Give me 20 minutes to make you dangerously mentally strong (so you can achieve your goals) with Maya Raichoora | Future Self Series Ep.5

0:11Grace Beverley: What is up? I'm Grace Beverley and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast shape guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing, because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice. What is up and welcome back to Working hard. I hope you are all doing very well. So by this point, I hope you've gathered that I am running a series across my maternity leave called the Future Self series. But if you haven't, the TLDR is that it's a podcast series built almost like a course around one specific idea. And the idea is that the most reliable way to build the life you want is to reverse engineer it.

0:45Grace Beverley: So you start at the end, you get clear on where you're going and you work backwards and build in a practical, actionable way in order to be able to actually get there. So through this series, I'm passing the mic to my favorite experts and thinkers. It's all been specifically curated to make sure you are hearing from the experts in each different area of this to give you a kind of fully fledged plan to building your future self. So, so far we've covered the plan, the mindset, the habits and the actual kind of health habits that you need to be able to actually look after yourself to get to the point you want to get to.

1:15Grace Beverley: So today we're getting into the thing that kind of sits underneath all of that, which is your mental fitness, which is maybe a phrase that you might not have heard of if you're new here. So I want to explain what I mean by that. Essentially, mental fitness isn't therapy or positive thinking, and it's definitely not kind of telling yourself that everything's fine when it isn't. It's basically the ongoing active practice of training your mind in the same way you train your body. So it's essentially building the psychological strength, the flexibility, the resilience that you need to achieve your goals and to get to where you want to get to in life, particularly when things get hard, when things are uncertain, when things are uncomfortable.

1:50Grace Beverley: and just like physical fitness, it's not something that you either have or you don't. It's something you build deliberately over time and so this is why I think this episode is one of the most important in the entire series. Everything we've talked about so far, the five-year plan, the mindset shift, the habits, taking care of your body, all of it requires a mind that can actually follow through and I've said this before but I am a firm believer that you can have the most beautiful vision for your future self. You can even have the most detailed plan and the best intentions. But if your mental fitness isn't there, and if you are running on self-doubt, on anxiety, on fear of failure, or just sheer mental exhaustion, then none of the other stuff is going to stick.

2:29Grace Beverley: It's just not going to work. This is the foundation that everything else is built on when you're reverse engineering your life. And the expert I wanted to talk to on this episode is one of my favourite people to chat to. If you didn't listen to our episode back in 2025, I want to introduce you to Maya Raichura. Maya's a mental fitness expert. She's on a mission to make training your mind as common as training your body. And I didn't really understand this until I heard her talking about that. And since then, lots of the things she's talked about are literally things I think about every single day and have really, really helped me be able to get to where I am now and feel happy about it and to feel resilient and to feel like even when shit comes along and like shit hits the fan, I am still on that track, which enables me to get back on track every time I need to, rather than consistently feeling like I'm just treading water, moving in a certain direction and something could really hit me and derail this entire plan.

3:20Grace Beverley: So that is the heart of what today's episode is about. The idea that your mind is trainable and should be trained. The idea that it is essential to make sure you have the mental fitness to be able to actually get to where you want to get to. And as with all these episodes before I hand over to Maya, she's put together a follow-up exercise and her personal recommendations in the Working Hard newsletter. So that's going to be sent out tomorrow if you are listening to this episode on the day it goes live. We're doing that with every single episode so that you basically have a course like structure by the end of this and you're not just listening to episodes and be like oh this sounds nice and then not actually doing anything about it in your life.

3:52Grace Beverley: The entire purpose of this series is to be as actionable as possible so I've left the link for that in the description but I hope you really enjoyed this episode. Hi everyone I'm Maya Raichora and thank you so much Grace for passing over the mic. I'm so excited to be one of your cover teachers for this Future Self series. If you have followed Working Hard for a while, you might already know me from previous episodes with Grace or from my own work as a visualization and mental fitness expert. I've spent years studying how to train and rewire the mind so you can think, feel and perform the best you ever have.

4:26Because isn't it crazy that more people are insecure about their body than their own character? We grew up placing so much importance on the physical body, learning how to train it and stay healthy. So what about building total self-confidence or building your emotional intelligence or finding peace and calm in your mind and heart? As we build out this future self-roadmap Grace introduced at the start of the series and reverse engineer our lives, we need to make sure our mental fitness is in check. It's one of the key building blocks that everything else rests on. You can have the clearest goals in the world, but if your inner world isn't strong enough, they'll fall apart the second things get hard.

5:04So today I'm bringing mental tools that elite athletes, entrepreneurs, business owners, leaders are using so that you're getting access to secrets that are usually gatekept, but I'm giving it completely for free. So grab a pen and paper to follow along and save these tips for later and let's get into it. Okay, so what exactly is mental fitness? You're probably familiar with the term mental health, but mental fitness is actually quite different. If we think about physical health and physical fitness, everyone has a physical health, right? it can be bad, it can be good, but you're only physically fit if you're going to the gym, maybe you're doing yoga, maybe you are going on a walk or running, dancing.

5:41It's the active maintenance of good physical health. Now in the same way, if you have a mind, then you have a mental health. It can be good, it can be bad. But being mentally fit is you actively training your brain so you can think better, feel better and perform better and therefore maintain a strong mental health. And so this is important to distinguish because the question is, whilst we all go to the gym and we know how to train the body, are you training your mind? And in my opinion, this is the coolest and sexiest thing you can do for yourself because you don't have to be unwell, upset, heartbroken to invest in your mental fitness.

6:17This is about, do you want to go through life achieving your goals? Do you want to reach your potential? Do you want to walk into a room and feel good about yourself? That is the crux of mental fitness. And interestingly, if you look at the most successful people in sport, in business or leadership, the thing that differentiates the good from the exceptional is the mindset. But the thing is, most of us have never been taught how to train it. And I think that's the bit that gets missed the most in the self-improvement space. We're taught how to set goals, build habits, chase that productivity, but almost nobody teaches you how to manage the actual internal experience of being a person while you do all of that.

6:54How you talk to yourself when you fail, how you handle fear before a big moment, how you see yourself when things aren't going to plan. Now that internal experience is arguably the single biggest predictor of whether you'll actually reach your goals and yet it's the part we train the least. So today I want to break mental fitness down into three specific areas that you can actually build. One will be power over your self-talk, two is power over your emotions and three is power over your self-image. And then I'm going to spend real time on that last one because that's where visualization comes in and it's the tool that ties this whole thing together.

7:29The reason I picked these three areas is because by the end of this episode, I want you to be a different person. I want you to have the tools and the knowledge to know how to actually change your life. They move the needle the most when it comes to building a strong mindset. So if you take action and you start practicing these techniques, it is nearly impossible that you will be the same person after watching this episode. Skill number one, having power over your self-talk. So I want to tell you about a time where last year I was at the French Open and I was watching one of the top 20 tennis players in a match.

8:02And as she was playing, she started hitting the ball into the net. You know, things weren't really working out. She was making mistakes. And she looked at her coach and she said to him, I just can't play today. Okay, that's fine. But in the first set, she said that 15 times to her coach. She just kept saying, I just can't play today. I just can't play today. Everything's going wrong. I can't play. Now, this is not just harmless. Her saying this over and over again made her energy go down, her confidence was going down, her motor skills were also going down. And so did she win the match? No. In that moment, in real time, she was reprogramming her brain to basically perform worse, to think worse, and to feel worse.

8:42The thing is, we all have that voice in our head. It can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. Generally researchers have found that we can have anywhere between 6 ,000 and 12 ,000 thoughts a day. But for most people, a huge proportion of those thoughts are repetitive and actually negatively skewed. See, our minds evolve to scan for threat, not to cheerlead us or help us to grow. This means we need to be extra intentional if we want to build better and more useful self talk. Now mentally fit people do two things when it comes to their self talk. Number one, they train it with discipline.

9:15And number two, they can practice self distancing. So I'm going to teach you how to do both these things. The first thing when it comes to negative self-talk is to understand that the aim is not to get totally rid of negative thoughts. The aim is to build a different relationship with them. Okay so I want to share with you a technique that can really help change the way you speak to yourself and by the way I use this very often and it's been game-changing. So it's called the best friend method. Talk to yourself like you would talk to your best friend. So let's take an example. Now, it's very normal that sometimes your mind might tell you, okay, you're not good enough, or you're falling behind, or everyone else is more successful than you.

9:54But see, in those moments, individually, we're very good at criticizing ourselves, judging ourselves, and really just putting ourselves down. But the best friend method disrupts that. So what I'm asking you to do is think of it like this. Let's say your best friend came to you and said, hey, look, I'm really falling behind. I'm not good enough to make it. what would you say to them? You are much more likely to be encouraging, to help them, to give them a different perspective, but we rarely do that to ourselves. And so what the best friend method encourages us to do is disrupt that negativity, disrupt that criticism, and instead replace it with more of like a coach attitude, more of someone who encourages you to keep going.

10:32So as you go on in life, use the best friend method. Whenever a negative thought pops up, you can now think, okay, what would I say to my best friend? And you know what? in life there's going to be enough people who will try and maybe talk badly about you or put you down so if there's one rule I want to leave you with it's always always always talk good about yourself you have control over that talk kindly to yourself be the person that encourages yourself because that is a true sign of mental strength okay now the second method is called self-distancing so psychologist Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan has spent years studying something called self-distancing which is a popular technique in psychology.

11:12Now in his studies people who talk to themselves in the third person using their own name instead of I showed lower stress responses, calmer body language and better performance especially under pressure. So something as small as saying Maya you've got this instead of I've got this it creates just enough psychological space to get out of the panic and into the reasoning of your brain. And actually this brings me on to something I've been thinking a lot about and learning a lot about recently, which is that outside of all of this, when you think about the negative talk, understand that you are not your thoughts.

11:46You are the observer of them. And so I like to think of it, if you had a door at home and someone was knocking on it, you don't necessarily let every visitor come into your house. In the same way, you don't have to believe every thought you have. You don't have to let every thought you have come into your brain or into your body. So the same goes for your thinking. Once you can observe a thought rather than automatically believing it, you get a choice point. You can ask, is this actually true? Or is this just an old pattern playing on repeat? Or my brain trying to protect me? Or my mind just not being very disciplined?

12:18And that choice is where you have power. Skill number two, let's talk about emotions. Everyone's either favorite or least favorite topic. Because honestly, I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions about mental strength. See, for years I believed that being mentally strong meant not showing emotion. I got taught that crying was weakness. I thought getting upset meant I'd lost control. But the more I studied the world's best athletes and psychologists, the more I realized I'd actually got it completely wrong. So Novak Djokovic, one of the greatest tennis players in the world, explains mental strength in a way that really resonates with me.

12:54He says he's not someone who never gets frustrated or emotional. In fact, when things don't go his way, he'll often have a burst of emotion. He might shout, smash a racket, or just show his frustration. But the difference is he doesn't stay there. He's learned that he can feel it and then release it. He doesn't carry that emotion with him for the next game, the next set, or the rest of the match. He owns it, feels it, lets it go, and then can refocus on the next point. And that is what mentally strong people do. They don't suppress emotion, they process it. So there's a philosophy that I absolutely love, and it's helped me a lot, which is that emotions are energy in motion.

13:30Emotions are designed to move through us, not live inside us. And the problem is that many of us either suppress them or become consumed by them. We bottle them up, hoping they'll just disappear, or we let them dictate our behavior for hours, days, even years. The thing is, emotions actually get stored in the body if we don't find a healthy way to release them. And that's why you might lash out at people close to you, or if you experience things like IBS, or even just feel exhausted. It's energy in the body that needs to come out. Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand how sometimes feeling certain emotions is not the easiest thing.

14:03And the brain is clever. It also wants to protect you from it. But the strongest people I know are emotionally fearless. They have the courage to feel disappointment, to feel fear, embarrassment, grief, even frustration without judging themselves for it. They understand that emotions are like waves. If you allow the wave to pass through you, it eventually settles. But if you keep trying to hold it underwater, it takes far more energy. Mental fitness isn't about never feeling emotional. It's about not allowing your emotions to make your decisions for you. Feel everything. Just don't stay there.

14:34All our emotions are messengers, even the harder ones. So when you experience anxiety, this is you feeling uncertain about the future. Anger is a boundary that has been violated. Resentment is built up disappointments or unmet needs. Or is when you're moved by something greater than yourself. grief is love with nowhere to go because you've lost something meaningful sadness is loss or disconnection from yourself but also others shame is a signal that you don't believe you are inherently worthy every emotion is telling you something so lean in and be fearless when you experience them so to put this into practice this is what you can do this week the next time you notice a difficult emotion try not to immediately distract yourself or push it away pause and ask yourself what am I actually feeling right now?

15:19If you can name the emotion or just notice where it lands in your body. Remember it's energy in motion and just sit with it for 60 seconds. Take a few slow deep breaths and remind yourself that the emotions are just waves and then ask yourself one final question. Is there a next helpful action I can take? Because as I said mentally strong people don't avoid emotions. They have the courage to feel them and the compassion to move through them. On a personal note, going from someone who suppressed their emotions for most of their life to now someone who genuinely feels it in all capacity, life just becomes so much richer.

15:55Because if you're suppressing the harder emotions, you're also suppressing things like love, joy, gratitude. So once you really let yourself feel it, I don't know, life just is better. It's richer, it's more powerful. So yeah, I encourage everyone to try that. Skill number three, having power over your self-image. I had a client who desperately wanted a promotion. Now on paper she was more than capable. She had the experience, the skills and the respect of her colleagues. Everyone around her believed she could get the role. The only person who didn't was her because deep down she didn't see herself as someone who was good enough for that position and it showed.

16:32She would second guess herself in meetings, she avoided opportunities to stand out and really she just kept playing small because she didn't believe she belonged in a bigger role. She just couldn't see it for herself. The thing is, it wasn't a lack of ability. It was a self-image problem. And one of the biggest lessons I've learned from working with hundreds of people is that it's very difficult to outperform your self-image. I'm just going to say that again. It is very difficult to outperform your self-image because your self-image acts like an invisible thermostat. If you see yourself as someone who's shy, you'll probably avoid speaking up.

17:05If you see yourself as someone who's not very confident, you'll hesitate before taking action. If you see yourself as someone who's just not very disciplined then you'll find ways to keep breaking those promises you make to yourself. Your self-image shapes your thoughts and your thoughts shape your actions and your actions create your results. That's why whenever I am working with someone to help them achieve their goal or really step into their future self, one of the first questions I ask isn't what do you want? It's who do you believe you are? And just take a moment to really think about that as you're listening right now who do believe you are because until your identity changes your behavior will always be pulled back towards the person you believe yourself to be the cool thing is though we get to level this up we get to change our self-image so to address this we're going to use visualization which is now a practice i've been doing for over 10 years and it's the crux of my research and i specifically do the self-image visualization every morning because it's had the biggest impact on my life and career but I want you to experience that for yourself.

18:06The skill of visualization is where you intentionally create images, environments and feelings in your mind and body with a specific purpose and then you repeat and repeat it which can actually rewire the brain. The reason it's so powerful is because neuroscience has shown that the brain really struggles to know the difference between something that is vividly imagined repeatedly versus something that you do physically. This is because nearly identical neural pathways are firing whether you are actually doing something or you're intensely picturing yourself doing it. And so we're going to take advantage of this.

18:41So studies on elite athletes have shown that mental rehearsal can activate the same motor cortex regions as physical practice. One well-known study had participants who only imagined doing bicep curls increase their actual strength by around 13.5 % without ever touching a weight. Their brains had rehearsed the movement so consistently that their bodies followed. So we're going to apply the same logic to our self-image. But think about it. If you've spent years mentally rehearsing worst case scenarios, you failing, imagining yourself fumbling in an interview or freezing in a meeting, being rejected, your brain treats that rehearsal as real practice too.

19:17You are quite literally training yourself to underperform, to feel more anxious, to have more doubts. So the work here is to become more deliberate about what you're going to rehearse. Instead of just vaguely hoping things go well or hoping you'll just become confident one day, you want to specifically and repeatedly picture yourself moving through a moment the way your most capable self would. Not a fantasy version, but a grounded version of you who feels the fear and moves through it. Speaking clearly, holding your posture, staying steady when things don't go to plan. So as you go through this future self series, one thing I just want to note is when we're talking about levelling up your identity or becoming this confident version of you.

19:57I'm not asking you to become someone that is so far away from who you are. Actually, I wanna encourage you to remember who you are because all those things, you being confident, assertive, peaceful, you already have it. So a big part of you visualizing this self-image is coming back to you, coming back to who you really are and remembering who you really are. Okay, so let's make this actionable because visualization only works if you actually do it, not just understand the theory of it. I want you to start by picking one specific upcoming personal milestone you'd like to reach. It could be getting your dream job, a fitness goal, or buying your first home for example.

20:35But now I also want you to think about who do you need to be or become to achieve that goal. Do we want to level up our confidence? Do we want to be more trusting of the process? Do we need to be more brave? Really focus on that character piece as well. So I'm now going to guide you through a visualization. If you're in a position where you can close your eyes and really immerse yourself in it, go for it. If not, just come back to it later, but you can still listen to it whilst you're doing another activity. So if you just want to close your eyes, you can take a nice deep breath in through the nose and exhale.

21:11And I want you to start by creating a mental image of who you want to be, that future version of you, whether it's a bit more confident, calm, resilient, and really see it in your body language, shoulders are back, head is held high, connect with them emotionally, physically, mentally, really feel it in the body. And now I want you to begin mentally rehearsing. How do you show up in the world? How do you walk? how do you talk to other people how do you act if we're focusing on discipline I want you to see yourself taking actions if it's confidence what does that actually look like and now really focusing on that goal you are wanting to go for that you're pursuing that greatness and I want you to see yourself achieving it as the person you need to be all that confidence, that bravery.

22:13Really see yourself making it happen. See yourself overcoming those tough moments, those setbacks, those rejections, but you make it happen. Really see the end of that movie, the end of the goal. Celebrate it, be grateful for it, enjoy it. Good. Really feel the emotions of it in the body. Find the clarity in the mind.

22:40okay and now taking this strength bring it into the present moment and take a nice deep breath in through the nose exhale

22:52and you can open the eyes again

22:58great now i would suggest repeating this a couple of times a week so that you can begin to really create new pathways in the brain that help you think, feel and perform as your 2.0 and as your future self. Okay so bringing it all together, that is mental fitness broken down into three trainable skills. Power over your self-talk, which changes how you speak to yourself. So being kinder, being your best friend and self-distancing. We have power over emotions, being totally fearless, have the courage to feel the harder things but also the incredible emotions. And then lastly, power over your self-image, which visualization lets you actively shake rather than leave to chance.

23:36Now, none of these are one-time fixes. They're muscles. And like any muscle, they get stronger with repetition. You don't need an hour of visualization or a perfect journaling practice. You need five minutes done consistently, applied to something that actually matters to you and aligns with you. So I said this last time I was on the podcast. And if there's one thing I want you to take away from this whole episode it's that your mind is like a puppy and if you don't train it it's gonna shit everywhere it's gonna shit on your career your relationships your confidence your life so our job and if you want to be mentally strong you want to achieve your goals you want to become the person who can wake up and just feel good in themselves we got to train the puppy i'm on all socials at myadoptmentalfitness my book is visualized and i'm always here to chat or help you train your puppy.

24:26Grace Beverley: Right, it's Grace here again. I hope you really enjoyed that episode. I feel like it's very clear when you hear Maya talking about it exactly why you need to be thinking about something like this. And I think it's very easy to dismiss these types of things. It's like, oh, just more mindset chat. Like I can get through things. I'm going to get through them anyway. So like, why do I need to spend time thinking about how I get through them? And actually that is the difference between you being able to actually reverse engineer your life versus is having this like amazing wish and a plan and never actually getting there.

24:54Grace Beverley: So a huge thank you to Maya for contributing to today's episode and an even bigger thanks to you for listening to this episode of the Future Self series and therefore supporting the podcast and our team during my maternity leave. We will as always be doing a full breakdown of the practical parts mentioned in this episode over on the Working Hard Instagram this week so you can see that and use that over there. Otherwise I'm going to see you next week where we are going to be talking about in my mind one of the most important things. Actually, I would go as far as to say the most important thing you can do for your career right now, whether you are self-employed, whether you are in corporate, whether you have your own business, and that is building a personal brand.

25:29Grace Beverley: This is the biggest multiplier that you can apply to your career, whatever it is right now. I think it is so incredibly important. And I am assuming that somewhere in your plan, there is at least some sort of career goals, if not just to get you to a place where you can sit on the beach all day. Like either you have big lofty career goals and you want to be doing that for a long time, or you have these goals in order to be able to give you a certain lifestyle. And personal brand is going to fast track that. So I can't wait to talk to you about that then.