What should you do when “life gives you lemons?” You’ve planned a nice picnic and found yourself in the pouring rain – do you go home disappointed or embrace it and have fun playing in the mud with your children?
In this episode, coach Travis Ramsey goes over 4 principles you can follow to become more mentally fit. Listen to learn about the impact of mental fitness on life expectancy, how to approach things when they don’t go according to plan, and why you should “take care of your feet.”
- Travis invites listeners to reflect on what’s going on in their life, and then to ask themselves a few questions.
- For example: “Am I acknowledging it and then setting it aside?”
- And also: “Am I an active participant in my life, and am I trying to create the life that I want?”
- Don’t be afraid to reach out to people you know and trust, and have conversations with them. You can do the same with Travis.
- This has been said in many different ways, but you can indeed have anything you want. It’s about starting with reflecting on what’s most important to you.
- Remember: you can do everything you want in the 24 hours each day has but, at the same time, you can’t do everything in those 24 hours – so think about how you’re spending your time.
- What could you do with your day, week and month that, when you look back, makes you feel as if you were happy with the way you spent your time?
- Some additional key aspects you should reflect on are: What is it that you really want? What do you really care about? And, more importantly, are you living that? If not, why not?
- The same applies to other areas of your life, like relationships – when there’s a fight, would you rather be the one who’s right, or do you want to focus on strengthening the relationship?
- As far as parenting is concerned, do you want to focus on correcting a bad behavior, or would you rather get to the root of what’s causing the behavior?
- The average lifespan is 27,375 days – how would you like to spend yours?
- Mike brings up an interesting point inspired by Dan Sullivan: many people decide to stay exactly where they are. This is fascinating because the only thing that’s impossible is to stay right where you’re at and have nothing change…
- Mike and Travis discuss the important role of mental fitness when it comes to your life expectancy, and living a longer and happier life.
- Travis has witnessed an interesting phenomenon several times: people want control of their life but are terrified of that control.
- One of the key things to do is to focus on what’s next, says Mike.
- We control our own reality in our expectations.
- Sometimes, you have the expectation that something was going to be a certain way, but then things shift, and that shift creates the distress within you because “it wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
- Travis points out the idea of expectations creating the situation in which we are experiencing.
- As Travis puts it, “expectations create our own internal experience.”
- Travis shares his involvement with a study on anger – it turns out that it has a lot to do with expectations creating our own internal experiences.
- It’s really about living in the present and not with some judgment of the way life, the weather, people, or anything else should be.
- So, one of the key questions then becomes, “how do you remain present in the moment?”
- Mental preparedness helps you get prepared for something, and it enables you to experience it differently.
- When you find yourself feeling frustrated, disappointed, angry or anything else that isn’t a positive feeling, take a step back.
- Take a step back and try to release yourself, others, and the world, from your expectations of the ways things should be.
- In life, you should always be listening to your body and to the little things it tells you.
- Body could be your physical body, as well as your mental, emotional and spiritual-self body.
- Never forget that, as Travis puts it, “dis-ease” leads to disease.
- In some work with firefighters, Travis has found that whenever something tragic happened, someone knew something - they had a feeling.
- Listen to the feelings you have, listen to what your body is telling you because it does tell you things… but it’s up to you to notice them at the right time.
- Focus on the quality of life, and don’t approach things as if they were binary, either you do something or you don’t, because that isn’t always the case.
- Remember: it’s a choice.
- Change is constant – you can either become stronger with whatever happens, or can retreat and wither from the things that happened.
- Think how great life would be if you could become a bigger person that can have everything go wrong and still choose to enjoy yourself and not let it affect you internally.
- Some events in life are so powerful that they fundamentally alter the way we see the world. Some people call them trauma, Travis calls them powerful events.
- It’s like being a boat in the ocean. You may get hit by a wave and the boat gets a hole – you can either let water come in and sink the boat or seal the hole.
- For some people, healing, personal growth and mental fitness are about going back and reclaiming the lost parts of yourself.
- Facing a challenge? You can either retreat or see it as an opportunity to grow.
- It’s not easy, but learning to become comfortable with the uncomfortable is a life-changing thing.
- Travis shares what’s at the heart of mental fitness and mental wellness: it’s the ability to contain.
- Can you hold two things: the world is both beautiful and full of good people, love, and hope, but it can also be not-so-kind and destructive too.
- Travis points out that there’s such a strong desire to make sense of the world and to make it fit our container, rather than expanding our container to fit it.
- When you’re experiencing inner turmoil, Travis’ advice is to allow the things that come up to come up, without the need of pushing them aside or numbing them.
- Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s moving forward despite the feeling of fear.
More information and episodes:
honestlybetterfitness.com/list
L&H Industrial at lnh.net
Dan Sullivan
Viktor Frankl
Mother Teresa
