Our approach at Unbeatable Mind is to test a theory on ourselves, implement what works, and then discard what doesn’t.
Here are some universal laws to reflect upon. You will recognize many of these from your Sunday school class, and you may be able to add others to the list: The law of cause and effect: this law states that for every cause there is an effect. It is also known in the East as karma. Your resource is to study Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The law of abundance: this law states that the world has enough for everyone who abides by this law. Your primary resource for this law is the Bible. The law of winning in your mind first, before acting: this law says that you will achieve victory every time if you first see it, say it, and believe it in your mind. Your primary resources for this law are Unbeatable Mind and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The law of attraction: that what you fix your mind on you will attract in life. Your primary resource for this law is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne . The law of receiving: that you receive in proportion to the value you deliver in life. Your primary resources are to study Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Your primary resource is the New Testaments of Jesus. The law of surrender: this law states that instead of pushing against the tide, surrender to it, and you will find enlightenment and peace. Your primary resources for this law are to study Buddha and the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. The law of forgiveness: this law says that if you forgive yourself and others, you will release negativity and find happiness. Your resource is to study the life of Nelson Mandela. The law of nonattachment: this law says to let go of attachment to material things, your ideas, and ultimately to life itself for lasting contentment. The resource is to study the writings of the Dalai Lama. The law of nonresistance: this law is similar to nonattachment, but it specifically applies to nonviolence. Fighting violence with violence should be a last resort and only done in self-defense. Your resources are to study the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The law of focus: this law says that what you focus on with intensity and duration will come to pass. Your resources for this law are Unbeatable Mind and Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich Now let’s turn our attention to the practical matter of how one goes about examining beliefs to clear them up to align with universal laws. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level All creativity and dedication aside, after we’ve tried, some obstacles may turn out to be impossible to overcome. Some actions are rendered impossible, some paths impassable. Some things are bigger than us. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because we can turn that obstacle upside down, too, simply by using it as an opportunity to practice some other virtue or skill—even if it is just learning to accept that bad things happen, or practicing humility. It’s an infinitely elastic formula: In every situation, that which blocks our path actually presents a new path with a new part of us. If someone you love hurts you, there is a chance to practice forgiveness. If your business fails, now you can practice acceptance. If there is nothing else you can do for yourself, at least you can try to help others. Problems, as Duke Ellington once said, are a chance for us to do our best. Just our best, that’s it. Not the impossible. We must be willing to roll the dice and lose.
We have it within us to be the type of people who try to get things done, try with everything we’ve got and, whatever verdict comes in, are ready to accept it instantly and move on to whatever is next. Not everyone accepts their bad start in life. They remake their bodies and their lives with activities and exercise. They prepare themselves for the hard road. Do they hope they never have to walk it? Sure. But they are prepared for it in any case. Are you? Nobody is born with a steel backbone. We have to forge that ourselves. We craft our spiritual strength through physical exercise, and our physical hardiness through mental practice (mens sana in corpore sano—sound mind in a strong body). This is strikingly similar to what the Stoics called the Inner Citadel, that fortress inside of us that no external adversity can ever break down. An important caveat is that we are not born with such a structure; it must be built and actively reinforced. During the good times, we strengthen ourselves and our bodies so that during the difficult times, we can depend on it. We protect our inner fortress so it may protect us. To Roosevelt, life was like an arena and he was a gladiator. In order to survive, he needed to be strong, resilient, fearless, ready for anything. And he was willing to risk great personal harm and expend massive amounts of energy to develop that hardiness. You’ll have far better luck toughening yourself up than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a world that is—at best—indifferent to your existence. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph Emotional resiliency means that you can bounce back quickly from a setback. It is a skill that can be trained, just like mental toughness. The process is simply stated but takes time and patience to develop:
Witness the negative emotional reaction, and then interdict it to observe the root emotion beneath it. Lean into the root emotion to experience it fully, ensuring that you are avoiding denial or transference. Transmute the negative emotion to its positive sister; for example, fear becomes courage, anger becomes commitment, jealousy becomes appreciation, shame becomes pride, and despair becomes surrender. Engage the new emotion with imagery and self-talk that supports it and blocks the old emotion. Then get moving again by taking action or taking your eyes off yourself and putting them on a teammate. The positive momentum will take you to a new, more positive, emotional place. It is much easier to be resilient when the Four Attitudes of Emotional Resiliency are burned into your character. The first attitude is to have self-esteem. Self-esteem is the emotional state of feeling worthy and respected by others. Low self-esteem can come from childhood abandonment, volatile environments where your voice is not heard, or outright abuse. If these attributes exist in your consciousness, then it is imperative that you get some therapeutic help and go deep into the silence practices to taste the underlying goodness inside of you. Second, resiliency is assured if you have the attitude of being oriented toward others versus just yourself, as our second discipline of service seeks to develop. In other words, if you are service oriented, then you tend to be more emotionally resilient. This character trait shows up at the fifth plateau of consciousness development (see the afterword), associated with a world-centric, service-oriented view. Victor Frankl describes this attitude in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his experiences in a Jewish concentration camp. Victor survived by finding meaning through tending to others’ needs over his own…and then teaching the power of this simple truth. The third attitude is holding a positive mind-set and optimistic outlook, which we have already discussed at length. It should be no surprise that a positive, optimistic attitude impacts one’s emotional resiliency. Finally, resiliency is ensured when you have an attitude of self-control informed by a deep certainty of your “why.” When climber Aaron Roth found himself alone in the desert, literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, he finally cut his own arm off to save his life. He did it because his “why” was to survive so he could be there for his unborn daughter, showing his orientation toward others. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level “Life should not be a journey to the grave,” said Hunter S. Thompson, “with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a ride!’” Amazing what you can do if you want to change your life. If you don’t, your life is just going to stay the same until it eventually gets worse. The development of mental control is the foundation for building an unbeatable mind that will not fail at any worthy goal or task, including a Spartan Race. I’m not talking about developing psychic powers like bending spoons. I’m talking about learning to block out distractions so you can focus enough to operate at an elite level, whatever your goals may be. Your monkey mind refers primarily to your rational, analytical “left brain” mind, especially if it is untrained through higher education and deep concentration. It is estimated that this part of our brain accounts for roughly 12 percent of our total thinking power. The other 88 percent lies in our creative subconscious, our “right brain,” and is poorly engaged by the majority of people. The first step for developing mental control is silencing yourself enough so you can witness what is going on in your head. As you witness, you gain awareness of the external and internal influences that cause the chatter. The silence is the first layer of training for the mind. Gaining the space to witness our thoughts tames them in the process. We begin to bring our mind back under our control, allowing ourselves longer periods of focus. Then, we have the possibility of removing negative distractions and ensuring that our psychology supports our physiology. Sometimes it’s as simple as breathing deeply, holding for a period, and then releasing slowly. Epictetus, the great Stoic, defined wealth not as having numerous and extravagant possessions, but as having few wants. When you’ve been to hell and back, food, water, and shelter will suffice to make you happy. It was only after I was broke that I started to appreciate every dollar I had. Working hard all week makes us thankful for Friday. Winter makes us appreciate spring. We need an appropriate frame of reference in order to be happy. The key to true happiness, therefore, is regularly recalibrating your frame of reference. It makes life simpler, healthier, and more enjoyable. Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life Concentration training requires daily effort. The good news is that you can do enjoyable things to deepen concentration, such as breathing, yoga, and reading. Further, the better you get, the easier it is to “practice” concentration in other areas we would not typically think of, such as in physical training sessions or when playing a sport. In a crunch situation, I recommend you collapse your concentration to your breathing while maintaining relaxed awareness of the surroundings. Breathing deeply will greatly reduce the stress, slow your heart rate, and bring your nervous system back into balance. The mind will remain focused as your body comes back into balance. Then you can make better decisions in the midst of the chaos, danger, or the debilitating effect of fear. This is why breath awareness and control is the number one tool for Unbeatable Mind students who challenge themselves and push the envelope. practice doesn’t just reduce stress and enhance concentration—it has some other powerful benefits as well. First, it is important to understand that breathing works on two levels in our bodies. It strengthens and makes our physical bodies healthier. Second, it charges and balances our energy body, making that healthier and more powerful as well. The energy body is that system of energetic pathways that includes channels on each side of the spine that transmit energy up and down the spine (nadis) and points where the energy channels intersect as they spiral back and forth around the spine (chakras). The energy body is quite elaborate and has been mapped in great detail, yet it is mostly out of reach of Western scientific instruments at this time. There are three steps to breathing for optimal physical and energy health: Relearning how to breathe deeply through your nose into the diaphragm Training to do this naturally so it becomes your normal breathing pattern when awake Learning to direct the breath to anchor and trigger razor’s edge performance; when triggered you will easily increase energy, reduce stress, deepen concentration, control fear and tap into greater willpower. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Every morning, I always make sure I get my sixty minutes of pain—it releases all types of post-hard-work pleasure chemicals and the rest of my day feels easy in comparison. Periodically, I need to take it a step further—I have to push the absolute limits of my body. I need to go on a ten-hour bike ride or a middle-of-the-night hike with Andy. I know I have successfully reset my frame of reference when I collapse on the concrete and it feels better than a Tempur-Pedic mattress.
The Stoics of ancient Greece believed that the greatest obstacle was not death, not pain, not suffering, but cowardice. By training themselves to accept what they could not change and to be courageous in front of any obstacle, they eliminated their fear of death. Tibetan monks identified the lack of control over the mind as the greatest obstacle. So the monks spend days making sand mandala paintings, and when they’re done, they sweep away their work with a broom. It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey and the process that gives them the opportunity to practice awareness, focus, and control. I discovered a truth that would guide much of my life thereafter: when you sign up for something, you’re forced to train for it. Just like in a business: you’re forced to work. Just like having a kid: you’re forced to take care of it. All of a sudden, you become accountable. Our Everest-like highs in life are fleeting, if we are lucky enough to achieve them at all. They are a time for reverence and humility, not fist pumps and chest bumps. Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life I began to experiment by combining CrossFit, Ninjitsu and Ashtanga into my training regimen and toughness has three secrets—controlling the body, the mind, and the emotions.
The major lesson I gained from my journey into Zen was that I could gain control over my mind if I practiced. The key was to learn to be silent, truly, in your mind silent. When you are silent, you can then witness the mind in action. In doing so you begin to separate your identity from “the thoughts” and get acquainted with that part of you watching the thoughts. That space between the thought and the watcher—your witness—is where the magic is. Absent that space, efforts to develop concentration, confidence, creativity, and spirit fall short. Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. —Sun Tzu Step 1: The first step is to focus your mind and prevent it from running all over the place. Step 2: As you discipline your monkey mind, you will begin to learn to connect with your internal witness. This is that part of you that is untethered from your ego. As you connect and identify with your witness, versus your ego, you will begin to protect your mind from negative and defeating influences. Those influences include fear-based thoughts, negative internal feelings, and negative external influences. Rooting out negative emotions, beliefs, and behaviors that will hold you back can take much time and effort. Step 3: This step is to feed your unfettered mind with super-food for success. This food is in the form of powerful, positive imagery as well as positive emotions directed toward your desired future states, skills, and victories. Step 4: In this step you activate a daily training plan to nurture your internal vision through repeated practice and to prepare for the fifth and final step, which is to… Step 5: Take massive action, and recruit like-minded teammates to align with your vision and help you win your missions, every time. Fish Bowl Guided Visualization Find a comfortable place to sit in a chair, on a cushion, or on a stool. The key is to keep your spine straight and to avoid discomfort that will capture your mind. Begin the practice by closing your eyes and scanning your body from toes to head. This is a sensitivity awareness drill that can also be done as a stand-alone awareness deepening exercise. It will bring your mental attention to parts of your body one at a time. Now you are ready to clear your mind completely using the fish bowl technique. In your mind, imagine your skull as a fish bowl and your thoughts are the cloudy, murky water (not too far from the truth, I might add!). Your breathing is the filter. Each deep breath you take in and out is a cleansing breath that begins to clear the murky water of your mind. You begin to sense the water of your mind getting cleaner and clearer as you breathe. After ten breaths it is mostly clean; after twenty it is as pure as a natural spring on a sunny day. As you imagine the clarity of your mind, you realize that what you are witnessing is a “no mind” state. In this state your mind is unspoiled by thinking. You maintain that state as long as you can. If you start thinking again, your fish bowl gets dirty and you can recommit to cleaning it. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Perspective is everything. That is, when you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you. Fear is debilitating, distracting, tiring, and often irrational. Pericles understood this completely, and he was able to use the power of perspective to defeat it. The Greeks understood that we often choose the ominous explanation over the simple one, to our detriment. That we are scared of obstacles because our perspective is wrong—that a simple shift in perspective can change our reaction entirely. The task, as Pericles showed, is not to ignore fear but to explain it away. Take what you’re afraid of—when fear strikes you—and break it apart.
Remember: We choose how we’ll look at things. We retain the ability to inject perspective into a situation. We can’t change the obstacles themselves—that part of the equation is set—but the power of perspective can change how the obstacles appear. How we approach, view, and contextualize an obstacle, and what we tell ourselves it means, determines how daunting and trying it will be to overcome. The way we look out at the world changes how we see these things. Is our perspective truly giving us perspective or is it what’s actually causing the problem? That’s the question. What we can do is limit and expand our perspective to whatever will keep us calmest and most ready for the task at hand. Think of it as selective editing—not to deceive others, but to properly orient ourselves. And it works. Small tweaks can change what once felt like impossible tasks. Suddenly, where we felt weak, we realize we are strong. With perspective, we discover leverage we didn’t know we had. Our emotions Our judgments Our creativity Our attitude Our perspective Our desires Our decisions Our determination Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can’t actually influence is wasted—self-indulgent and self-destructive. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist. So go ahead, feel it. Just don’t lie to yourself by conflating emoting about a problem and dealing with it. Because they are as different as sleeping and waking. You can always remind yourself: I am in control, not my emotions. I see what’s really going on here. I’m not going to get excited or upset. We defeat emotions with logic, or at least that’s the idea. Logic is questions and statements.
It might help to say it over and over again whenever you feel the anxiety begin to come on: I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. Or try Marcus’s question: Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness? As Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, “When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?” Another way of putting it: Does getting upset provide you with more options? Sometimes it does. But in this instance? No, I suppose not. Well, then. If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure.
You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming—or possibly thriving because of—them. Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness—these reactions are functions of our perceptions. We can stop seeing the “problems” in front of us as problems. We can learn to focus on what things really are. There are a few things to keep in mind when faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. We must try: To be objective To control emotions and keep an even keel To choose to see the good in a situation To steady our nerves To ignore what disturbs or limits others To place things in perspective To revert to the present moment To focus on what can be controlled This is how you see the opportunity within the obstacle. It does not happen on its own. It is a process—one that results from self-discipline and logic. And that logic is available to you. You just need to deploy it. Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been. —MARCUS AURELIUS We decide what we will make of each and every situation. We decide whether we’ll break or whether we’ll resist. We decide whether we’ll assent or reject. No one can force us to give up or to believe something that is untrue (such as, that a situation is absolutely hopeless or impossible to improve). Our perceptions are the thing that we’re in complete control of. They can throw us in jail, label us, deprive us of our possessions, but they’ll never control our thoughts, our beliefs, our reactions. Which is to say, we are never completely powerless. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph |
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