Mental toughness, as it turns out, is the lack there-of. You can’t be mentally tough. If you are up in your head, you are involved in a fist fight with words, images, ideas, concepts and random thoughts.
Trying to escape that fistfight through mentally tough thinking is like trying to escape a maze that has no exits.You’ll go around all the possibilities thinking you are pro actively doing something, but it will get you nowhere. You’ll always end up back where you started.
The only way you can leave and never return is to acknowledge that the maze has no exits and that you are chasing your own tail in a hologram that has little, to nothing, to do with reality.
We think we need to be mentally tough because we know we are mentally weak.
Thinking is weak, but it is also very cunning!Because it makes you “think” you are its definition, and that is our key weakness.
Hey, I’m no different, I hear all the bullshit that takes place in my head just like you do, but I’m no longer taking it seriously.
It just speaks, and, as long as I take what I need for practical purposes, and I am discerning enough to know when it is disempowering, which by the way, is a lot of the time, I'll be OK. It’s just my mental conditioning. No need to get in a fistfight with it.
OK, so here’s the thing: If I try to kid myself that I am mentally tough, I am now trying to rely on the same voice that speaks against me, to speak for me!
Remember the maze metaphor a few paragraphs up?
Would you trust a car salesman that tells you that the car you want to buy is tip top today when he told you two days ago that the head gasket was blown? Oh, that car is all good to go. I didn’t mean any of that.
How gullible would you be to believe it?
Trust issues? What about faith? What about confidence?
So mental toughness is an oxymoron if you are trying to use thinking to navigate it.
What then?
Mental toughness is not a thought. It’s a state of being.
It is an absolute, resolute, anchoring to the ground right in front of your feet. It’s about staying there regardless of what is happening, and what your mind is saying about it.
If you want your life and your performances to end in an epilogue, then believe the dialogue, nothing will take you nowhere faster.
Gilesy