8/1 Mental Toughness Thursday

The Things They Carried
“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.” -Rocky
I have been blogging about mental toughness for several years now. The idea was born out of a Check-in with one of our members. I asked what is the number one thing I could do to help and the answer was, "Teach me about mental toughness." 
Mental toughness can be trained, just like endurance, power, speed, strength and flexibility. That's really great news! You can become tougher with simple and effective practices. 
One such practice is gratitude. Keeping a gratitude journal, or just acknowledging the good things in your life, can help keep you focused on what is good in our life. Because I can tell you from experience, it's far too easy to get sucked down the deep dark hole of "everything sucks." One way you can express gratitude is to comment on my Bright Spot Friday post in the Facebook Community Group. I just started posting BSF 2 weeks ago as a way for me to publicly acknowledge my gratitude. I invite you to join me in this weekly practice. 
Another mental toughness practice is to not take anything personally. This is one of the Four Agreements (an OUTSTANDING book my Don Miguel Ruiz) that can help you eliminate so. much. suffering. This agreement reminds us that people treat us as they do because of who THEY are not because of who YOU are. Once you wrap your brain around this, and trust me it takes DAILY PRACTICE, you feel weightless. I wish this for all of you. 
My last mental toughness training tip for today is to dive deep, I mean really deep, into what motivates you. If you want to lose weight, ask yourself why. Then ask yourself why again. Keep asking why until you get to the root (it's down there in the deep dark I promise) of why you want to lose weight. Whenever you set a goal, ask yourself why you want that goal about 5 times. If you're not uncomfortable by the 3rd time you've asked yourself why, keep going. This practice will make you squirm a bit AND THAT'S OK! Going deep into motivation will help keep you on the path to success. 
I have lots of other practical tips for developing mental toughness. You can view them by going into my archives: https://www.truespiritcrossfit.com/workout-of-the-day/category/mental-toughness

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