PNTV - The Art of Mental Training by DC Gonzalez

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Today we're going to look at the Art of mental Training by D.C. gonzalez. The Art of Mental Training. D.C. gonzalez. This is a great little book. It's 135 pages or something. Quick reading, super good book. I've been binging on mental training and we've got a bunch of videos coming up on other great books on the topic and this is one of the most popular ones because it's great. We've got the Philosopher's Note. No mind map on the back here. We're just going to jump straight in. Five big ideas. We'll start with. Why do we even want to train our minds? It's kind of obvious, but let's think about that for a moment. If you think about your absolute best performances and your absolute worst performance in your life, what was the difference? Probably was tied to your mental state. What was your mind? How are you thinking? How are you orienting to the opportunity? Huge difference between your best performance, your worst performance, and it all comes down, or a huge part of it anyway, comes down to where you were with your mind. Mental training is huge if we want to reach our potential and to perform at a peak level. So the first idea, we've got five of them. It's an obvious one, but to stop the negative. So if you want to have a strong inner mental climate, which is how DC Gonzales describes it, then we need to first stop the negative chatter. We've got to notice when we have the negative stuff bubbling up and just stop it. Just stop, stop, stop it. And then insert some positive self talk and imagery. So stop it, bring in some good stuff and go from there. Again, it sounds obvious, but notice how often you allow yourself to spiral out. You've got negative chit chat going on and you don't stop it. It just keeps on going. Well, if you want to get an unbeatable mind, which is what Mark Divine calls it, we're going to do a video on his great book Unbeatable Mind soon. Former Navy Seal, great guy D.C. gonzalez tells us we want a positive mental state. How do we create that? First step, stop the negative chatter. Second step here is the critical three. So DC talks about one of his teachers in the book and a lot of great stories. Kind of reminds me of Wave, the peaceful warrior, Dan Millman, Socrates. He has a teacher named Leo Tai. Leo Ty teaches him all kinds of awesome stuff and he comes Back to the critical three. What are the critical three? The critical three are these three. One, breath. I think you can see that. Two, bring that one over. What do we have? Two, relaxation, relax. And three, imagery. We need to breathe, we need to relax, we need to imagine our ideal. DC teaches us how to breathe. It's unbelievably important. In the note, I go off on the fact that this is it. If you want to control your mind, the most powerful way to do it is to control your breath. Because when you're feeling anxiety, when you're feeling stress, when you're in pressure situations, what tends to happen is your breath goes to about here. Well, that's an incredibly great way to make sure you're anxious. And what's amazing is you don't even need to get your mind right. In order to get your mind right, first you need to get your body right. You need to get into a deep, rhythmic breathing pattern. So breathe in through your nose, into your diaphragm, expand your belly, go all the way down as low as you can, and oxygenate your body with life giving oxygen force. So breathe in through your nose, as deeply as you can into your belly, expand your diaphragm. And then he says, breathe out through your mouth. So slightly open your mouth and slowly exhale and put your tongue right behind your front teeth. The ridge up there, kind of lightly press it there so you're breathing in super deeply through your nose and then gently and slowly out through your mouth. Your tongue placed up there by the roof of your mouth, by your front teeth. Ready? Almost forgot to open my mouth a little bit. Let's try that one more time. I like it. Now you just drop in. So the more chatter you have in your mind, the more important it is you connect to your breath. The more crunch, the more pressure you feel, the more you need to slow everything down. That's breathing. Now, as you breathe, you start to naturally relax. But D.C. walks us through this amazing relaxation technique. Lay down. He goes off on another book. But the quick thing is lay down, do this deep breathing and then relax different parts of your body and get into this state where you're out of your mind, your body is relaxed, and then what do you do? Then you just open yourself to your subconscious. You're out of your conscious mind. And then what do you do? Well, then you imagine your ideal future. We're going to talk about this some more in the next big Idea here. Imagineering, breath, relaxation and imagery. Those are the critical three that he comes back to again. And again and again, cornerstones of training our minds. So let's go to imagineering. Imagineering is a word that I think Disney either first used or made popular. Walt Disney talked about imagineering, where you imagine your ideal future. And D.C. talks about in the context of deep breathing, deep relaxation, and then visualizing imagineering, imagining our ideal outcome. He talks about a story that Gary Mack, who wrote Mind Gym, shares. We did a video on Mind Gym. We've got a note on Mind Gym as well, about Pele. Pele, greatest soccer player ever. Before a match, he'd come into the locker room an hour early. He'd grab two towels. One towel he'd roll up and use as a pillow, and the other towel he'd put over his eyes. And he'd lay down somewhere in the locker room where he could be quiet. Then what did he do? Then he did some imagineering. He didn't call it that, but what he did was he would imagine when he was a kid playing on the beaches and just loving soccer, he'd feel that joy and that love he had for playing soccer. Then he'd imagine some of his greatest moments, his greatest performances throughout his career. He'd really feel that. He'd see it and he'd feel it. Then he would imagine the game he's about ready to play. He'd take that love he had as a kid in all the great performances he's had in the past, and he'd imagine bringing that to life in today's match. He'd do that for about a half an hour. Then he'd hop up, he'd walk out of the locker room into the arena, and he'd be unstoppable. And he'd do what he just imagined. Imagineering, it's really, really powerful. So we want to imagine our best performances that we've had and imagine future great performances. Now, this morning, as I was meditating and getting ready to write the note, I was doing some imagineering. I was thinking about it. I'm like, what do we imagine? We're not athletes, most of us. So what's our peak performance? And for me, it comes down to creating a perfect day. I want to make each day a masterpiece, is what John Wooden described it as. So how do I make each day a masterpiece? In the note, I talk about my routines. We're not going to have time to go into them right now, but I have very specific things that I do. Getting up early, meditating for 20 minutes, doing a little yoga, then working on a note, then taking a Break and spend spending time with my family. I call that am one. I get up this morning. I got up at 3:30, went to bed super early 7pm Part of my nighttime routines is going to bed early, get up early, do that, then I do this, then I do this and I do this. And I want to create a perfect day. How do I make today a masterpiece? So that's what I imagine. That's what I was in my mind of. Okay, I do this and then I do this and I'm imagining that, imagining great days and I'm imagining today being a great day. It's really exciting. But I made the distinction that when we're imagineering we don't want to imagine the outcome. I have some ambitious goals of what I want to do creatively and entrepreneurially, but that's not what I'm imagineering. That's not what I'm visualizing. Pele wasn't visualizing getting a million dollar check or winning a gold medal. That wasn't what he was visualizing. That's outcome visualizing science says Heide. Grant Halberson Succeed. Great book. We've got a note, we've got the video on it. One of the leading researchers on success and goal setting. Don't visualize the outcome, visualize what you need to do to achieve the outcome. So the outcome is just a natural byproduct of you crushing your performance goals. So when you imagineer be like Pele and imagine the performance, not the outcome. This is where a lot of self help gets it backwards. We're staring at our vision board all the time and just thinking about the outcomes. Okay, you need to know what your goals are and have dreams and visions which we're going to talk about. But we need to focus on almost all of our effort on the practice, the process, the performance. That's what we want to obsess about. What am I going to do such that those outcomes are natural byproduct? Really cool stuff. That's imagineering. Now that is tied to our goals. Fourth, big idea. Are you lacking motivation? Alright, if that's the case, you're just lacking inspiring goals. You need to set inspiring goals. What are your inspiring goals? What fires you up? And DC talks about you want to create stretch goals, right? You want to create goals that are stretching you out of your comfort zone, but not so far that you're snapping is how tall Ben Shohar describes it. Stretch goals, not snap goals. So what are your stretch goals that motivate you? Your two to three year stretch goals, your year long goal that's tied to those two to three year goals, your quarter goal, that's tied to those year and two to three year goals. What about this month? What are you going to do this month that's tied to those other sequential goals? And how about this week? What are you going to get done? And how about today? You want to have coherence in those goals such that they're just naturally aligned. Researchers talk about this too in goal setting, such that your today goal, your this week goal, your this month, your this quarter, your this year, your two to three year goals all line up. That's one way to get fired up. Create goals that inspire you. Don't go crazy and snap yourself, but create something that stretches you adequately and appropriately. Not too little, not too much, and go rock it. So our fourth idea, the final one here. What's the number one lesson that his teacher, Leo Tai? At the end of the book is this great section which we talk about in the note, and it's just a great story. Leo Tai asked him Danielson, what is the number one lesson that you've learned? And he goes through a list of all the things that he's learned from his master. And the number one thing that he learned in the art of mental training was self belief. Self belief. Henry Ford tells us, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. Do you believe in yourself? Psychologists call that self efficacy. Self efficacy, your belief in your ability to deliver results, to create something that's meaningful for you. Do you think you can or do you think you can't? That is the number one aspect of mental training, self belief. DC was a wrestler and he coached wrestlers. And that's one of the research studies that we talked about in a prior video. You can bring wrestlers into a study, they can figure out which one has high self efficacy, self belief, which ones don't. And then you watch them in competition. What you'll find is the wrestlers who have a higher level of self efficacy outperform the other ones, independent of how they did in the past. What was really interesting was in the most competitive arena, when a wrestler is in a match with another wrestler and they tie, they're so evenly matched that they tie and they go into sudden death. They're exhausted, they have very similar skills. It's incredibly challenging for the wrestler. You can predict which wrestler will win based on their level of self belief. It's an amazing thing. Self belief is the core of all this. We've got to trust Ourselves, we've got to believe that we can do this. And one way to do that is by earning that through the practice, being willing to work hard, set these goals and then go do the work. We'll talk about this in Unbeatable mind. His Navy SEAL officers who trained him had just supreme confidence and it was earned. It was supreme competence because they put in the work. So that's what we want to do. Cultivate that self belief. Stop the negative chitchat that's going on in our mind immediately. Insert the positive focus on the critical. Breathing, relaxing, imagining, imagineering. The performance, not the outcome. Goals. If you're lacking motivation, set some goals that fire you up. If you have a goal right now that fires you up, how do you dial that in? Even more if you don't have a goal set one. Whether it's getting out of bed tomorrow morning at a certain time, or meditating for 10 days in a row, or doing a triathlon you've always dreamed of or a Spartan race, which we talked about a few weeks ago, what are you going to do? Set a goal that fires you up, stretches you, doesn't snap you. Then the number one last self belief. Believe in yourself, know that you can do it. And there you go. That's a quick look at the art of mental training. D.C. gonzalez, you rock. I think you'll really like the book if you felt some energy here. And I think you'll also like the Philosopher's Note and all the other ones. So there you go. What was the idea that jumped out at you, that landed? And how are you going to make that a bigger part of your life? We want to move from theory to practice. That's the whole point of this, is to give you a bunch of ideas. Not to overwhelm you with ideas, but to inspire you to take them, the ones that really resonate and, and make it a part of your day to day, habitual, embodied way of being. So get on that. Hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. 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. 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