Episode Summary

Jenna unpacks the power of mindset and the feminine aspects found within mental toughness.

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Show Notes

Resilience is going with what is and being able to respond to the unexpected. When we function with mental toughness, we are adaptable to our experiences and emotional landscape. We are utilizing skills that honor flexible yin energy.

As entrepreneurs, it is essential to sustain performance, but the toxic masculinity we’ve seen modeled does not work. Hard work demands conscious rest. The synergy of cycles and knowing how to act in accordance with time is a skill required for harnessing your mental toughness.

This week I dig into feminine elements of mental toughness. We examine how our fears keep us from our dreams in order to avoid discomfort. Learn how to confront areas of resistance with flow, utilize mental toughness, and honor rest. Let’s activate true mental toughness.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• What mental toughness is.

• Why predictability gets in the way of entrepreneurship. 

• How to sustain performance. 

• The 3 hallmarks of mental toughness.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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• Brooke Castillo

Full Episode Transcript:

Mental toughness, what is that exactly? Definitely something high performers seem to have with their ability to not crack under pressure. But it's also something we tend to think of as very male, or at least most prevalent in male dominated fields. But today, I'm going to break down what it's actually made of. And I'm going to make my argument that it's actually very rooted in feminine principles. HOOK

You're listening to The Uncommon Way Business and Life Coaching Podcast, the only podcast that helps you unlock your next level in business and life by prioritizing your clarity and your own Uncommon Way. You will learn to maximize your mindset, mission, messaging, and strategy in order to create a true legacy. Here's your host, top-ranked business coach, and reformed over-analyzer turned queen of clarity, Jenna Harrison.

Welcome back to The Uncommon Way, everyone. I hope that you are enjoying spring, or that it's reached you where you are. Or maybe you're in summer. I left Pennsylvania in the 70s, to come here to Phoenix, Arizona, where it is 100°. So, definitely full summer here.

Oh, my God, guess who is ranking on Apple podcasts in a very crowded niche of entrepreneurship/ marketing? Yep, us. I get this weekly digest that comes to me automatically, and it shows me what's going on with my podcast. And every time I would open it, I'm like, “It's going to be there. Someday, I'm going to see it there in the U.S. ranks.”

And then, I think I forgot about it for a while. I opened it up this week, and sure enough, there we are. So, my deepest thanks to those of you who listen regularly, who share an episode now and then, and or leave a review. This is how we get this uncommon perspective on business building into the hands of more women, which helps them create better businesses, and then do such extraordinary things for our planet.

I'm really proud of the work that each of my clients do, and I have a feeling you're also changing the world. So now, here we are. We're ranking in the U.S., in Sweden, and Singapore; thank you very much, Geraldine. And to the woman or women in Sweden, whom I have yet to meet, thank you, too.

So, I'm on my way to my mastermind retreat in Phoenix. And it's going to be a very yin space, very different from the last mastermind that I was in, which was all about the mental world and the mental practice of business. And I’ve got to say, I feel a little subversive and delightful doing a podcast on mental toughness the morning before I head to that retreat. Because I love straddling those two worlds, of the feminine principle, intuition, and mystery, and the very business minded side of things.

To add to that subversion, I'm just going to tell you that I am recording this podcast wearing some lovely black lingerie, and nothing else. A, because I'm in a hotel room, and I didn't feel like getting dressed. And B, because how fun is it to be speaking as an authority on mental toughness, while embodying one of the most played out representations of a female in our culture. It just felt too fun to not do it.

But maybe this is just me and a weird way that I like to find humor. But even in college, I remember, frequently, if I were running around in sweatpants and a messy bun, I would wear some of my most beautiful lingerie underneath that.

And then sometimes, if I were wearing what would be considered more, I don't know, what is the word, more attractive or sexually enticing clothes, I'd be wearing my granny panties underneath. It just always brought a smile to my face, and it was my way of fucking with our traditions and our ideas around femininity and sexuality. Here I am, full circle, decades later, playing with the same themes.

So, I cannot believe that I haven't created an episode on this topic until now. It's such a key piece of my work. I love helping women cultivate mental toughness. And of course, I started out with this. I started out as a performance coach, and my training was with the U.S. military.

Now, when I first came back to the military as an adult; I grew up in it. My dad was a pilot, and then I married into the military. When I came back as an adult, and really looked at it through adult eyes, I was so fascinated by how you can take a disadvantaged inner-city youth and somehow put them through boot camp or basic training, and then they come out a U.S. soldier on the other side. With such a completely different mindset, with their head held high, and just a completely different identity.

When I first looked at this, I thought of it as brainwashing. How do they brainwash these people? And the other question was, if so, can I brainwash myself? How can I do that? I became so curious and so fascinated. And that's why I decided to get my graduate certificate in Leader Development from the War College. I wanted to take every class I could, soak everything up that I could, and really try and dissect this. Break this down and understand what was really going on.

So, as I thought about doing this podcast, I remembered that earlier on, I had done a webinar on this topic, so I went back to look it up. I just have to tell you, it was so fun. I had so few testimonials and stories to pepper into this webinar, because I was just starting out. But the content was still really good. In fact, there was even a concept in there that I've completely forgotten about, and it's just so good.

I'll be doing a podcast on that in a little bit. But I'm just sharing this because if that's you right now, if you're starting out and you really don't have many testimonials, and you're maybe even thinking that there are other people out there who would be better suited for your clients, I just want you to know, you still have immense value to give. You'll be looking back five or ten years from now, thinking that shit was really good. So, just keep going. Alright?

Here's one of my favorite quotes from Michael Jordan, “The mental game is the hardest game. And that's what separates the good players from the great.” To take another basketball legend, talking about the power of mindset, we have Kobe Bryant and his Mamba mentality. Plus, there are people like Jocko Willink out there, who are really solidifying the representation of mental toughness and this kind of mindset work as stemming from the military, and particularly male in its application.

But mental toughness is not a masculine principle, it's a feminine one. It's very yin, which I'll explain in a minute. I don't love the term “mental toughness”. It's too pigeonholing and it really brings up too many other associations in people's mind. Sometimes I call it “mental cha-cha” just to really flip the script. But whatever you choose to call it, or how you want to think about it, at its core, it's really about resilience and equanimity. It's not about grip force and pushing through. It's about releasing resistance to what is.

So, the archetype of the male energy, or yang, is very much about consciousness and creation, and applied focus and even force to create change. The feminine energy is the primordial mystery of potential and possibility. It's about fluidity and adaptability. Now, we all have both within us, we all want both within us. We want untethered infinite potential, as well as the conscious direction which allows creation on the material plane.

Where we get into a problem is when these two energies reach their shadow states, their excess states. Toxic masculinity is hard and regimented and decidedly limited. That is the paradigm that we have all been brought up in. But toxic femininity is no walk in the park either. It's extremely yielding and wishy-washy and ineffective.

But in its highest state, the feminine energetic is extremely potent and powerful. And as I'm arguing here, it is the basis of what we have all come to know as mental toughness. So, let's dive into that.

I was reading this book on parenting, and the author was talking about Judo. And how the practice of Judo is really about directing the force of the opponent, rather than trying to counter the force of the opponent.

So, for instance, when your child says, “I'm so bored,” and that is the energy there, there's that force, that direction, of ‘I am bored’, parents will come in and they'll try and stop that by saying, “Oh, no, you could do this or that or the other thing. Don't be bored. I gave you all these toys. How can you be bored?”

They were trying to stop the child from being bored, rather than saying, “Oh, yeah, I get bored a lot too. That stinks. What are you going to do about it?” Right? You're going with the flow of that energy, of that boredom. I quickly made a connection in my mind with something that I witnessed frequently in the military.

So, on the morning of 9/11, when I was at work and I saw the towers go down, I immediately called my parents to let them know that I was okay. Even though they were three hours behind us, and I knew they wouldn't even be awake yet. I wanted them to know that I was okay before they heard the news.

My dad answered the phone, and when I told him what happened, you know what he said? He said, “Oh, okay. I'm glad you're okay, darlin. I'll tell your mom. Take care of yourself.” That's what he said. He didn't say, “Oh, my God, we're under attack. What is going on? I never expected this.” It was just like this focused in oh, okay, we'll handle this. It reminds me of that Judo concept.

One critically important piece of mental toughness is this ability to go with what is and to even expect the unexpected, or at least being okay with the unexpected. I know I've given this example before, of soldiers going into battle and being able to handle themselves with such presence, despite the ambushes and the unexpected.

And yet, sometimes they'll come back, and maybe their girlfriend or their wife will do something that they didn't expect and they can just crumble into a heap over that. It's all about the level of expectation in our mind, and our ability to accept what is.

Now, your foremothers had this. They had to, because of how life was. Because of how children could die at any moment. Because of how susceptible they were to the natural world. Because of the lack of predictability, they were forging their way into new lands.

It's just that now, in our privileged, modern world, we've insulated ourselves from a fair number of hardships and disappointments. And our tolerance for those things has declined.

The brain loves a sense of control, and that is based in causality, “Well, if A in the past, then B now. Though, if things were going smoothly, they should continue to go smoothly, because A and B are pretty similar. So, I should see the same outcome. If Josefina built her business this quickly and she's a woman, I should build mine equally quickly.” Nope. Not always.

This is about our preconceptions of how things will go or should go. I remember one of my mentors, Brooke Castillo, saying you are entitled to death, that's it. So often, we get this entitlement dynamic in our life, where, “But I've been through this before, so I no longer should. But I've been in business this long, so things should be happening by now.” But apparently not, because something else is happening. That is the reality. So, that is our truth.

Our brains crave, they long for this predictability, but that gets in the way of our entrepreneurship. Because when we're sitting there focusing on what we don't have, we're not putting our brains to solve for what could be. And in the same way, you don't have the guarantee of events or outcomes or circumstances. You don't have the guarantee of a specific emotional state.

And this really gets to us. We should really, really want happiness all the time, as a baseline. Even though that's impossible with our brain chemistry. And we learn much more effectively with other emotions at play. We probably wouldn't even appreciate the happiness if we were experiencing it in a prolonged consistent way. But that doesn't stop us from wanting it.

In response to this urge to avoid uncomfortable feelings, we enter a state known as “emotional reactivity”. Where our actions and thoughts are about getting away from an emotion, even if getting away from it doesn't truly serve us. Say you're very uncomfortable being visible, and you feel very vulnerable. So, you tell yourself that you don't want to put yourself out there.

But that decision is not what moves your business forward. Because it's natural to feel a lot of vulnerability and fear and doubt and disappointment as an entrepreneur and as a human. And so therefore, those things should be your expectation. And when you do feel them, so what? It's just a feeling.

We are so unwilling to feel that we will give up on our greatest hopes and dreams. We will avoid so many experiences and possibilities, that we will shortchange ourselves from so many positive experiences and opportunities.

If you could drink a little bottle of potion called Fear, for instance, and you knew that it was only going to last for 15 seconds, then that could be a fun thing to do. You could be like, “Ooh, I'm going to feel this for a second,” you would drink it, and you'd be like, “Aah, that was so fearful.”

It's like when we ride roller coasters. I remember my son, just the other day we took him to the amusement park and his joy of feeling that fear in a controlled way, was so palpable. And yet, when it happens organically, we will run at light speed to get away from it.

There were a couple of women in my last mastermind group who consider themselves very tough, they were ex-athletes. And they really prided themselves on this fact that they weren't even thinking about their emotions, and they were just going for it. They weren't going to be slowed down by those things.

But a few months later, they kept asking for coaching on these feelings they were having, because they were able to finally see how it was driving so many of their unhelpful actions. But back when they were resisting it, I was giving them an analogy. It's kind of like when you're dating, and you have your heart broken and you say, “I'm never going to love again. I'm never going to feel. No one can ever hurt me. I'll never get close to anybody.”

And in the moment, when you're a teenager and you're saying that, that feels very tough. It's like, “Yes, I'm the badass who never lets anyone in.” But we all know, in hindsight, that's actually the easy way out. It's actually a sign of weakness that you can't open yourself to being hurt. And that true strength is about being able to weather those storms.

I told them the same would be true in their businesses. That if they could just get used to tolerating those feelings, they'd not only be able to do so much more, but they'd actually have the strength that they were seeking in the first place.

So, there's a third key piece of mental toughness. And that is about relaxing your body, for presence of mind and your access to your higher thinking. This is something people don't know about the military, or at least the army. They have more four-day weekends than any profession I have ever seen. My husband, pretty much once a month, has a four-day weekend just to completely decompress.

And when they're in a deployment cycle, there is a lot of importance given to the cyclical nature, what they call the “operational tempo”, the op-tempo of the cycle. So obviously, the deployment itself is the heightened state. And then, there's a build-up to that, where you're starting to ramp up. But when you're coming back, there is a mandated downtime for people.

I remember, in the height of the war, Ben would get off at something like three o'clock or one o'clock every Friday. They would go through the offices and kick everybody out that was trying to work harder or work longer. They would be like, “Go home. Be with your family.” Oh, no, it was Wednesdays, that's what it was. Yes, it was right in the middle of the week.

It was time where you were actually supposed to spend time with your family, decompress, establish human connections, and all the things that they knew would actually add to their overall long-term performance and resilience. Because remember, the military's interested in performing optimally, and also retention. And they know that neither of those things can happen if the people are so wound up, spun up, and in such a high, high activation state.

It's like exercising, right? The work that we do in the gym is actually terrible for our body. What happens afterwards, all of that recovery process, is what's so important. That is what builds the muscle. So, as an entrepreneur, who also needs to perform at such a high level for a sustained period of time, you need to learn from that, right? You need to be able to decompress.

But now, if you think of these three hallmarks of mental toughness that I've been describing: Allowing what is, in terms of circumstances. Allowing what is, in terms of emotions. And nurturing the whole self, those are feminine principle concepts. We work on those three continuously within the Clarity Accelerator because it takes all three.

The same way the military takes civilians and transforms them into soldiers. We’re taking civilians and upgrading their minds, in a very short period of time, to transform them into true, mentally tough entrepreneurs. In the most divine feminine power kind of way, naturally.

Because when you hear, “Brute force! Battle through these obstacles! Push down your feelings into a tiny box. I'll sleep when I'm dead,” that is nothing but toxic masculinity bastardizing what mental toughness truly is. Even the name was taken over by the patriarchy, because I don't think anybody operating from a balanced masculine and feminine ever would have come up with that term.

When we see this concept being misrepresented or misapplied, like after World War Two, when the term “shell shocked” was used to blanket over the tragic effects of untreated PTSD, that was a human thing. Just like how human members of religion will corrupt the spirituality that they're representing. It's the human intervention that's the problem, rather than the thing itself.

We, as women, should embrace this concept of mental toughness, or of having mental cha-chas, or of resilience, or whatever you want to call it, you choose your word. But love the concept of it, because it is you. And as women who represent a new face of business, and as women who need to develop this superpower, in order to grow the high impact businesses that you aspire to have, we need to prioritize this work. Because we're just not taught to cultivate it, and because it goes against our biology.

So, what is one circumstance in your life or business that you can stop resisting? And how will that change how you move forward? What's one emotion in your life, in business, that you can start allowing, and getting to know and getting to tolerate?

And what would change for you if that emotion were no longer a problem? What’s one thing can you do today, maybe even right now, to reset your nervous system in order to tap into your highest thinking and resilience? Where can you stand in your power and stand above it all, watch it happen, and know that it's okay?

Because you have the power of taking that and transforming it into lessons and wisdom and desire and momentum. And one last question, if you would like to create a military-grade mind, so that you can move yourself and your company into the success that's waiting for you, then what are you waiting for? Join the Clarity Accelerator; you will be a different woman in three months.

Okay, my friends, have a wonderful week, and I'll talk to you again next Saturday. Remember, you know who you are, and each day you're stepping further into what you are here to create.

Hey, if you're a coach who wants true clarity about your secret sauce, your people, your best way of doing business, and how you talk about your offer, then I invite you to join us in the Clarity Accelerator. I'll teach you to connect all the dots, the dots that have always been there for you so that you can show up like you were born for exactly this.

Come join us and supercharge every other tool or tactic you'll ever learn, from Facebook ads to manifestation. Just go to TheUncommonWay.com/schedule and set up a time to talk. I can't wait to be your coach.

Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the Clarity First Strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit TheUncommonWay.com. See you next time.

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