the lost art of mental toughness

Summary

are you mentally tough. rate yourself 1 to 10. I’ve asked a lot of people. most don’t think they are. and most of them are wrong because they’re using the wrong definition.

1. social media gave us a bad picture of what mental toughness looks like. ice baths. 4am wake ups. screaming through workouts. pain without flinching. it makes for content. it isn’t what mental toughness actually is.

2. real definition. mental toughness is the ability to push forward against your own desire. that’s it. that’s the whole thing.

3. quick confession. I love training. when my legs burn, I smile. when my lungs burn, I’m happy. that doesn’t make me mentally tough. that’s me doing what I want. no different from someone reaching for a donut because they want one. the donut person and I are both doing what we want.

4. I’m mentally tough on the morning I don’t want to train and I train anyway. you’re mentally tough when you’ve had a brutal day and you do the dishes anyway. take out the trash anyway. play with your kids anyway. read a page anyway. put the phone down and talk to your spouse anyway. small stuff. it counts.

5. and it doesn’t mean always on. you have to rest and recharge. but that’s not the problem right now. the problem is the voice that says “you don’t want to do it, do it later.” every time you win that argument, you’re laying a brick. day by day, decision by decision. that’s how a different person gets built. if that’s too hard for you, try harder.

Transcript

rate yourself one to ten

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And my question for you today is, are you mentally tough? I’ve actually asked a lot of people this question. I’ve studied the subject for a very long time.

And what I’ve realized is most people don’t think they are mentally tough. So again, I ask you, are you mentally tough? Where would you rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the toughest you could possibly be mentally and one being absolutely no mental toughness? And really think about it because I don’t think people really know how tough they are until they’re put into situations in which they’re forced to be tough.

And if you are an entrepreneur, you are going to be forced into situations in which you have to be tough. You have to think about how you’re reacting to a situation, how it will look later, how you look now. You don’t want to panic. You don’t want to freak out. You don’t want to be an asshole. You don’t want to get overly anxious.

social media’s version is wrong

There are a lot of ways to be mentally tough in entrepreneurship, but let’s just talk about mental toughness for a minute because it is getting a little out of hand what you see, you know, as social media does across the world with basically anything. You pull up social media and everyone is a millionaire.

Everyone is beautiful. Everyone is mentally tough. Everyone has everything together and everything figured out, but we all know that’s not the reality. Mental toughness is not getting in an ice bath. It’s not pushing yourself hard in a workout. It’s not waking up early. It’s not the ability to take pain without making a noise.

Mental toughness is really, really simple. All mental toughness is, is the ability to push forward against your own desire. Again, mental toughness is the ability to push forward against your own desire. So I’ll let you in on a little secret. I love fitness. I love working out. I love training hard specifically.

When my legs burn, a smile will pop up on my face. When my lungs burn, I’m happy inside. I don’t know where this came from. Do I think it means I’m mentally tough? No. That’s how it was built. I don’t know if I created that version of myself over a long enough timeline or if I was born that way, but that’s what I actually enjoy and I don’t think it makes me mentally tough.

push forward against your own desire

I think you can practice mental toughness through fitness to some degree, but at the same time, practicing mental toughness is just pushing forward against your own desire. So if I want to go train today and I want to work out and I want to work out hard, I’m only doing what I want. It’s no different than the person who sits down to eat a donut because that’s what they want.

That’s what they enjoy. Luckily for me, the thing that I enjoy happens to make me better, but it doesn’t make me mentally tougher necessarily. What makes me more mentally tough is when I wake up in the morning and I don’t want to work out. That off day where I just don’t want to do it and I do it anyway.

That’s what makes me mentally tough. That’s what makes you mentally tough. It can be as simple as you’ve had a long, hard day and you don’t want to do the dishes. You don’t want to take out the trash. You don’t want to do what you have to do. You’d rather sit on the couch than play with your kids or scroll on your phone than talk with your wife.

Those are the choices. You have to make the hard choices. You have to push forward against your own desire and make the hard choices. Every time you push forward against your own desire, you’re becoming a little bit more mentally tough and it doesn’t matter what it is. There’s only what it is for you.

the off day workout

So let that sink in for a minute. There is no pinnacle of waking up at 4 a.m. and doing a really hard workout that is mental toughness. The only thing that you need to look at in mental toughness is when you have that little trigger in your mind when there’s something you know you should do but you don’t want to do it and you do it anyway.

Doesn’t matter what it is. That doesn’t mean I’m not giving you an excuse to work late and avoid your family and do all that crap as an entrepreneur you know you shouldn’t be doing. It’s the opposite of that. It’s focusing on what’s most important in your life and doing what you don’t want to do to make sure that those things are taken care of.

The more you do this, the more you push forward against your own desire, the more times you pick up a book and read a page instead of watch Netflix, the more times that you take out the trash instead of sit your ass on the couch, the more times that you do wake up and work out as opposed to stay in the comfortable bed, the more times you actually go outside and throw a ball with your kids even though it’s too hot, you send the right message to them that this is important.

You are important to me. It’s all these tiny decisions. That’s all mental toughness is. That’s all you need to practice. So anytime you have that trigger in your brain where you know you should do something and you say to yourself, I don’t want to do it, you just almost automatically, instinctually say I don’t want to do that and you go do it, you’re building your mental toughness.

brick by brick

Now that doesn’t mean you have to be always on, always productive, always doing something. You got to relax sometimes. You got to chill out. You got to recharge. You got to reset for the next day. I get all that. But that’s not our problem right now. That’s not most people’s problem. The problem today for most people is when that little voice in your head tells you it’s okay.

You don’t want to do it so don’t do it. We’ll do it later. We’ll do it tomorrow. We’re not going to do it. You do it anyway. The more times you win that battle, the more, the closer you are to actually becoming a different person, a mentally tough person who can push themselves to do things they don’t want to do which is what it’s going to take to be a successful entrepreneur.

And then when you are a successful entrepreneur and you get hit in the face, you can stand up and you know you have what it takes to push through because you’ve been through this before. That’s mental toughness. You can build it brick by brick, little by little, one day at a time, one tiny decision at a time.

Nobody has it all figured out. There is no pinnacle to mental toughness. All there is pushing forward against your desire day by day, decision by decision. That’s too hard for you? Try harder.