Mindset

Where’s That North Korea Worry Now?

Writing this article earlier in the week, I thought I was so insightful highlighting the amount of worry that was wasted on North Korea.

Then, Drudge, with his sirens blaring and massive headline—NKorea Threatens To Cancel Trump Summit—reminded me that we can still find plenty to fear.

At first I thought, crap my article is outdated, but then I realized, actually, it’s even more timely.

We can allow our emotions to be whipped around by things that we can’t control—e.g. the worst people in our world, stock market, nearly everything else—or we can…

Choose Our Thoughts

In nearly 20 years of researching these topics, there’s one crucial lesson that most stands out—

We are what we think.

Literally, what we think about is our ENTIRE experience of reality.

If you’re a football fan and spend all day every day immersed in football, this becomes your life.

If you’re an investor who spends every waking moment thinking about opportunities in the market, the market is your reality.

And if you’re tuned into fearful news all day every day, your life is full of fear and worry.

Guard Your Mind

Around the time ding dong North Korea was doing his little public display of disaffection, my client told me about a weekend retreat he attended with a group of business leaders.

Over dinners and lunches they spent hours talking about the situation, indulging the fears, debating what to do…

None of them could do anything.

They knew nothing beyond what the media had told them. They aren’t in any way involved in military or government or any group that solves such problems, yet they spent their weekend infecting each other with fear.

While it’s important to be informed of some of what’s happening in our world, it’s equally important to be informed about how our world is using us and our attention.

It’s not just that we live in a world of propaganda—which is so dominant that presidential elections are, literally, won off of it—but because, especially in this case, it’s obvious there is plenty of theatrics going on.

Over time the so-called experts and propagandists gave us many intelligent-sounding explanations of the threat from North Korea, but I’m yet to hear an intelligent explanation of how it was resolved!

How did two mortal enemies who’ve been spewing hatred and K-pop across the DMZ for decades get to this WWE gesture?

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How To Take Control of Your Thoughts

I spent most of my career stressed and frustrated, thinking ahead to the day when I could quit my job and feel “free.”

Well, when I quit my job, it didn’t work that way.

Jumping from the bonfire into the forest fire, doing what I wanted was way harder than anything I had ever done on Wall Street, and my mind simply wasn’t up for the task.

I wanted to write a book. In my head, it sounded easy, almost a bit indulgent. It turned out to be the hardest thing I’d ever done.

For days, weeks, months, and eventually years, my stress and frustration went far beyond my ability to manage it.

Those were by far the hardest years of my life. Unwilling to let the overwhelming task beat me, I “forced” my mind to find a way through.

For the first time in my life, I was feeling “unhappy,” “depressed,” “anxious,” “fearful.”

Taking Control Of Your Thoughts

I simply wanted to feel amazing every day.

Already thinking I was an “expert” on getting what you want, I realized that I was missing a big piece of the puzzle.

How do you keep taking powerful actions when your mind isn’t up for the task? How do you train yourself to feel great when those things around you (e.g. your life) keep dragging you back down?

So many of us are victims to our minds. The thoughts in our heads constantly turning, few of us feel how we want to feel each day. Tired, we use our daily upper, caffeine. Stressed, we bring ourselves back down with alcohol. Unable to stop that damn machine at night, we put out the lights with sleeping aids.

This is the best our society teaches us to do, but we can do better.

The fact is, you can take control of your mind and thoughts. It’s not easy. In fact it’s damn hard.

It’s taken me years of daily practice, and I’m still far from perfect at it. But having gone deeper on the mind than is “reasonable” (e.g. hours a day of training) I’ve found enough of the map that I can see the rest of the territory.

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How To Condition Your Mind

If I asked how you train your mind, what would you say?

“I read a lot.”
“I meditate for an hour every day.”
“I journal every night.”

If any of those things are true, then you’re doing a great job of feeding your mind. But what happens when you feed yourself and don’t workout?

You get flabby.

People who hit the gym regularly have bodies that show it. The same is true for people who condition their minds. Conditioning isn’t about feeding your brain new information or how you brainwash yourself or finding productivity “hacks,” it’s about creating a training routine for your mind.

Thinking of your mind as a physical thing, a concept we call the body-mind, is a big shift for some people, but it’s fundamental to conditioning.

People who can’t conceptualize this are always at the mercy of their reptile brain and have little control over their thoughts.

I have a free e-book you can download for Building Your Limitless Mind. (and Audio Masterclass on it here)

But I’ve written this article for conditioning your mind for people who want to quickly take control of their thinking. If you want to be in your mind’s driver seat, the first step is to understand the physical forces that control your mind.

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Row Row Row Your Boat

I came across this cool idea from Dr. Wayne Dyer.

For too many of us, life feels like a “struggle,” where have to keep “pushing,” just to keep “making” things happen.

For many years I fell into that trap, and I spent even more years building and doing the mental practices to break out of it.

Yesterday, I heard Wayne Dyer’s solution to this problem, to simply remember that nursery rhyme you drilled as a kid.

Paraphrasing from his tape series, “Real Magic:”

“Row, row, row YOUR boat: Notice that it doesn’t say your spouse’s boat, or your kid’s boat, or your neighbor’s boat… it says, YOUR boat
GENTLY: Keep rowing every day, but do it easily, don’t struggle
DOWN the stream: It doesn’t say, swim against the stream. It stresses that the right direction is down the stream, in the flow of the current.
MERRILY, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily: You choose how you approach every aspect of your life.
Life is but a DREAM: Or a nightmare…You choose.

How To Deal With Anxiety – And Use It To Your Advantage

Everyone deals with anxiety—to one degree or another.

Some of us squash it down, some of us develop coping strategies, but nonetheless all of us know that gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That sense that things could go wrong.

It’s exhausting. It takes away from the quality of your work, and more importantly, the quality of your life. You wake up on days you should be excited with a sense of dread, and it wears at you.

But anxiety doesn’t need to be your foe. In fact, you can use the same mechanisms that cause anxiety to drive you towards what you want. The brain functions that cause anxiety are incredibly powerful, you just have to know how to use them.

I train my clients not on how to cope with anxiety, but on how to use it to get what they want.

It all starts with understanding where anxiety comes from.

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4 Must-Read Books For Anyone Who Wants To Win

One of the fundamental steps to my system for getting what you want is that you must be committed to learning new skills. You can learn skills in a lot of different ways, but you will most commonly develop them by reading.

With this in mind, I’d like to issue a little challenge to those of you working to get what you want in you life:

I’ve put together a very short autumn reading list of books that teach skills anyone can benefit from. Read them all by the end of this autumn, and see what happens.

You can spend your fall watching football, eating pumpkin spice everything, and getting more or less nowhere, or you can challenge yourself to read these books and develop real skills.

If you do complete this reading list, I guarantee you’ll see the benefits, quickly, just in time for bonuses.

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Die first. It's easier that way.

All the time people tell me that they wish they had enough time to focus on what they truly want.

Most the time, I call bullshit.

We all know that there’s no such thing as “having the time” to do anything.

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Don’t Read This Book 100 Times!

Just a quick note.

An entrepreneur I met told me that he had the goal to read Think and Grow Rich 100 times in the next year.

Now, that’s my favorite book, and I certainly recommend everyone read it over and over again, but I also suggest that you do much more than just read it.

In school you might be well rewarded for being able to regurgitate what someone else thinks, but in life, it’s not what you think that matters.

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Simply the BEST affirmation…

As I wrote about in this article, if you aren’t doing them already, I highly suggest exploring using affirmations for top performance.

No matter what you do, there is simply no substitute for constantly reinforcing in your mind the ideas that lead you to feel how you want to feel, and take the actions that you want to take.

While the pro move is to build tailor-made affirmations into your daily practices, a good quote, conversation, or even song, can produce the same benefits.

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Recovering from Mindblowing

I’m still recovering from attending Deepak Chopra’s Sages & Scientists symposium in Beverly Hills last weekend.

People keep asking me how it was, and I say, it was fascinating, yet on the inside I’m still piecing it together.

Over some 20 hours we covered the gamut of science of the cosmos and quantum, to topics of consciousness.

From as big as this infinite ever-expanding universe that is made mostly of invisible matter.

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Best mental hack to be happier :)

We all want ways to feel better and better every day, and this is best.

The verifiable truth is that the way we feel is not dependent on what is happening in our lives, but how we choose to use our bodies and minds.

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Work to Live or Live to Work?

London last week was dead.

Traffic was, on some streets, non-existent.

At dinner at a popular private club, we shared the restaurant with only two other tables, the night before it was closing for a couple of weeks. At a late night spot typically overrun with party-goers, we took prime position in the lounge.

It was a stark reminder that, in Europe, people, actually, do take vacation.

It made me think of a book I read many years ago that had a deep impact on me at the time, Work To Live, by Joe Robinson.

The founder of the Work to Live campaign, Robinson had dedicated himself to lobbying for a minimum of three weeks vacation for all Americans.

As Robinson pointed out, relative to those in Europe who were getting 4-5 weeks vacation a year, many in America were barely getting 1-2 weeks, and of those who were, many were unable to even take them.

Back when I read his book, some five years into my career at Goldman Sachs, I scarcely remembered even taking a weekend off, let alone a week. To get 4-5 weeks off would have required open heart surgery.

At the time I accepted that was my trade. I had given up the reasonable rights of an employee to charge like a racehorse in a profession that didn’t slow down for weekends or vacations.

Truthfully, that was all good with me, but Robinson’s book helped me see some of my underlying drivers that “forced me” to keep charging, and the fact that many people who have far less choice in their careers were working harder and longer than ever before.

Over the years this notion drove an interesting dichotomy for me.

On the one hand, I am mission-driven. “Working” has never been a sacrifice to me, but what I like to do, a pursuit of meaning, driving what matters to me. Yet, on the other hand, to be truly effective, you must be taking time to reset.

Beyond that, it’s crucial to keep stepping back and getting clear on why you are working so hard, what you want to get from it, and how you weigh your time today relative to the time you hope to have in the future.

I don’t think of these topics as work-life balance, nor the false binary choice to either work to live or live to work, but about getting clear on what matters to you, and making deliberate choices about how you use the dwindling days of your life.

Time waits for no man, but she does let you choose how you date.

What’s Missing From the Legend of Icarus

In his book The Icarus Deception remarkable thinker and prolific author, Seth Godin, challenges us all to fly closer to the sun.

We all know the legend of Icarus, yet on the first page of his book, Seth identifies an aspect to the story that many of us don’t know.

In a bold plan to escape the prison of King Minos, Icarus’ father, Daedalus, crafts a pair of wings for himself and his son.

With the wings attached with wax that melts under heat, Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but, of course, as the legend goes, overcome with hubris the young boy soared too high, lost his wings, and fell to his death in the sea.

Stop Flying Too Low

The lesson we are taught from this story is not to dream too big, not to fly too high, but, as Godin points out, the part of the story that is often missed is that Daedalus also cautioned his son not to fly too low, as the sea below would steal the lift from his wings, and also lead to certain death.

Yet, that’s exactly what most of us do.

Fearful of flying too high, we settle for flying too low. Fearing what it means to stand out, we conform, doing the same things as everyone else, somehow hoping for a different result.

Godin implores us to see that our careers have changed, and putting your head down and working hard is the wrong answer.

“Your ability to follow instructions,” Godin notes, “is not the secret to your success,” and inside this wonderful book he encourages us all to see our role like artists, creating, and sharing our uniqueness with the world.

Follow Your Own Instructions

Even if that’s not how you perceive your career, the lesson still holds. To create a truly remarkable career and life, you must break free of the groupthink to cultivate different ways of thinking, and take different types of actions.

While we often perceive that flying closer to the sun requires great risk, even the grandest of plans comes together through a series of small steps, that are embodied in this simple two-step exercise:

1. Dream BIG. Bigger than big. What is your version of flying high? Close your eyes and imagine what this means for you. For a few minutes, watch a mental movie of you flying all the way there. Imagine what you are doing, who you have become, and most importantly, the feeling of soaring to new heights.

2. Focus on one step: From where you are today, imagine the one step that is now in front of you. Some of you might imagine that as a big step, such as your next promotion, and others might see it simply as the actions you are taking today. Now, with all the energy of reaching new heights, see yourself taking this step.

In achieving even the tallest goals, you don’t need to think beyond this, but to merely keep taking each step as it presents itself, step by step, flying higher and higher.

I recommend doing this exercise frequently (I do it daily), continuing to drill into your mind your highest vision for your life, and reinforcing your focus on CRUSHING the step right in front of you.

Do We Only Use 10% of Our Minds?

I don’t know about that, but I certainly know that many of us want to keep unlocking more of the power of our minds.

When I first began this work, I thought of getting what you want far more practically than I do today.

Back then I saw it as getting clear on what you want (goals), and building powerful processes and skills to get it.

Today, that’s still the foundation of my system, yet over the years I began to see the deeper force behind all these things is your mind.

I saw that, in order for you to be willing to dream up what you truly want, you must build that type of optimism and belief into your thinking.

That for you to take powerful actions, and to have the motivation to keep getting better and learning skills, you must condition your thinking to do so.

In all, behind these practical steps to getting what you want, it is our ways of thinking, feeling, and our motivation to take actions, that is driving all of the steps.

And, behind this, there is something else too, what we might call “Will.”

That is, quite simply, your skillfulness at getting your mind to unlock more of your potential.

We all know that our minds quite happily operate in our comfort zone of habit and redundant thinking, and left to their own devices will do more of the same.

Rather than go to the gym and give it your all, for instance, the mind does what it is comfortable doing, and it’s the will that trains the mind to stretch and do more.

Similarly, when you dream, when you really think big, even if you can stretch your mind far enough, you must be able to get it to stick there, to form a new comfort zone beyond where your old fears and inhibitions would kick in.

Training the mind to flex this way is more than just occasionally thinking positive, and, instead, like training any skill, you want to use your will to methodically train.

When you’re at the gym, by challenging yourself to reach new levels, you keep proving to your mind that it can comfortably keep expanding your capabilities.

In your work, you want to remind yourself that you can give more, do more, take better actions, and keep proving to your mind that you can achieve better results.

And, in every aspect of your life, you want to train yourself to see the limits that your mind had imposed and keep doing things that expand your view of what is possible for you and your life.

In going for what you truly want, you surely need clear goals, and powerful processes and skills, yet all of these things only become possible through unlocking the power of your mind.

To Grow Your Business: Grow

Coming out of a meeting with a business associate he met some four years ago, my client observed that he was still in the same place.

When they first met, my client’s business, having just gotten started, was less than half the size of the other guy’s, but today he is more than three times his size.

When I asked my client what had made the most difference, he said: “Simple. We keep winning because we keep getting better at everything.”

“We keep getting better at our processes, better at managing our teams, better at marketing, better at selling, my mindset is better, my skills are better, and hence our business keeps getting better,” he said.

There’s not a lot of mystery to success.

The willingness to obsessively keep the eye on the ball and advance it every day will get you most of the way, but the surefire way to crush your goals is to keep outgrowing them.

Sure, there’s some probability that you do nothing right and keep winning, or that you do everything right and end up failing, but, generally, if you’re getting better, you should keep getting better results.

But, that doesn’t happen haphazardly.

You don’t improve at golf by showing up and hitting balls, but by swinging the club better each time. It’s not about one swing being better than the last, but building a system of continuous improvement to keep improving your swing over time.

Doing this, you must constantly analyze your performance, tweak your actions, methodically practice, and seek new ways to grow and improve.

Approaching your business or career the same way, you want to get clear on ways you can improve, develop the metrics to measure your performance, and then build the systematic practices for consistently driving better actions and results.

Growing this way, you are surely more likely to outgrow your competitors, but that’s not the only reward.

As my client put it: “It’s not that my business has outgrown his, but I’ve grown, and that’s the greatest reward.”

Living the American Dream

On this special July 4th weekend, I am most grateful for America.

I wasn’t born here, but I do feel that I was born to live here.

I may not be what many people today associate with your typical immigrant, but like millions of others, I came to America to live my dream.

And I am living it. I know that might sound cheesy, but America has made it true for me.

Sure, my life isn’t always rainbows and unicorns, but I do what I want. And I get to earn my living doing what I love, sharing ideas that make other people’s lives better.

I couldn’t do this at any other time, nor anywhere else in the world, other than America.

This land that was founded on new thinking, innovation, and exceptionalism, is the place I feel I can truly be me.

A nation that prides itself on freedom and liberty, still today we stand on the greatest battlefield of optimism and hope in our uncertain world.

America has stumbled, and she’s a little more battered than just a bruised knee, but she is strong, resilient, and ever adaptable to change.

As a nation, we are far from perfect, we have many challenges, yet we still live in the greatest democracy that the world has seen.

There is no place on the planet where people even talk about something even close to the American Dream.

And, on this weekend, I’m very grateful to be living mine.

How about you? How are you celebrating living yours?

Do those things you're avoiding

A couple of years ago, I was stuck, stuck, stuck.

Having taken a number of years to “try” to finish my first book, I didn’t know how to keep taking steps forward.

Most days, waking up early to sit down and write felt more like Andy Dufresne crawling through the sewer to freedom in Shawshank Redemption, than it felt like doing what I wanted, but, I knew if I kept moving, I would find my way.

Around that time I read a book by Ryan Holiday, titled, The Obstacle is the Way.

I remember one of the stories at the beginning of the book of a King who wanted to test his people by hiding a stash of gold beneath a huge boulder that he left in the middle of a path.

Many of his subjects walked around or got stopped, but one man, seeing the obstacle was the way, found a lever, moved the boulder, and uncovered the gold.

Ryan’s book is full of similar tales that get you to think about your “struggles” differently, and, get you to move those boulders and find your way.

In psychology, there’s a notion that says: What we resist persists, but what we embrace has the power to transform us.

Take for instance, a basic fear, such as the fear that many people face, of public speaking. Their entire life they might go out of their way to avoid this fear, and hence it will persist.

Yet, inevitably, that one day will come when they are “forced” to stand and speak (perhaps at their own wedding), and, perhaps at a time that matters most, they will perform terribly.

Having failed to see that obstacle as a way to grow, and learn, and squash those old self-doubts, they will likely reinforce that old fear and continue to do their best at avoiding those things that are uncomfortable.

Like a river backed up by an enormous boulder blocking the flow, the things you avoid only cause you to stagnate.

Indeed, the obstacle is the way.

Peter Dinklage: So Lucky!

peter-dinklage-on-being-cast-as-tyrion_o_2886451

Last night, rereading this quote I shared with you about a year ago, I really felt something.

To be honest with you, it’s hard for me to put words around it, but the feeling is deep.

It’s a feeling that says, ‘Damn straight, that’s what it takes to make your own luck,’ but it’s also much more.

The notion that Peter Dinklage, standing at 4’5″, a man born with such a disadvantage to having a “normal” life got lucky, is not even laughable.

Last week walking through the Flatiron district, after meeting with an extremely successful entrepreneur who thinks his world is “coming to an end,” I passed a group of kids stuck in wheelchairs.

With big smiles on their faces, whirling around on the sidewalk, I thought to myself, this gig we call life is all about perspective.

Too many of us (me included), too often focus on what we don’t have, or how our lives can be better, yet how often do we reflect on how lucky we are?

Even these kids in wheelchairs are lucky to have been born into a first world country that gives them access to support and services.

They are lucky that they have parents who dedicate themselves to the extraordinary efforts required to take care of a wheelchair-bound kid.

They are lucky that it is only their limbs that aren’t working, and, from a quick observation, they still have their minds.

This thing we call “luck,” is purely a matter of perspective.

Lucky isn’t being born in a country like America, but being “gifted” the perspective to see what that means for you.

Lucky isn’t achieving everything you want, but to have the perspective to strive and become the greatest version of you.

Lucky isn’t to look around at our fellow human beings and think that they got “luckier” than us, but to have the perspective that you can make your own luck.

Kobe Bryant Showed Us What We All Have

Basketball legend, Kobe Bryant, said:

“I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.”

As far as I can tell, the most successful people on the planet aren’t somehow gifted with something that the rest of us lack.

Sure, some, like Kobe, are born with the genetics to be exceptional at what they do, but that’s never enough.

Michael Jordan didn’t win because he was magically built for the game, and neither did Kobe. They were world-class winners because they did what few people in the world are willing to do.

That is, they committed to be their best, and every day showed up and did it.

Some days that’s easy to do, but for many of us, many days, as far as I can tell, it’s a matter of skill at using your will.

When you don’t feel like getting up and diving into your day, how do you get yourself to do it?

When you are confronted with those obstacles that are put in all of our way, do you stall out, or do you persist and navigate your way through?

When things aren’t going your way, do you keep driving towards your goal, or do you find an excuse to back it off and chill?

These things don’t come easier to people who are born with more will, but to those people who, through practice and repetition, train their skill at using their will.

Each time you drive harder towards your goal, you grow a little more resolve.

Each time you power through an obstacle, you convince yourself that nothing can stop you.

Every morning that you choose to bounce out of bed and tear into your day, you are reinforcing the habit that builds all champions.

It matters less how you feel, what matters is, are you willing to train the will that it takes to win?

Ali: Build the mind of a winner

This article first appeared in BOSS Magazine

So often in life, winning is about doing away with the competition. Few knew this reality better than the late, great, Muhammad Ali. His actions provide some useful lessons to anyone who wants to get out and win. Here are six of the most important ones.

Train Your Mind

Ali didn’t just train his body in the gym, although that was clearly important. He did much more by training his mind. Often, that is the only difference between a winner and the runner-up. The person who trains his or her mind always has an advantage over one who doesn’t.

It’s something that many people in business simply don’t recognize. Technical skills, like jabbing in the case of Ali, or analyzing companies in the case of bankers, go only so far. What distinguishes the truly successful is mental toughness and the ways in which they use their minds to win.

Use Your Environment

It’s not hard to see that someone training in the boxing gym from an early age will quickly develop mental strength. The regimen involves getting hit repeatedly by an opponent and yet still coming back for more, again and again and again. That alone takes mental strength—something conditioned on Ali by his environment.

Consider your job and ask yourself, how can you use the stresses of your environment to build mental toughness? Got a tough boss? Use him or her to harden you up. Face a lot of on the job stress? Take time each night after you get home from work and mentally prepare your mind to deal with the obstacles you think you will face tomorrow. You don’t have to get hit in the head every day to get mentally strong.

See Yourself as Invincible

Famously, Ali said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” Is this the reason he is still lauded as the best ever pugilist?

Ali trained himself to believe that winning was inevitable: a sure thing, a forgone conclusion. There is no one harder to defeat than a person who believes that they are invincible. Think about that.

When your opponent doesn’t just think they can win, but just knows it, then they will keep going until the job is done. That was Ali.

What would you do, if you just knew you were going to succeed, that success was inevitable? Probably a lot more than most others.

Exploit Your Opponent’s Weak Minds

Better than just going in knowing he’d win, Ali waged psychological warfare on his opponents. He’d tell them again and again how he was going to destroy them in the ring.

His combined exuberance and eloquence were sure to raise nagging doubts in the mind of an opponent. That wasn’t just showmanship on Ali’s part, it was part of the strategy. Or put more simply, those boasts were an artillery barrage on the psyche of his opponents before he’d even stepped into the ring. By the time Ali arrived, the softening up job was already half done.

Now, I’m certainly not advocating that you taunt your colleagues or competitors, but do consider, how can you use your superior mental strength to exploit their situations to your advantage?

Use Your Opponent’s Strength Against Them

Ali wasn’t the largest heavyweight boxer in the field. He faced men who were much bigger and stronger than he was.

What did he do? He used their strength against them. Consider his match against George Foreman. Ali simply allowed Foreman to keep swinging and wearing himself out. Sure that meant Ali had to take a few hits to the body, but when the exhaustion slowed Foreman to a crawl, Ali finished him off.

Again, I’m not suggesting that you let your opponents keep swinging at you without fighting back, but consider how this idea applies to say negotiation. Fatigue your opponent, throw up roadblocks, find ways to wear them down and get what you want.

Have the Will to See it Through

Ali’s inner strength allowed him to take on the United States draft board when he refused to go fight in Vietnam. Others dodged the draft, or fled. He did not. He simply came out and took whatever was coming at him, stayed true to himself and his beliefs. He paid a price for that. But I don’t think he ever doubted that what he was doing was right.

Ali once said, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”

To build mental strength takes time, effort, and most of all, will. You can’t expect to hit the gym once and build a rock solid body, and you can’t expect to think tough once a year and build mental strength. Practice this in everything you do; make mental toughness not something that you do, but a part of who you are.