Micro Class - Train Your Mind

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one is train your mind. I'm going to give you three ways to do so. It's inspired by Michael Phelps's no Limits. Thank you, Michael. Now we've all heard many times before that sports is 90% mental health. Yet for some weird reason, most athletes don't spend anywhere near the proper amount of time training this part of their game. But the reality is that this holds at least as true for life. Life is 90% mental. Can you put yourself in the mental state to do what needs to get done? Whether you feel like it or not? That's going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else. You can have all kinds of skills, talent, just as in sports, but it's the mentally tough competitors in life that are going to succeed the most. But for us, our arena is obviously different. We're talking about being with our family or colleagues or spouse or whatever. And the ultimate challenge that we have as life competitors is to step in between stimulus and response. So something happens in our lives and then we respond. Now the more aware we get, the more we're able to step into this gap and choose our response consciously. We talk about this in the Mindful Athlete, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan's coach George Mumford quotes Viktor Frankl who says that your freedom exists right here. Can you choose an empowered response? Now I want to talk to you about three ways we can train our minds to do that. Number one, meditation. Meditation. Check out Meditation 101, one of the classes that you have available where I walk through all my favorite big ideas, why I think you should do it, and, and how. But remember, you're literally training your mind. Every single time you meditate, every single time you bring your attention back to your anchor, you're doing another rep, another rep, another rep. When you see the Dalai Lama, you can't see inside his mind, or Matthew Ricard or all these great meditators. You can't see inside their mind. But if you could, their mind, their gray matter in their little happy brains would look like a bodybuilders physique. You just can't see it. But that's what it looks like. It's toned, it's strong, it's trained. That's our first way to train our minds. All research supports that. Second idea is win. We just did a micro class on what is important, what's important. Now practice that. You want to train your brain well Meditation is just warmup really for the rest of your day. Then ask yourself what's important right now? You're about ready to get distracted. You're going to go jump into email for the 20th time in the last hour or go hit the social networking sites again. Really what's important now is that what's important right now. What's important now? Discipline yourself to get good at noticing when you're going into distraction ville and coming back via that question. That's training your mind. Third way to train your mind is to play what I call the Equanimity game. This is based on Marcus Aurelius meditations. Here's another version of you, right? Let's say you get off center. Oh man, life knocked you around. You're kind of off balance, right? How quickly can you get back to balance? Life knocks you off this way. How quickly can you get back to balance? Equanimity literally means balanced mind. How do you maintain your your equanimity? How quickly can you get back to balance when you get knocked off? That's training. Every single moment gives us an opportunity to train our minds. Let's take advantage of it. And don't expect to be perfect at any of this. Day one. Don't get overwhelmed. Get excited about making tiny incremental gains. You compound a half a percent gain in any given day every day for year two, three, a decade. Two or three. You won't even recognize the life you have right now, no matter how awesome it already is. So there you go, some ideas on how to train our minds. Remember, it's 90% mental in sports and in life. We want to step in between stimulus and response. Meditation. What's important now? Equanimity game. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See ya. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that micro class. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson. Me. Two basic things. One, our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And two, our Optimal Living membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. Ten bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there, philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my optimal living classes. This is where I take all the ideas we cover in the Philosopher's Notes and boil it down to the most practical stuff you can apply today. Classes include Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Relationships 101, Habits 101, etc. You'll also get access to what we call micro classes that I think you'll love. We aim to astonish, and we're blessed to have thousands of members telling us we're helping them change their lives and that this is the best 10 bucks they invest in themselves every month. Go to BrianJohnson Me Membership to learn more. Thanks for your support and have an awesome day.