Why we should train our minds like how we train our bodies

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.” – Alan Alda

It’s a damn, hard process. Intellectually, we know that the biggest areas of resistance in our lives are the areas of greatest growth, but are any of us ever prepared for the mental and emotional toughness that is required to overcome them? Isn’t it interesting that if we want to lose weight or get fit, we train our physical bodies by slowly increasing the amount or intensity of our workouts. How do we train our minds and emotional states in the same way?

I think one of the biggest reasons why we fail at resolving issues is that we put off dealing with it for so long, then when we can’t stand it anymore, we try to confront it and fix it then and there. Think about some areas of resistance in your life. I’ll bet the first ones that cross your mind are the ones that have been festering there for years, perhaps even decades. We can lie to others, but not to ourselves. For me, one of my biggest lifelong issues (and I didn’t even realise it was such an issue) was gaining independence and sticking to my own belief systems. I’d be so caught up with pleasing authority figures (parents, teachers, bosses) because that was my standard of being an ‘exceptional’ human being. I didn’t have a strong sense of what I wanted to achieve in life or who I wanted to be so I would subconsciously adopt the values of the social system. I can definitively say that it’s only through my entrepreneurial journey that I’ve had the freedom (and desperation) of having to really soul-search to find a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a way of acting, that feels true to myself. It’s a long journey, even though life is short. It’s also a daily commitment, of making one choice at a time that gets us closer to where we want to be.

My point is, we should approach our biggest issues with the same mentality that we approach our physical goals. Let’s start with the training. Let’s train ourselves to take one step away from the city of our comfort and one step towards the wilderness of our intuition every day. Let’s do one small thing today, and every day, that we wouldn’t have done yesterday. Today I honked my horn at a car whose bonnet was sticking out dangerously onto the main road and I saw in my rear-view mirror that they then reversed their car a little. Usually I would’ve been too shy to, but I felt proud of myself for taking this small action. Over time, we WILL develop the mental and emotional resilience to deal with our bigger problems in life, without that feeling of guilt and avoidance looming over us.