PPI #155: Mentally Fragile to Mentally STRONG! You have to listen to this!

Talent alone will not make you successful. You must also have the mental strength to endure the hard times. And today I'm going to teach you how to become mentally strong so that you're unshakable, resilient, and have the confidence to overcome anything.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and I've been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country. And I'm also the author of two best selling books, including the Three Alarms. So the first thing that you need to do if you want to become mentally strong is that you have to connect with your why? What is your deep purpose, your deep reason for doing whatever it is that you're doing? It can't just be, for example, about making a lot of money. What do you want to use the money for? What do you want to do with that money? What experiences do you want to have? What people do you want to help with? What do you want to do in the world? How can you be of service to others? What is your deep fulfilling why that runs deeper than what somebody might see or what you might first say at the very surface level? I'll give you an example. When I was helping build Skype in the very early days, our tagline was the whole world can talk for free. That went well beyond the company, well beyond what we were doing in terms of providing a piece of software to help people talk over the Internet. We were actually democratizing telephony. We were joining the entire world together, letting people talk and have conversations who had been separated for years and hadn't even seen each other for a very long time. And that why that went deeper than just providing a piece of software. That why created this revolutionary spirit inside us, inside the company. It made people love the brand because they felt that we were doing what we intended to do, get the whole world to talk for free. Look at Nike as another example. Nike isn't just a seller of sportswear. What Nike wants to do is unleash the competitive athlete that's within all of us. Within all of us is a competitive spirit that is just waiting to be empowered, unleashed and set free. And by connecting to that deeper why, when you go into a Nike shop, you don't go in there thinking that you're just going to buy a pair of shoes or some clothes. You look around and you get this sense of, gosh, I think I might win that race or I might enter that marathon or I might finally participate in that swimming contest. It takes you to a different level because you're connecting with that deeper why and that is one of the first things that you need to do to become mentally strong is to think, why am I doing this? Why? And why is this so important? Why is why do you need to connect to that deeper why? Because in the hard times, if you just have a superficial reason for doing whatever it is that you're doing, that won't be enough to sustain you. That won't be enough to carry you through, to make you want to persevere through those challenging moments, overcome those obstacles, and to continue on whatever your journey is. But if you do have a deep why, a why that extends much deeper than the surface, that perhaps provides service to others and impacts the world in a positive way, then when you go through those inevitable, challenging times, you'll be able to reconnect with that purpose. You'll be able to reconnect with that why. And it will help carry you through, carry you through that trough so that you can get once again to a peak number two, to become mentally strong. You have to accept that you cannot control and everything. I actually relish in this fact, the fact that I can't control everything, but what I can control is how I react to everything. You know, there's a statement that goes along the lines of success is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to those things. Your reactions are everything. I mean, just take, you know, relationship improvement as an example. A lot of times people, when they seek to improve a relationship, they just think about what, what are the things that I need to proactively do to help a certain person in a way that's going to make that relationship perhaps flourish, you know, in a stronger, deeper, you know, better way. But they don't pause to think, actually, could my path to relationship improvement simply lie in the fact that I could react better to this person, react better to when they're not feeling great, react better to when they make a mistake, react better to when they're just not in a great mood. Your reactions hold a super strong key to you becoming mentally strong. And when you realize that you can't control everything, but you can control how you react to everything, then you take the power back. Suddenly it's not things that are just happening to you and oh, poor me, those things can happen. You can, you know, you could say to yourself, bring them on. I accept the challenge, I accept the hardship, whatever it is that that may bring, but I'm going to be responsible for my reactions to it. And when you take that responsibility on, you enter a new kind of Sphere of mental strength. No matter what happens, you can always control how you react in any given situation. Number three, recognize that there is strength in numbers. We are not meant to do things alone. No person has achieved greatness on their own. And when you have that support system around you, when you have those numbers around you, they are incredibly fundamentally important to help you get through the most challenging times. Having that support around you helps you be mentally strong. Nobody who is at the top of their game mentally has gotten there without the help of someone else. Michael Jordan didn't do everything on his own. He had Phil Jackson as his coach. He also had Scottie Pippen as his kind of go to man during the games and even in practice. Steve Jobs didn't create Apple by himself. He partnered up with Steve Wozniak. Oprah hasn't built her entire empire on her own. She has all the people around her, within her network that have helped her become the incredible person that she is. There is strength in numbers. So what does this mean for you? You need to pause and you need to ask yourself, do I have the right support system around me? Because if you don't have the right support system around you, if you don't have that right partner, if you don't have that right mentor, that right coach, that right friend, if you don't have these people, or worse, if you have people that are taking you down, then when things get rough and when you require that mental strength, when you most need to be strong to persevere, to get through those difficult times, in the absence of having that support around you, it will be incredibly tough. But by having that support around you, by having that shoulder to lean on, you'll be able to persevere. You'll be able to overcome those obstacles, overcome those challenges. Nobody achieves greatness on their own. And nobody who's achieved greatness has done it without persevering and without surviving challenging times, they go hand in hand together. So make sure your hand is also hand in hand with someone else's so that you have the support that you need. Number four. And oh my God, I love this one. You have to reframe stress when you go to the gym. When, When's the last time that you went into the gym or that you. When you went to exercise and you said to the person you're exercising with or to yourself or to the personal trainer in the gym, can you please show me the most comfortable exercises that I can do? You would never do that. Why? Because you know that stress is good, that Stress builds strength in the body. So get it up here in your head mentally. It's the same concept. You know, there's a saying that pressure is a privilege, and I love that. I love the idea of seeking stress, of embracing challenge. When a challenging thing pops up in my day or a challenging person enters my space, or I start having doubts or frustrations about doing a particular thing, I say to myself, yes, bring it on. Let's do this. That's exactly the direction in which I must step. And when you start to think in this way, when you reframe stress mentally in the same way that your body already gets it physically, that stress builds strength. When you do this, it becomes liberating. Because when you go through those challenging moments, they're like, you know, somebody in a gym giving you weights to lift, and you just lift them. Because by lifting those weights, you become stronger. And by becoming stronger, you become even more capable of going through that same challenge the next time it comes around. It doesn't just help you in the moment. Reframing stress does not just help you in the moment. You become stronger as a result of it, just like completing an exercise in the gym. And again, the next time that that stress comes along, the next time that challenge comes along, the next time something similar, maybe not even identical from a stress point of view, comes along, you're stronger already. As a result, you have the confidence from the last time that you experienced it, and you power through having this emotional stability. The ability to maintain your emotions under stress is absolutely paramount to you becoming mentally strong, to you transitioning from being mentally fragile to. To mentally strong, to having that stability to weather any storm whatsoever. And it starts here in the mind. The fifth thing to become mentally strong is to have unwavering positivity and tenacity. You know, three key words here. Never give up. Always look to persevere. There's always a way around every single obstacle that comes in your path. And let me actually blow up that thinking as well. Your way through the obstacle is not around it. It's literally, as I just said, through it. Once again, the obstacle itself is the direction in which you must step. It is the weight asking to be lifted so that you can become stronger as a result. And number six, last but not least, if you want to become mentally strong, remember to make sure that your standards are uncompromising when you get into a situation, when you're in challenging times, and if you let your standards drop in those situations, it's like an attack on your personal integrity. And it makes you less wanting to go through that challenge in the future because you know that to go through that challenge that you have to reduce your standards and that never feels good. So if you can get into the mindset of having uncompromising standards even when the times get rough, it's like jet fuel for your personal integrity, for your mental stability and to help you make that transition from being fragile to antifragile, from being mentally fragile to mentally antifragile. The opposite whereby every single challenge and hardship and thing that you experience, it only strengthens you, it only makes you stronger. And I'd love to hear from you. So don't forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you'd like to get a copy of my new book the Three Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com that's E R I C ericpartaker.com where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best selling book the Three Alarms.