Rebuild Your Mind; Rebuild Your Body

No one would expect to be able to build impressive muscles without spending time working hard in the gym. The same then is true of the mental attitude which is necessary in order to be able to work out that hard.

Mental strength does not come to us any more easily or naturally than physical strength. Both need to be carefully trained and developed. No matter what your genetics might dictate on either of these things, you can improve and be better than someone who has not bothered.

The one trait above all others which will see you to success is in maintaining a positive mental attitude. A positive mental attitude is the steroids of the mental strength game.

Where do you get them?

As with any strength training, it has to be done consistently otherwise you will lose any benefits that you’ve gained.

In the Western culture we’ve become accustomed to being negative about things. Our days are filled with complaining about things, being irritated or angry about other people. Road rage is a symptom of a much larger problem.

You need to learn to stop that practice, because what you do to others is reflected in your own self. Anger and frustration can be powerful motivations in a workout to really push yourself, but that assumes that you’ve made it into the gym in the first place.

Remove all negativity from your mind. While you may see negative things in others, don’t mention them, don’t even think about them. Instead find something positive to say. This is very hard to do in my experience, but it also applies to you, yourself. It’s easy to talk yourself into giving up by focusing on the negatives. Focus on the positives. If a workout didn’t go as well as you’d hoped then be determined to do better next time, but focus on the fact that you came and did it.

Normally there is a reason for a workout not going well, so search within yourself to determine why – where you ill, tired, hungry? This is the second secret, which is to learn from every experience, good or bad. Take pleasure in those experiences, because each have something to teach you and if you can learn the lesson you will do better the next time.

Establish a morning ritual where you find those nuggets of benefit in the happenings of the previous day. Start the day with a laugh, even if forced because the biofeedback will make you positive. Start the day in control of your own mind by choosing to only be positive that day.

Only you can develop the strength to stand firm in your own mind. Only you can choose to be unaffected by the moods of others, to instead focus on achieving your aims. This is how you change the rest of your life – what are you going to do about it?

Attracting the best people to your team is clearly the key making your support team more effective and thus accelerating your progress towards your goal, but how do you convince those people to work with you and not someone else? If they are good then they will already have other people who want to work with them.

The answer of course is to stand out from the crowd, but not in a wearing a loud shirt sort of way, rather it’s to have a reputation as the guy who gets things done, the guy who can be relied upon. They are building their teams just as you are and would you rather have the expert who can’t be relied upon or the guy who is good and makes sure to put you first? It cuts both ways, but how do you get that reputation?

The problem with this approach is clearly that it won’t work at first, but the more you work on solving this, the better your reputation will become and better your future team will become. You might even by example be able to turn the average team you first attract into the best team; the team others want to steal away from you.

Route to Success

The route to success in this is to go the extra mile. This works for you as much as it works to build your reputation because it will transform your own results from mediocre to outstanding. The downside to it is that it really reinforces the concept that you cannot do everything and that you need to sacrifice goals which are less important or which perhaps are not relevant any more.

It is also easy to become resentful of the extra effort required to go the extra mile, and martyrdom will counteract the benefits you are seeking to create, so make sure that you maintain the positive mental attitude and do the extra mile because you want to. Remember that most people will fail to complete the first mile never mind complete the second one so this will really make you stand out.

Each time you perform the same service you will seek to do it better. Better might simply be in terms of doing it more efficiently so that you complete it faster, or it might be a higher quality product, but either way it will make your work excel and that will make you much more attractive to the other team members and to potential team members.

Expand Your Mind

One of the best results of this exercise is that it will improve your imagination as you constantly seek to find better ways of doing things. That is an area where your team will be able to provide you with very useful feedback because they will consider the problem from different viewpoints and while they are unlikely to provide the solutions you need to improve, they are likely to provide you will the inspiration for where to look in order to find the solutions.