how to rewire your brain for mental toughness

Summary

mental toughness isn’t motivation. it’s the ability to control the conversation in your head when the weak voice shows up. and that conversation is trainable.

the two-voices model: every hard rep has a strong voice telling you to keep going and a weak voice begging you to stop. your job is to drag the weak one across the finish line, over and over, until the strong one becomes the default.

the protocol I use:

1. meet yourself Saturday. one brutally honest workout a week. you against you, no audience, no excuses.
2. fitness is the safest lab. the stakes are zero, the lessons transfer everywhere. you learn to recognize the quit thought in real time.
3. the Murph as a benchmark. one mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, one mile run. PR days teach your mind what it’s actually capable of.
4. catch the quit thought. every rep, the brain offers an out. learning to see it for what it is is half the work.

how long this takes: real change shows up between 16 and 254 days depending on the habit. so we use 254 reps. one brick at a time. stack five years of bricks and you have a wall nobody can knock down.

discipline, repetition, identity. that’s the whole game.

Transcript

what mental toughness really is (and isn’t)

All right, let’s talk about building your mental toughness. You’ve probably heard the quote before, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times and good times create weak men and then weak men create hard times.” If you didn’t know, right now, no matter what you think about politics or the economy, we are actually in good times. So most of building our mental toughness has to be manufactured by activities that we put in front of ourselves.

A lot of people might have a hard life like I was in the military. you get some mental toughness there, some grip that you’re forced through in some training, but ultimately at the end of the day, if you want to build mental toughness, it’s really on you to practice building mental toughness. And it’s something I’ve been doing and doing in fitness communities uh that I’ve been creating for well over a decade. And how we do this is called Meet Yourself Saturday.

It’s a very specific workout, and I’m going to break down exactly how to do it. But here’s the thing. I know that the biggest thing that you can do for building mental toughness or being more mentally tough is to control the conversation in your mind. When you feel like you are not in control of the thoughts in your brain or you can’t control the conversation that’s happening in your head, that is where mental weakness starts to appear and it’s pretty simple.

Okay? So just for example, if you are you don’t want to wake up in the morning, your alarm goes off, you’re like, I don’t want to wake up.

the two voices inside every workout

Why can’t you turn that conversation around? Why can’t you be like, you know what? No, I’m we’re waking up. Like, we’re going to get up. I’m getting up. Because we all have that mental weakness chatter that I don’t want to do the focused work. I don’t want to do the hard thing. I don’t want to wake up early. I don’t want to do the workout. I don’t want to push hard in this workout. We all have that mental chatter.

I don’t care how tough you are, how long you’ve been doing it, it exists. It’s called being human. But once you learn to control that conversation when it comes up, so that weaker version of you pops up and is like, “Hey, I don’t want to do the workout. Hey, I don’t want to wake up early.” You’re able to then control the conversation and just be like, “No, we are going to wake up early.” And the reason I say we is because I honestly look at the mental weak mentally weak side of me and the mentally strong side of me as two different people who are battling all the time.

So I have to drag that mentally weak person through workouts, through early wakeups over and over. But you know the silver lining here is that it does get easier over time. And this is what I have been coaching for years. And so let’s get into it. It is called Meetyour yourself Saturday. I think the safest place you can practice mental toughness aside from, you know, joining the military, going out and doing hard things, signing up for events, or running an ultramarathon, whatever the case is, the easiest way to meet yourself is in a controlled environment, utilizing fitness as the instrument, the tool to harden your mind.

There are a lot of other ways to build mental toughness, but this is my favorite one. And what you’re going to do, you’re going to do this once per week because we don’t need every workout to be the hardest thing that you’ve ever done, but once per week, we’re going to do a meet yourself Saturday workout. And all a mere Saturday workout is a really hard workout. And I’ll give you some suggestions here in a second, but it’s a really hard workout in which you want to quit or you don’t want to push it.

And what you’re trying to do every single Saturday when you do meet yourself Saturday workout is you’re trying to push yourself to the point where you find that person inside of you that wants to quit, that wants to slow down, that doesn’t want to do it. For some people, like I said, that’s really easy.

meet yourself saturday: the protocol

That’s just set an alarm for 5:00 a.m.

why fitness is the safest place to train grit

Maybe that’s your meet yourself moment. Maybe it’s just the fact that doing a workout is your meet yourself moment. But over time, as you do harden your mind, those things get easier. So, you actually have to put yourself in harder and harder workouts, harder and tougher situations. So, you find that version of you that wants to quit, wants to slow down, doesn’t want to do the thing. And so, you’re going to do a really hard workout.

My recommendation, I did this workout uh for three years, not three consecutive years, it was three different years. It was the Murf workout. So, many people have heard of it. So, what the Murf workout is you run one mile. Then after that mile, you do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, and then at the end of all of those calisthenics, you run another mile. And you wear a 20 lb vest in the workout. And so I did it every Saturday for a year.

I think I took a year off.

murph as a weekly toughness test

Then I did it another year, and then I took some time off, and then I did it another year. So I’ve done it three conse not three consecutive years, I’ve done it three total years. And really just to push myself on this mental toughness, this mental chatter side because some Saturdays it would be the fact that I just had to get it done. It was the meeting myself about the consistency. It was I don’t want to do this workout today.

I want to do something else or I just don’t want to work out today. So sometimes my meet yourself moment was just going and getting the workout done. Other Saturdays I was incredibly motivated to go do the meet yourself Saturday workout. And so I’d be like, “Okay, today is a PR day. We’re going to push ourselves so hard that we PR. We’re going to go as fast as we can. When we want to slow down on the mile, we’re going to go faster.” And looking for that little version of me that wants to complain, wants to slow down, wants to feel sorry for myself.

And when you get to that moment, you have to realize it.

recognizing the “quit” thought in real time

Okay, that’s the most important part of the meet yourself, you know, strategy here is you will see or hear that internal chatter. Hey, let’s slow down. let’s quit. Let’s not do this. You have to recognize that is just a thought. It’s not who you are. It’s just a thought. It’s part of being human. You can now change that conversation in your mind. So consider yourself lucky if you’re getting to the point where there’s a version of you who wants to quit, doesn’t want to do the thing because now you have an opportunity to change the conversation and become more mentally tough.

So that is exactly how you execute Meet Yourself Saturday. The Murf workout is a great one to practice, but like I said, no matter where you’re at, what you’re doing, it could be different for you. It could be running one mile. It could be the fact that you’re just doing something, but I highly recommend you put it on repeat and you do it every single Saturday. Every single Saturday. That way, you have this practice in place and this is your mental toughness grit building practice.

And a lot of people ask me, “Okay, I’m going to do Meet Yourself Saturday. How long should I do it?” Like what should the goal be? and you’re not going to like the answer. Okay, so I pull a lot of research on what it took to what it takes to build a habit and the research points to anywhere between 16 to 254 days. Okay, that’s a wide range. And then if you go further into it there, people are like they pulled out, okay, well three 3 weeks that’s that same study like the 3 weeks to build a habit came from this study that I’m talking about.

And then people started to realize like well maybe it’s more realistically 66 days is like what it took most people to build a habit. So it’s 66 days. My take is anything worth doing is worth overdoing. So if you think that mental toughness and building your grit is worth doing, let’s just make sure that we can’t fail and go so we’ll go to the outer edges of the study and we’re going to do 254 times. So 254 was on the outer limit of the study.

how long it actually takes to build the habit (16 to 254 days… and why we choose 254 reps)

That means the lowest common denominator in this study was able to build a habit, but it took 254 times for that habit to be solidified. So, I’m just going to say to the catch all for me, for you, anybody watching, listening to this, you’re going to do 254 meetyou yourself workouts. Meet yourself Saturday workouts. That’s going to take you 5 years. Sorry, that’s how real growth works. Things take 5 years. Building a business takes 5 years, takes 10 years, takes seven years.

Things don’t happen in 3 weeks. Things don’t happen in 2 days. They don’t happen in 16 days. If you want to build mental toughness, build grit, be a different person, become someone better, it’s probably going to take you 5 years. Some of you will achieve it sooner, some of you won’t. But I still wouldn’t stop the practice because it is not something that you achieve and then you’re there.

building bricks… visual tracking for five years of work

It’s something that has to be continually done. You have to discipline yourself. You have to go through this over and over and over again. So once per week for 5 years and I call this building bricks and I highly recommend to athletes or anybody watching who wants to take on this challenge to put some visual representation of every time you do this. I’ve done this in multiple different ways with my kids and myself. Um we have these try harder stickers that we put on the wall or on their water bottles when they have done a hard workout.

It’s a visual representation of like, hey, I did a hard thing. I’ve had athletes actually build brick walls. they bought bricks and they’re like putting bricks in their gym or along the wall. So, there’s a visual representation of every time that they do a Meet Yourself Saturday workout, there’s this visual representation of them training their mind, of them getting better. That’s what you need to do. It takes a lot longer than you think, but I’m going to go back to the most important part of this is the recognition of the thought, the thought pattern that you have that says, “I want to quit.

I want to slow down. I don’t want to do this.” You are so lucky when you find that, you hear that because now you have the opportunity to become a different person, to try harder, to ultimately build more mental toughness and more grit. It’s going to take longer than you think. It’s going to be harder than you want it to be, but it will absolutely be worth it. Go build mental toughness. Go build grit. Become a better human.

Try harder.