Mental Toughness – How to Train Your Mind To Believe in Yourself

Hello, it’s your girl, Courtney Sanders with another episode of the Courtney Sanders Show reporting to you live from Houston, Texas. This isn’t live but it should be because I’m back in the studio with all these crazy equipment that I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.

So you know, I’m probably going to be talking about the audio every time I get on a podcast until it becomes familiar to me. I just want to turn me off my headphones, you know, a new artist or you know, celebrities or whatever singers. They’re always like, turn me up in my headphones. I get it, I get it. Because when you’re loud in your headphones, it’s really cool and it’s really fun. But that’s neither here nor there. We’re not talking about how things sound today. We’re talking about your mind today, specifically how to develop mental toughness, how you can have that mind over matter and how you can train yourself to believe in yourself.

And so I got to just warn you upfront, this is not coming from some well-researched position. I’m not a neuroscientist. I am not a psychologist. I don’t have a degree in this. This is not going to be some super in-depth like PhD. This is how you train your mind. This podcast today honestly, is a hodgepodge of personal strategies that I’ve been using to develop mental toughness. Everyone says, oh when you become an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship is the greatest personal development training program ever.

False. Motherhood is the greatest personal development training program ever. Nobody warned me. Motherhood is crazy rewarding, but it’s crazy tough, crazy challenging as you’re learning to get your rhythm and especially if you’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, you get a lot of things going on. I’m a full-time mom, full-time entrepreneur, full-time wife, full-time laundry lady, full time dry, cleaner picker-upper, drop, fulltime diaper changer.

I’m all the things all the time. It can be really hard to keep your mind together and so what I mean by that is sometimes it can be easy, honestly to just make excuses for why you can’t do the things that you know you’re supposed to be doing that you know you’re called to do.

So there’s a stamina element, but oftentimes I find that our minds give out before even our bodies do before we do physically. I’ve just been really serious about sure that I show up as my best self, making sure that I show up as my most positive self. I noticed that I was developing a nasty habit of complaining all the time, blaming my husband for everything.

And honestly, it was just getting draining because that’s just not my personality. I’m normally a very optimistic person, very positive. And so, okay, I need to get back into the swing of things and make sure that I am mentally tough because motherhood, it throws you for a loop.
So even if you’re not a mom, even if you’re not a woman, hopefully, these suggestions will be really helpful to you. But yeah, these are just basic things that I’ve been doing to not only show up as my best self but ensure that I get the work done that I actually want to do.

Notes from the podcast:

Here are the ways on how to develop mental toughness.

1. Recite scriptures.

So the first thing that I do, or that I haven’t been doing is I’ve been reciting scripture to myself that specifically combats certain lies that I’ve been telling myself, realize that I’ve been believing lies and might even be coming from, you know, a supernatural source.

You need to get yourself together. And while that’s true a lot of it is our own mind and things that we’re just picking up from outside, I do believe that there’s a spiritual component to this as well. And there are malevolent entities, spiritual entities that desire for you to think in ways that are not conducive to your greatest good. And so it’s both.

I found the greatest way to combat that is actually not with affirmations, but with scripture. And here’s why I used to do affirmations. I used to be really into that. But I feel like when you do affirmations, part of you knows that it’s not based on anything and that’s really hard to overcome. Like you just create this affirmation because it sounds good and it feels good and you say it and it like, you know, gasses you up at the moment.

But what is it based on? What’s an example? I’m trying to think of various affirmations that I’ve told myself. I know people do a lot of affirmations related to money, I am a woman of wealth. I can create as much money as I need to fix my situation. They’re writing that on a card and they’re looking at themselves in the mirror and they were reciting that over and over again. If it makes you feel good, but is it true?

Maybe, maybe not. Especially if you have a track record where that hasn’t been the case, inevitably you’ll find that your mind keeps going back to all the reasons why that’s not true. Because your mind is searching for something to base the statement that you’re saying over and over again to yourself on.

I’m not saying affirmations are bad, but if you’re affirming things that you’re just kind of like pulling out of thin air because it sounds good and you hope that they are true. I find that over time affirmations aren’t really that helpful because they’re not grounded in anything. They’re just grounded and kind of like your hopes and what you wish is true, but not what’s actually true.

I’m letting go of affirmations. I want to know what does God says about me. That’s the truth. Scriptures went around, uh, for a very long time. God has been around since the beginning of time. I’m pretty sure of what he says. If He said it then and it was true, then it is true now.

2. Read motivation and motivational messages.

I like to hop on YouTube as much as the next person and find a motivational speaker and yes, this message is exactly what I needed to hear. So I read a motivational book, I love it. Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, one of them said something like, motivation is like taking a shower, you wouldn’t do it once and expect it to last.

It’s something that you need to do every day. And I find that to be true. Motivation is great, but you actually, in terms of mental toughness, want to develop the mental toughness where you can do things beyond when you feel like it or beyond when you’re motivated. So that’s really what you want to develop. Mental toughness. However, initial motivation is really helpful to get you going.

Eric Thomas, the hip hop preacher, so freaking motivating. He’s not a football coach, but he has the demeanor of a football coach. So he basically yells at you all day. But I love it. I love it. He’s got a lot of crazy stories, he’s telling the truth.

Also, there’s Mel Robbins, the lady that did the Ted talk and wrote the book about the five-second rule. Really, really interesting, but she has one talk and I’ll link to it in the show notes, where she basically says, what’s the quote? If you only did that, which you don’t feel like doing, you would have everything you’ve ever wanted, which is so true when you think about it

And that was so motivating to me that I even wrote it on my mirror in the bathroom, which also is really helpful. So it’s not just enough to listen and to read these motivational messages. You want to also include them in places where you can see them.

3. Practice mental toughness and low-risk activities.

So mental toughness is like a muscle. If you use it in one area, it’s going to be strong when you use it in a different area. So just like your physical body, if you are picking up weights in the gym when you go grocery shopping, you have heavy bags, you’re going to find that the bags feel lighter because you’re stronger now.

Mental toughness is no different. One of the greatest low-risk activities that I like to practice mental toughness is toughness in simply working out. Do you push yourself? Do you do one extra rep? Do you run for one extra minute? And here’s the thing, it really doesn’t matter how much more you push yourself. If you just push yourself a little bit further than what you wanted to do, you develop that muscle where you can push yourself further and other areas.

4. Leverage accountability partners.

Accountability partners are just that people who will hold you accountable to the things that you say you want to do. Notice I did not say, encouragement partners, right? A lot of times we confuse support with encouragement meaning and encouragement in the sense that it has to be positive all the time. Sometimes you need somebody in your life who will call you out on your bs and who will tell you the truth. So I have accountability partners in my real life. I have friends that know that they can hold me accountable.

My husband, I mean he’ll tell me the truth all the time. That’s been so helpful. So just letting people know what my goals are and just sharing with them what it is and I’m trying to do oftentimes when you find yourself in a place of mental weakness, but you’ve told someone what your goal is and what you want to push yourself to do and they know they can call you out and they can say, that’s completely ridiculous. So definitely focus on getting an accountability partner. Accountability partners are super helpful in your quest to develop mental toughness.

5. Practice ignorance is bliss.

Often times we don’t believe in ourselves specifically in a new arena because we feel like we don’t know enough. We’re not experts, whatever. And so we dive in trying to get expert advice where like reading all the books, listening to all the things, hiring all the people. We just want people who know to teach us the way, show us what works. And lately, I’ve just been taking the position of first going to do things via my own instinct and see how that shakes out before I engage with anybody else.

Beginners brilliance is when you’re in a new arena and because you’re completely ignorant of it, you don’t know how things are supposed to be done. You just do things the way that makes sense to you. And by doing things the way that makes sense to you sometimes, And again, if it’s beginners brilliance, sometimes you hit upon something that everybody else in your industry missed because they’re so used to doing things by the established rules. And so you end up doing things in a very new and novel way.

If I’m doing things according to my own instinct, there’s no one to compare myself to. There’s no expert that I’m comparing myself to and feeling inadequate around because I don’t know as much as them. Or I find that oftentimes when we get into this space of trying to learn what everybody else has to say about something and what are the best practices?

Once you know the rules, you start measuring yourself against the rules and it’s really easy to feel inadequate and that’s where the self -doubt creeps in and the imposter syndrome and am I good enough? And then your mindset just shouts to you nowhere where if you don’t do that and you just are just jumping from instinct to instinct and this is my idea and I’m just trying this out, there’s no inadequacy because you’re just trying this out.

You’re a beginner, you’re ignorant of the industry. You don’t know what you’re doing. That’s the fun of it. You’re just trying things out. You’re just experimenting. And so it’s really a lot easier to believe in yourself because you are not comparing yourself to those that came before you.

So yeah, those are the five strategies that I’ve been using lately to develop mental toughness and to train my mind to believe in myself, try them out, hit me up on Instagram and let me know which strategy you’re going to be trying out.

So there’s the live verse, truth, scripture, situation cards, things that I’ve been doing, listening to motivational messages, writing messages on my mirror that’s been super helpful. Practicing mental toughness and low-risk activities, working with an accountability partner, i.e., my husband, and practicing ignorance is bliss. So let me know which strategy you’re going to try.

And also seriously, if you like this live truth or live scripture idea. Go to courtneylsanders.com/cards to download the digital cards version where you know, you can see some of the scriptures that’s been helping me with some of the lies that I’ve been combating. So that’s all I got for you on this episode. Check out on the next one. See you later. Bye.