Visualization is an incredibly powerful technique that will enhance your mental strength, allow you to tap into more of your mind power, and allow you to accomplish more challenging tasks. It is the law of “win in your mind first,” and it is no surprise that great inventors, entrepreneurs, and athletes all use some form of visualization to create their desired outcomes in their minds while they act powerfully in the world. It is time we made this a routine skill. Visualization is the creation or re-creation of an external experience in your mind. Mental projection is visualizing a personal future state or victory. Visualized images create energy around a desired future experience before you experience it “for real.” I call this type of visualization a Future Me visualization because you are envisioning a future “ideal” version of yourself. You create the event in your mind well before it happens. The visualized event is then charged with emotions and vivid colors, sounds, smell, and tastes. You will reinforce those visual images through repeated practice sessions. This process plants a powerful seed in your subconscious mind of the potential energy for the event. Then as you work on the goal, your subconscious mind goes about supporting you with the resources necessary to nurture the event to its fruition. In a sense you could say that visualization rewires the System 1 brain to align with your goals. The second form of visualization is a Mental Rehearsal, whereby you practice a skill or prepare for an event in your mind. A SEAL platoon will “dirt dive” a mission to set the patterns for winning in the mind prior to executing it for real. The SEAL operator will walk through a dive profile on dry land while visualizing every detail. In this manner he performs all the major elements of the dive before ever getting wet. This was an important part of my mission prep when I was at SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1. The mini-sub dives were often six to ten hours in duration replete with complicated navigation patterns. Dirt diving the missions prior to launch proved crucial during the mission when fatigue and Murphy’s Law reared their heads. The mental rehearsal implanted the route in both conscious and subconscious minds and provided a memory aid as well as subtle physiological cues. Additionally, it helped identify potential challenges before the mission hit the reality of the deep face-to-face. Both forms of visualization can be performed from the first person or third person perspective. What I mean by this is that they can be imaged from your subjective frame as if you had a helmet camera on, or imaged from your objective frame as if watching yourself in a movie. Either method is effective; however, most people start with the objective frame and then migrate to the subjective frame as they gain experience. Visualization leads to improved concentration in that the practice of visualization requires you to develop greater powers of concentration due to the effort required to construct and maintain the visual imagery. In the early stages, the training can be frustrating, especially if you have difficulty holding an image in your mind for long. You may be more kinesthetic or auditory in nature; thus developing the capacity to visualize will take patience. You will experience enhanced confidence as the result of the training. When you can clearly visualize an event skill in advance, your mental practice is accepted as real by your body. Though not as visceral as the physical doing of the event, the visual practice is still felt internally and leads to more confidence every time you do it. This translates to more confidence as actual improvements in the skill accrue. Next, closely related to confidence is the greater emotional control you will experience. If you fear performing to some degree, which we all do (especially for scary things such as public speaking), visualizing the performance repeatedly will dampen that fear response when you perform the event live. A final note on visualization: When done well, a visualized event involves the sensations of feelings, emotions, and sounds to support the imagery. The objective is to create as realistic a mental representation as possible, as if you are really experiencing it. That is why it is really important to ensure that your image is positive, powerful, and as near to perfect as possible. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Generally speaking there are three mini-brains that have evolved over time, each building on top of the other to form the brain we have today. These mini-brains developed along our human chronological timeline and have different roles. My zoo metaphor comes from the fact that scientists favor labels representing what they believe to be our animalistic past. I took the liberty to continue the trend so as to not feel left out. The Reptilian Brain is formed from the brain stem and cerebellum and is our oldest brain. It is almost identical to a reptile’s brain, hence its name. The reptilian brain regulates basic life functions like breathing, heart rate, and respiration (from the brain stem) and balance, posture, and movement coordination (from the cerebellum). It is also responsible for hardwiring behaviors from memories—so this is where deeply rooted training information is stored and retrieved. It may also be safe to assume that this brain is a component of the subconscious mind. The Mammalian Brain evolved some 300 million years ago, so you probably don’t remember it happening. It is called the mammalian brain because it is similar to the most evolved part of all mammals’ brains. The prominent behaviors it regulates are the fight, flight, or freeze response and our need to feed and reproduce. It is also responsible for emotional behavior and regulating chemical and hormonal activity. When you get depressed, you can blame the mammalian brain. But you can then thank it for regulating your body temperature, blood sugar levels, digestion, hormonal balance, and other important things. The mammalian brain houses the pituitary gland, which is the master hormone gland, and the pineal gland, which regulates sleep. It also includes the hippocampus, which is your memory sorting and storing tool, and the amygdala, which sifts and filters incoming information for threats and opportunities. This sub-brain is largely responsible for the negativity bias so prominent in the human condition. The fear wolf spends most of his time lurking here and sending fear signals to the third sub-brain. The Monkey Brain is the most recent addition to the zoo and is the seat of awareness, cognition, problem solving, and creativity. It is called the neocortex and is the “command center,” where we reason, plan, intellectualize, analyze, verbalize, and learn. It allows us to interpret events and react to them accordingly. This new brain of ours is so complex that it would do it an injustice to try to summarize it here. When someone says you are operating out of “right brain” or “left brain” thinking, they are referring to the hemispheres of the neocortex. This part of our brain differentiates us from other mammals and is one of the reasons we have such enormous potential. The frontal lobe of the neocortex is your “executive office,” where intent, focus, and willpower conspire to bring you greatness or misery. In your teens this area is not fully developed, which explains why you may have made poor decisions fueled by your emotional mammalian brain. Many scientists like to reduce the mind and consciousness to correlates of chemical releases and electrical firings in the brain. Don’t believe them for a minute. Those are simply by-products of the mind performing the processes of thinking, sensing, perceiving, dreaming, and feeling. Your experience of a conscious mind certainly has chemical and electrical correlates, but it is a mistake to conflate consciousness with mere brain electrochemical signaling. Studies of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences support this idea. The yogis and other Eastern spiritual traditions believe that the mind exists outside of the brain and even includes the heart, belly, and spinal column, as well as a connection to a universal intelligence of some form. I believe that consciousness transcends yet includes the matter and functions of the brain itself, though it requires the brain to function in our human form. To connect with this mind, what I have called the witness, you must train your neocortex to acknowledge and comply with it. Only then can your witness become the zoo keeper and direct the activities of the animalistic brain. The problem is that we have largely denied the witness in our culture, instead identifying almost exclusively with thoughts in our brain as being the main thing. The neocortex doesn’t want to give up the power we have anointed it with. Time and space loosen their hold and slow down or warp. In this manner the frontal lobe becomes your “flow activator” to allow the merge, dissolving past and future into the moment. Training so that you can activate the flow state at will does take time. The witness process and sacred silence practices are the best way that I know of to activate this training. As soon as you begin, you will note that the animals running amok in your mind take notice and line up to support you instead of fight. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Put simply, our identity is made up of thoughts (opinions).
Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering. For simplicity, our psychological thoughts are nearly all of our thoughts that have opposites. This is because if a thought has an opposite, then we will almost certainly consider one side to be “good” and its opposite to be “bad”. For example, if we think it is “good” to be rich, funny, skinny, and intelligent, then we would consider it “bad” to be poor, boring, overweight, and unintelligent. Our minds tend to be filled with the same psychological thoughts repeating themselves over and over again. Functional thoughts are mostly answers to the question “How do I do that?” Functional thoughts determine how to build something, how to get somewhere, or how to solve a particular problem at work. Purely functional thoughts don’t create suffering, only psychological thoughts do. However, most of the time, our functional thoughts are tainted by psychological thoughts. In any moment when we have no psychological thoughts, or we don’t believe our psychological thoughts, what remains is the experience of the present moment. When we don’t have or believe the thoughts that create our unwanted emotions, none of these emotions are experienced, and we get to experience the present moment.R The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time. This feeling is similar to the sense of wonder and innocent curiosity that young children have. A Guide to The Present Moment It doesn’t matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now. The implications of our obstacle are theoretical—they exist in the past and the future. We live in the moment. And the more we embrace that, the easier the obstacle will be to face and move. You can take the trouble you’re dealing with and use it as an opportunity to focus on the present moment. To ignore the totality of your situation and learn to be content with what happens, as it happens. To have no “way” that the future needs to be to confirm your predictions, because you didn’t make any. To let each new moment be a refresh wiping clear what came before and what others were hoping would come next. You’ll find the method that works best for you, but there are many things that can pull you into the present moment: Strenuous exercise. Unplugging. A walk in the park. Meditation. Getting a dog—they’re a constant reminder of how pleasant the present is.
One thing is certain. It’s not simply a matter of saying: Oh, I’ll live in the present. You have to work at it. Catch your mind when it wanders—don’t let it get away from you. Discard distracting thoughts. Leave things well enough alone—no matter how much you feel like doing otherwise. But it’s easier when the choice to limit your scope feels like editing rather than acting. Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.” There is plenty else going on right here to care about any of that. It’s our preconceptions that are the problem. They tell us that things should or need to be a certain way, so when they’re not, we naturally assume that we are at a disadvantage or that we’d be wasting our time to pursue an alternate course. When really, it’s all fair game, and every situation is an opportunity for us to act. It’s a beautiful idea. Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth. “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is not a cliché but fact. The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph The first key to the Spartan lifestyle is keeping to the big picture. It’s not healthy to get too focused on any one aspect of your life. If you do, it will almost inevitably be to the detriment of others. Healthy foods, healthy attitude, healthy relationships, healthy mind, and healthy body together define a complete Spartan lifestyle—the Spartan code in action. We want to be popular, good at sports, make good grades, receive parental approval. But we don’t necessarily know how to achieve that. The answer to all of these desires generally comes down to work harder. Practice more hours, study more hours, put more effort into changing your habits. It’s not normal in our society to go out for a run on a Sunday morning and push yourself to the point where the pain is etched into your face. Similarly, it’s not normal for a business executive to wake up every morning and knock out one hundred burpees. It’s not normal, that is, unless you are getting in shape for a special event, or unless you are training for some specific goal. Pain serves a purpose, though. It keeps us from touching hot stoves, from stabbing ourselves with forks when we eat, from biting our tongues off, and from otherwise injuring ourselves. If we didn’t know pain, we would never be satisfied with simple pleasures such as eating, resting, and living.
Learn to Dose Your Pain Here’s a quick checklist for internalizing the process of the “dosing of pain,” the proper management of time, and the fast decision-making of the Rule of Upside Downside. Realize that time is the most precious asset we have. Once you truly understand this, you learn how to make sure you don’t waste any. All of your time is used in a way that maximizes the achievement of your goals. Understand that time passes whether we like it or not. Every second another second is gone. When you truly understand that, it helps you in those moments when you’re uncomfortable. You know you can handle it if it’s for a greater good. Why does quick decision making matter here? You don’t want to waste more time than required in making decisions. This will sound harsh but none of us know if we will be here one minute from now. If you understand that, you won’t want to waste time being unproductive. If you can make accurate decisions quickly, you have time to enjoy the fruits of those decisions. I always try to look at the upside versus the downside of each decision. You should value: Health first Family second Business third Fun fourth I’ll trudge through endurance events for days on end, but I’ll make trivial and life-changing decisions alike on a dime. While this may seem contradictory, it reflects another aspect of the Spartan-ness. We are decisive, but we’re more than that. We are decisive fast. To “Spartan up!” you must decide things quickly. Wait too long, and you’ll lose. If you are losing, lose fast, get it over with, move over, and start winning. It’s a lesson I learned on Wall Street many times: sometimes you need to cut your losses quickly so you’re not totally fucked later on. The Rule of Upside Downside holds that before deciding on a course of action, you should think quickly about the positive effects and negative effects of it, weigh them, and decide. I’ve always been really good at making quick decisions. What’s my downside? This is the question I ask myself dozens of times per day. I do the work because this upside-downside analysis is constantly going through my head. And pretty much every time, the result of the analysis is: Work harder. Be better. Do more. Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life A few years ago, in the middle of the financial crisis, the artist and musician Henry Rollins managed to express this deeply human obligation better than millennia of religious doctrine ever have: People are getting a little desperate. People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic. Not that you need to martyr yourself. See, when we focus on others, on helping them or simply providing a good example, our own personal fears and troubles will diminish. With fear or heartache no longer our primary concern, we don’t have time for it. Shared purpose gives us strength.
Sometimes when we are personally stuck with some intractable or impossible problem, one of the best ways to create opportunities or new avenues for movement is to think: If I can’t solve this for myself, how can I at least make this better for other people? Take it for granted, for a second, that there is nothing else in it for us, nothing we can do for ourselves. How can we use this situation to benefit others? How can we salvage some good out of this? If not for me, then for my family or the others I’m leading or those who might later find themselves in a similar situation. What doesn’t help anyone is making this all about you, all the time. Why did this happen to me? What am I going to do about this? You’ll be shocked by how much of the hopelessness lifts when we reach that conclusion. Because now we have something to do. Stop pretending that what you’re going through is somehow special or unfair. Whatever trouble you’re having—no matter how difficult—is not some unique misfortune picked out especially for you. It just is what it is. When really, there is a world beyond our own personal experience filled with people who have dealt with worse. We’re not special or unique simply by virtue of being. We’re all, at varying points in our lives, the subject of random and often incomprehensible events. Reminding ourselves of this is another way of being a bit more selfless. You can always remember that a decade earlier, a century earlier, a millennium earlier, someone just like you stood right where you are and felt very similar things, struggling with the very same thoughts. They had no idea that you would exist, but you know that they did. And a century from now, someone will be in your exact same position, once more. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph There’s strength, and then there’s Spartan strength, the ability to commit to working for a long period of time without any concrete evidence that it will pay off—doing it because you want to, not because you have to.
Think of it this way: Spartan strength is the determination that arises out of true commitment. Grit is the assertion and application of will to fulfill that commitment. Spartan strength emerges out of a psychic alignment to get something done. That alignment is determined and unbreakable: this is just what is going to be. Grit emerges out of the force of will that manifests action. Grit is execution. Grit actually gets shit done. Spartan strength and grit are what we’re looking for in the Death Race and in the Spartan Race. We’ve determined that they’re the most important factors in personal success. To succeed at life we must be able to do that which sucks: working late on a weekend in order to meet a deadline; doing what your boss tells you to do even if you don’t agree with it; studying for days to score high on midterms. These activities are not fun—they suck—but you have to do them in order to succeed. If you approach life the right way, you can turn that which, from the outside, looks like it will suck or be miserable into something fun to overcome. We learn to be gritty, or we learn not to be gritty. The alarm goes off at 5:00 A.M.—what do you do? Believe it or not, our success in life often hangs in the balance. If we go through life hitting the snooze button, our chances for success plunge. We are dramatically decreasing our odds of success in life. When successful executives are studied, one of the basic common denominators found is that they all wake up early and work out. None of them are hitting snooze. They all know that if you snooze, you lose. Developing grit is easier said than done, but there are specific strategies to do so, which include: Making a commitment, one that will make life better for you and for those around you. Determining what kinds of bullshit usually gets in the way of your fulfilling said commitment. Learning how to recognize the bullshit when it sneaks up on you and telling it to go away by focusing solely on the task at hand. Executing the task at hand as if your ass is on fire. Recommitting and doing it all again! Make sure the goal in question matters. Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life 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 |
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