through hard things.

16:50Like you can learn a lot from meditation, yeah. You can learn a lot from journaling, yes. But you can also learn a lot from a conversation with somebody about what happened. because as you start to talk, you start to actually make new neural connections that you hadn't before and someone can actually share their perspective, which can also make you change your perspective as well. And so that's number three. And number four is a reframe that turns pain into training or pain into meaning. So instead of asking yourself questions like, oh, why is this happening to me? And that makes you a victim, ask yourself questions like, what is this preparing me for?

17:26How is this going to make me better? What can I learn from this? It's that shift that transforms your suffering into actual strength. And it transforms you from a victim in your life to a person's actually creating their life. And so this is basically called, you know, there's something in psychology, it's called stress inoculation theory. And this theory says, you know, exposing someone to manageable levels of stress and then teaching them how to respond actually builds long-term resilience within them. And so if you want to get tougher, stop trying to avoid discomfort. Start treating it like resistance training for your brain, for your mindset.

18:04There was a landmark study that was done in Annals of Behavior Medicine that found out that people who use cognitive reappraisal, which means reframing your thoughts after a stressful event, recovered physiologically faster than those who didn't. And so thoughts can literally change your heart rate, your cortisol, and inflammation. and so your mindset also determines your mental toughness. And so one of the most important questions that you can ask yourself when you're going through something that's hard is what meaning am I giving this? I would say life is 5 % what happens to you and 95 % the meaning that you give it.

18:40Like let's say that you get fired from your job. You could say, oh, like the wrong meaning would be like, I'm worthless, I failed, I'm a loser, no one's ever gonna wanna hire me again, right? That's the wrong meaning that you're giving it. If you do that, then you're going to have a shame spiral. You're going to procrastinate. You're going to avoid stuff. You're going to fear trying to get another job, right? If you wanted to reframe that meaning and give yourself a better meaning, it could be like this role has reached its expiration date. I didn't really want to be there anymore. Or this is a redirection towards something that's more aligned for me.

19:12Or I'm being given a window to finally pursue what I've been putting off, right? When that result, that reframe, maybe you're more grounded, you're more curious. You can actually find something that you're passionate about. Even though the discomfort is still there, you can actually look at it from a different perspective, right? Another example is like, let's say that you have a breakup or a divorce, like the wrong meaning that you could give that is I'm not lovable or this always happens to me or I wasted years of my life with this person, which then makes you have like, what? Low self-worth, emotional shutdown, resentment, all of that.

19:49If you wanted to reframe that meaning and give it a different meaning, you could say something like the version of me in that relationship needed to evolve anyways. Like that relationship ended because I've outgrown it and that's okay, right? Which is more emotional ownership, which allows you to heal and maybe have a higher standard when you're moving forward in your life. And so really what it comes down to is deciding to reframe it and then also just being radically honest with yourself. And so let's not sugarcoat it. Like the mentally strongest people in the world are the most honest with themselves, with everybody.

20:22Like they don't lie to themselves. They don't lie about their patterns. They don't blame others for their procrastination. They take full ownership for their own lives because self-deception is like the mind killer. The number one weakness that destroys mental toughness is an emotion. It's denial. And so you can't change what you're running from. So you've got to stop running from things. and so you've really got to actually start to bring these things and be honest like fully honest and transparent with yourself like what uncomfortable truth am i avoiding right now like do i keep blaming other people for something that's actually my problem you're like where where am i trying to be too busy because i'm afraid you know like what what part of me still believes that i'm not good enough like being truly honest with yourself more than anything else and if you do all of this, this is how you really start to build yourself into somebody who is mentally tough.

21:16The more mentally tough that you get, the more that you can handle anything else that comes for you later on in life. And so I want you to understand like you're not born mentally tough. You don't wake up mentally tough. It comes in these moments of choice. Who am I going to be? How am I going to act? What meaning am I going to give this? Mental toughness is not just one little decision. It's a lifestyle where you're deciding to choose growing over comfort more than anything else. And so that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories.

21:47Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. If you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of this podcast, you can go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way and leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus. With customizable tools and charts, you can access across all your devices. Try our most powerful trading platform yet at fidelity.com slash trader plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss.

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