Marinate Your Mind With These Mental Toughness Sauces
I simply couldn’t take it. I got too worked up.
I could no longer listen to sports commentary. It seems silly, but I’d arrive at my destination stuck inside of my own head, agitated. That didn’t build my mental toughness. I needed to marinate my mind and maximize my transitions!
Sports media just pick individual athletes to highlight and now only point out the errors they make. They perpetuate the absurd notion of perfectionism.
And I certainly can’t entertain a few grown men debating about all of the drama in sports. Like I seriously care what a grown athlete tweeted about another player. But, I listened…I was soaking my mind with a worthless mental toughness sauce. (I still listen to Jim Rome though).
We need to marinate our mind with people, places, and things that help us BE the BEST AT Getting BETTER.
Here are the mental toughness sauces that you need to marinate your mind in!
Success Sauce
In times of suffering, we forget how tough we really are.
Jon Morrow is a quadriplegic, and one of the most successful bloggers on the planet. He had to overcome challenges like we all do, but when starting out, he listened to podcasts and audiobooks for 6-8 hours every single day. After doing this over and over again, and marinating his mind with successes, he literal felt and believed that anything was possible!
The success sauce makes everything taste great! Rub it in!
We must watch and listen and surround ourselves with success. Marinate your mind with mental toughness sauces of motivating podcasts, uplifting videos, and successful people.
Suffering Sauce
Man and woman can only enjoy that which acquired from hard work and toil. The harder you work for something, the more you enjoy it. If something is easy, then how much reward is there?
You must do something that sucks, every single day!
David Goggins calls it “Embrace the Suck!”
The mental toughness sauces of suffering simply means doing what you don’t want to do.
If you don’t want to write, then write, if you don’t want to workout, then workout. If you don’t want to mow the lawn, then mow the lawn.
When you train your mind and create situations that make you suffer, then when tough times in life approach, we’ve developed a resolve through suffering.
Gratitude Sauce
More, More, More. It’s an addict’s mantra!
We don’t have enough, are not where we want to be, and aren’t enough. Anxiety and stress come from looking at where we are and what we don’t have.
Gratitude is actually the secret sauce of mental toughness. It brings relief to the suffering sauce if we’ve put too much on.
Peace comes from simply being thankful for all that we do have. It’s not an attitude of gratitude, it’s more of an action of gratitude. We need to take certain steps and take action toward a grateful mindset.
- Be able to walk, run, skip, and play with my kids.
- Loving wife.
- A happy son and daughter.
- My job of coaching.
- Having a New PGA Tour winner!
- The huge cup of water.
- New deck furniture.
- Planted three flowers with my daughter.
- Shared a sprite with her.
- Amazing sunset the other night.
- Camping with a friend and ran 20 miles.
- My podcast episodes.
- many, many, many more blessings.
Now, take action and write out your own gratitude list. Marinate your mind with the mental toughness sauce of gratitude. Once we start to count our blessings, it’s easy to share them with others.
Passion Sauce
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson.
There’s an obscure scene in Rocky II. He’s drifted away from being a contender, has spent his money, and he asks Mickey for a job cleaning the gym and carrying spit buckets. When Mickey asks him “why,” he humbly replies, “I just have to be around it.”
Our why has to make us cry, if it doesn’t, then it’s not our why. When you marinate your mind with the mental toughness sauce of passion brings us to tears.
When we win, we cry because we know how much we’ve sacrificed.
When we lose, we cry, because it hurts.
Our passion has to be the driver in our life. Life is HARD!
There are going to be setbacks and obstacles and horrible days and weeks. Other people will have success while you’re stuck. Too often we settle or go down a path because of the money, power, title, or prestige only later to find out that we do not like it. But then we’re stuck, because we’ve invested a ton of our time, and we’re even probably good at it.
If you do not have a passion for what you’re doing, then you’ll come up with an excuse for doing it.
If you don’t wake up excited about what you have to get to do, then look at your “why” and you’ll see it’s not specific.
Passion is the prerequisite for anything we want to do, and you must marinate your mind with your passion!
Confidence Sauce
You owe it to yourself to be confident. Confidence is contagious! It’s a killer sauce of mental toughness. We need to rub it on everything!
However, all of the hard work and sacrifice toward your goal becomes absolutely meaningless if you don’t believe in yourself.
If you second guess yourself, compare yourself to others, or only focus on the results, then you undercut everything you’ve done. It becomes a cheap currency.
A funny thing about confidence it that there is a nosy neighbor called doubt. Doubt wants to move-in with confidence. Doubt always wants to hang out with confidence, but they simply don’t get along well. However, that doesn’t keep doubt from following confidence around wherever confidence goes.
Wherever doubt lives, it does so, rent-free. Doubt is a squatter!
We can live successfully with doubt as a neighbor, but we can’t let doubt move in with us as a roommate and crush our mental toughness.
Confidence and Focus: An Unbeatable Pair For Your Mental Toughness
Dr. Rob Bell is a Sport Psychology Coach. DRB & associates coach executives and professional athletes. Some clients have included three different winners on the PGA Tour, Indy Eleven, University of Notre Dame, Marriott, and Walgreens.
