Week Three Mental Toughness Tools

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Over the last two weeks, you've discovered your burn and begun building a deeper belief in yourself. Now it's time to strengthen the way you think. Because mental toughness isn't determined by what happens to you, it's determined by how you choose to respond. In week three, we're diving into two of the most powerful mental training tools I've used with championship teams, Olympic athletes, Fortune 500 leaders, and elite performers around the world. You'll learn how to reframe adversity into opportunity and how to use intentional I am statements to reshape your mindset, strengthen your belief, and change your actions. This is where you begin conditioning your mind to perform at your highest level. Now we go.

Rewiring Responses Through Conditioning

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But this takes work and this takes mental conditioning. I've always considered myself to be a performance coach on the mental side, but Coach Saban at Alabama and the five years that I spent there in the two national championships, he used to love calling me the mental conditioning coach for the team. Because a lot of the work comes down to mental conditioning and changing and learning to control and to reshape the wiring. We have to change the wiring of our brain and how we respond. It's a lot of what mental toughness is about. A lot of times you hear people talk about winning is your ability to get back up one more time than you've been knocked down. That's a choice to get up. But if you've become accustomed in your life to staying on that canvas on that mat and not getting up, your brain is wired or conditioned to respond that way. We have to shift and change how you think and how you respond. One of the most powerful tools that we have used in order to teach how to rewire your brain is what I call the power to reframe.

A Mother’s Lesson In Reframing

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Share another story about my mom before we go to work on reframing for you when you face challenge and adversity in your life, personally and professionally. I remember when my mother got a phone call from the Boston Medical Center, went something like this. Dr. Skinner's team calls in and says, Janet, you need to come to Boston immediately. We have some new treatments, still no cure. Remember, even to this day, there's no cure for amyloidosis. You're gonna have to come to Boston immediately. Now, my mother's thinking, okay, there's there's still no cure. You want me to come to Boston? You want me to do all these things? Dr. Skinner proceeds, her team proceeds to tell my mom, you're gonna go through some painful procedures. You're probably gonna have to start wearing a mask just to be able to go outside. You're gonna have to wear joke stockings around your legs to control the swelling from some of the tests we're gonna put you through, and you need to come to Boston immediately. My mother hangs up the telephone and instantly picks it right back up. And she calls her boyfriend Alan and she says, Alan, they told me that I need to come to Boston immediately. There's painful procedures. There's I'm gonna have to wear a mask and these job stockings, and there's gonna be swelling and there's gonna be pain. But we are going to turn this into a family trip. We will have positive memories. We will bring the boys with us. My mother said, the boys like bowling, we'll take them bowling. They like Chinese food, we'll take them for Chinese food. But we will have positive memories from this trip to Boston. I remember being five years old in Boston with my mom on one of these trips, sitting in an old rickety booth at a candlestick bowling alley. In New England, they play candlestick bowling, little tiny sticks, smaller balls, candlestick bowling. We had just finished bowling. My belly was full from the Chinese food that we had in Chinatown in Boston. And my mother looked down and she said, Do you want to play hangman? I'm like hanging with my mom, right? Of course we're gonna play hangman. And so we take out a piece of paper and I draw the little, and then I write down one, two, three, four, four. Remember, I'm five years old at the time, four spaces for the letters. And I'll never forget my mother looks down and she guesses my word without guessing a single letter. I remember laughing so hard. I remember my mother's big smile, that big curly white smile. I don't remember my mother's pain. That, my friend, is the power to refrain at its highest level. The reality of the situation. My mother was dying before my eyes. My mother, when she got that phone call, they said the joke stockings, the pain, the increased medications, there's no cure. I had no idea how many days she would live, but her thought was, I'll take my boys on a family trip. That's what she saw in her mind's eye, and that's exactly what she did. When I think back on that story, the moment my mother hung up that phone and picked it right back up to contact your boyfriend Alan, that was the power to refrain. How many times in your life do you face challenge and adversity that's not dying? And the manner in which you choose to respond actually pulls you back from ever taking any positive action.

Expectancy Theory And Intentional Focus

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In psychology, there's a principle called expectancy theory. That which you focus on expands. Many people we've conditioned our brains, and thus the wiring of the brain or how we respond to challenge and adversity is to always focus on the negative. So expectancy theory tells us you focus on the negative, you get more negative. So we've been so conditioned to thinking about the negative. When something bad happens, we focus on the negative and we pull back from taking any action. You have control of your response. Nobody controls that for you. So we have to start to learn to think positive thoughts or to focus on solutions. Expectancy theory, just as it works for negative, it also works for positive. My mother, even though she was dying, she would write those words in the journal, she would turn these into family trips. She was conditioning her mind to focus on the solution, not the problem. The power to reframe is your ability to focus on solutions, not problems. Now, I'm not telling anybody I want you to live in la la land and act like bad things don't happen. But what I'm saying is I want you to understand that when challenge and adversity strikes, and it's gonna strike for all of us, that you choose to take it in and you choose to identify what is the positive solution, what is the action I can take that's gonna keep me on a path of driving success or creating positive momentum. That is the power to reframe.

The Three-Step Reframe Practice

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And you will see inside of your playbook, there's an exercise that I want you to go to. And I want you to go from a recent time when you have reacted negatively to something that happened to you regarding challenge and adversity. Your response was negative. And I want you to literally, I want you to reconnect back to it. I want you to feel it. And until we understand that it's okay to understand, to deeply have awareness to our understanding of how we think the way we think and how that impacts the action we take. We're never gonna change. And so, if you really want to change, I need you to be honest with yourself. How did you react? Did you react in a state like I alluded to where you took no action and you gave up? Put it down on paper. And then understanding now the power to reframe, using my mother as an example, it's gonna ask you, how could you have reframed? So now, if we take ourselves back to that situation, what could you have done differently? And then you'll see there's three steps where I outline using the power to reframe. Number one, we must acknowledge it. Okay, there's two types of focus, I believe. There's focus and then there's intentional focus. Those individuals that understand driving performance and understanding that you control your responses, we can change the hardware of our brains. Those individuals drive intentional focus. Focus is I know what time I'm supposed to show up to work, I know what I'm supposed to do. I show up and I kind of just do what I'm supposed to do. Intentional focus is that awareness to, I know I have not been responding the right way. I'm going to evaluate my behavior, identify the planning, drive the performance, just like I share in the book The Standard, on page 24 in our book, The Standard, where we dive into the research of the almost 20 years of doing this work, page 24, we dive into the four P's of the standard, which essentially is helping people understand it's okay to identify the problems, but then we have to work towards the solutions. So I want you to work through the exercise in your book. We're gonna put 10 minutes back on the clock. And then I want you to read through and start to acknowledge and shift how you change the wiring of your brain. We must acknowledge, then you must choose to take action, and then you got to reframe by actually taking the action. I want to give you a quick business example before we put you to work on this second tool of the six mental training tools that have been put to the test by the highest performers to ever walk the face of the earth.

Sales Setbacks And Positive Momentum

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And this is now your time to start winning at your highest level by applying these proven tools through our mental toughness system. Imagine in business, you're building a pipeline, sales, you're growing opportunities, and all of a sudden you get a phone call from a contract that you thought was locked in. It was done. We've all been there. And then all of a sudden, you get that phone call and somebody says, We've changed our mind, we're not gonna wire the money today, we've gone another direction. Many people in that moment, they go back to a negative place. They go back to a place of not believing, not like you felt when you closed the deal. And because they're not believing and that negativity starts to take over, they actually do nothing. Maybe they stop their day, they go home, they get distracted, they do something else, or they just take no action. One of the things that I've always done in sales, I'm still in sales, even back to when I was a financial advisor, which is how all of this work started. I remember when something negative happened, I'd always go to my existing pipeline, all the opportunities. And I didn't have to resell anything, I just had to take a positive action step. I had to send a text message, make a phone call, do something that created positive momentum. The moment that I reframed, I shut down the negative, I accepted a result that I didn't like, I didn't want that no, I didn't want them to change their mind. But the moment I went to the pipeline and just took a positive action step, the moment you hit send on the text message, the moment that you dial that phone, you silence the negative, you're moving towards the positive, and that's the power to refrain. Don't ever lose sight of the fact that you can change how you've conditioned yourself to think up until this point. But you have to change the action, you have to change how you think, you have to change your response, and don't ever forget that you have control. We're putting 10 minutes on the clock. Please go through this exercise, read through those steps on acknowledging, choosing, and reframing. And we're gonna continue to attack one tool at a time within this system to help you drive continual peak performance and to win more

Sponsor Break With Q Logics

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in your life. This episode of The Burn is brought to you by our dear friends and partners at Q Logics. Now you know I don't co-sign things I don't believe in. And I believe in John Chiarando and the team at Q Logics. He's built multiple nine-figure businesses, real integrity, real character, the kind of guy you want in your corner. But here's what happened. All that expertise, all that knowledge, it was just his. Locked in his head, his decisions, his team, you couldn't access it. So John created Q Logics. He basically said, How do I make everything I've built available to people who actually need it? Here's what that looks like. Q Logics helps you see the blind spots in your business, the gaps you don't even know you have. You don't know what you don't know. They're your tour guide through that. Q Logics helps you build systems that make your business work better or they ask better questions so you're approaching it in the most effective way. And Q Logics has access to a network of businesses and resources, real connections, real synergies that can accelerate what you're building. If any of that resonates, go to Qyphen Logics, L-O-G-I-X.com forward slash Ben. Fill out a form, their team will research your situation personally, then they'll tell you straight, can they actually help? Thank you to our friends and partners at Q Logics. Make sure you find out more about Q Logics and your opportunity to win more with them today.

I Am Statements And Self-Talk

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I am the greatest. I am the greatest, is what Muhammad Ali used to say to himself before he was even the greatest. It's what Muhammad Ali used to say to himself before anybody knew who Muhammad Ali was. Think about how we started. We referenced that empty stadium, that empty warehouse, that mind having opportunity, that mind having a canvas, that mind having not yet given yourself permission to go for it, to one day fill a stadium, to fill a boardroom, to have the stages and the arena packed. It's the same as Muhammad Ali. The difference, and maybe in your life you've done this, but the difference for Muhammad Ali was he had that burn. He had that belief in himself. Negative things would happen and he would search for the positive until he fueled it with what I call I am statements. We have to believe at such a level with what we tell ourselves that the action then follows every day. An I am statement is the answer to a who are you question. I am statements are one of the most powerful statements of affirmation that a human can tell themselves. We must remember that what you say comes out of your mouth, goes into your ears. That's what you believe, and that's what drives your action. So when you heard, I gotta do it one more time, I am the greatest. Muhammad Ali, when he said it, he believed that the action followed until he became the greatest. So who are you? And what if you started answering that who are you question with I am statements, not by telling me things that you've already achieved, but us having the ability to help you connect to the things you believe you can achieve. We're gonna make this easy on you. You already wrote down personal goals, you already wrote down professional goals. So when I get done with this story, we're gonna put you to work again. This is a process. This is a process of adapting these tools and this proven system for you to change the scope of your behavior and your belief system and your life and your results, but it takes time. And there are days where that old mindset might come back, it might still feel empty, but we are working towards filling that arena.

Will Compton And Belief That Works

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One of my favorite stories in our work of I Am Statements takes us back to 2013. I remember I was connected to a young gentleman named Will Compton. At the time, Will Compton was an undrafted free agent out of the University of Nebraska. He was a captain of the team, number 51 middle linebacker, was the number 12 leading tackler in the history of the storied tradition of Nebraska football. But Will Compton didn't get an invitation to the combine. He went undrafted. The media said that he was too slow, and people said he could never make it in the NFL. I had a dear friend make an introduction of Will to me and me to Will over Twitter of all places. Now X. But it was Twitter back then. And I remember that I followed Will, Will followed me back, and all of a sudden, after following each other, and he'd retweet something that I would say, and I'd retweet something that he would say. Finally, I noticed he had said that he was going to be an undrafted free agent with the Washington Redskins. So I send him a direct message and I said, Will, do you want to get together and talk about mental toughness training before you report to training camp? And he responded back, Are you serious? Now he lived in Bontaire, Missouri. I lived in St. Louis, Missouri. So we agreed to meet in Arnold. We were about an hour and a half apart. Arnold was right in the middle, about 45 minutes for each of us. And we agreed to meet at a St. Louis Bread Company. Now you all know that is Panera Bread, but that is St. Louis Bread Company. Panera Bread started right here in St. Louis. That's St. Louis Bread Company. So we meet at this St. Louis Bread Company, Panera Bread, and we sit down at a booth. And I will never forget this day. Now, up until this point, I had worked with my high school basketball team. That was my first work in sports. Let me give you a little side lesson. Remember, I said this earlier in our work together. Long obedience in the same direction with aggressive patience. Everybody wants to work with Coach Kleiman. Everybody wants to party on the field with the New England Patriots like I did in 2014, and with Levante David with the Buccaneers when Brady came to be their quarterback. Everybody wants to be in the big boardrooms and the big stages and be with Alabama. But you have to have patience and oftentimes say yes to the things that don't pay you to one day earn the right to understand what it takes to win at those highest levels. And so I was saying yes to all kinds of opportunities, including my first one in sports. My old high school basketball coach said, Benny Boy, come fire up these troops. I went and gave back to my high school basketball team. That's how my work in sports started. And with those players, I started applying these mental training tools that I'm teaching all of you. First time I ever got paid to speak was 2006. First time I ever coached was 2008. And I started using some of these tools because they worked back then and they still work now. But the first time I ever had a chance to work with a professional athlete was Will Compton at Panera Bread that day. Worked in business, it worked at the high school basketball level, but now you take that deep breath. You talk about it's almost an I am statement for me. I'm a performance coach for NFL players, right? So I gotta step into this next level of belief for me. Who are you? I had to believe that, just like I was gonna challenge Will Compton to believe that he could make the Redskins. So we sit down at this booth, I'll never forget the day. I look at Will and I say, Man, tell me what's on your mind. He says, Well, you know, if things don't work out with the Redskins, there's 31 other teams. Moment he said that, I knew I had. I paused, I said back to him, hey man, let me ask you a question. Rather than worrying about the 31 other teams, what if you woke up every single day and you told yourself, I am a linebacker with the Washington Redskins? And what about when you had doubts during the day? Maybe it's during a lift or a run. And you say, Man, I don't know if I can make the Redskins. And you stop and you say, I am a linebacker with the Washington Redskins. And what about before you put your head on the pillow at night, you close your eyes, you visualize, I am a linebacker with the Washington Redskins? His eyes got so big, I thought he was gonna jump over this table and tackle me. He was so fired up. And he wrote it down on paper: I am a linebacker with the Washington Redskins. 24 hours later, I'm pulling into a lunch appointment and I get a text message from Will. And the text message says, Do you drink coffee? I thought, man, this is kind of a weird text message to get. Do I drink coffee? And I responded, yes. Will then sends a message. Great post-workout drink, coffee, whey protein, and honey. I'm literally staring at my phone, like, what in the world is he sending me this for? So I said, Sounds great. I'll try it. He then responds back to me. That is what a linebacker with the Washington Redskins drinks. He believed in an I am state. He immediately shifted how he thought and what he believed. He told himself every day, I am a linebacker with the Washington Redskins. He showed up to that first training camp seven out of seven on the depth chart. Will Compton not only became a member of the Washington Redskins, fast forward a handful of years, he became the starting middle linebacker and captain of the Washington Redskins defense, helping them make it to the playoffs for the first time in 10 years when they battled Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers. Will went on to have a nine-year NFL career. Will is now the host of Bussin' with the Boys, one of the most listened to podcasts in the world today for former athletes that are now having a space in the podcast and entertainment world. He has sponsors, he has TV commercials. I tease him all the time, like, man, you're bigger now, you're making more money now than you did when you were playing ball. But what would have happened if he would have kept thinking about those 31 other teams? At some point in time, and the blessing was that Will made the choice to believe that he was a linebacker with the Washington Redskins. That wasn't something that he had already achieved, it's something he started to believe he could achieve. So, how many times in your life have you told yourself you can't do something? Now, what if we change it to a belief that it's already happened, it's going to happen, the action will be put behind it. It increases the probability, it changes your energy around it. And then when it's fueled by a burn, nothing will stop you until you do it. Remember, you have 100% control over your mind. We learned that when I shared our last tool, the power to refrain. This is another proven mental training tool. Worked for Muhammad Ali. Worked for Will Compton. It has worked for me in so many different areas of my life. And now I know that it can work for you.

Write Your I Am Statements

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I want you to dive in once again into your playbook, into the section. You will see there's an entire worksheet here on your I am statements. But I want you to be intentional in how you do this. I want you to go back to the section on attaining belief in yourself. I want you to go back to the worksheet that had vision, the burn, and your personal and professional goals. Go back to some of those big goals you've given yourself permission for, and let's change them to the creation of I am statements with you knowing that you've already achieved those things you wrote down that you believed would happen. We're gonna put 10 minutes on the clock. We're building towards, I'm gonna give you a little foreshadow here, one main tool that will embody all of the work that we're going through, all of the tools. But I need you to take that clock serious. I need you to take the work serious. I need you to lock in on creating these I am statements so we can take you through the full system, equip you with the one final tool, which is going to connect you to all of these mental training tools that are proven to help you elevate to your next level. Let's put that time on the clock and let's get to work.