I – You have the choice to complain about each situation or make it into an exercise. What you choose will determine your strength of character.
Everything tests you in some way. Learn how to develop skills from it. From the small, petty annoyances of life to the massive, earth-shattering crises, everything in life gives you the opportunity to become more of a man. A man is able to demonstrate strength by resisting the force of outside events and people. He gives no foothold to any adversary.
But many instances offer you the chance to not only resist but learn to use their power against them. By making every life situation an exercise of some virtue, you can rapidly improve yourself. And you go on the offensive. You are hitting life instead of letting it hit you, and that offensive mentality gives you the strength of mind. Strength of minds leads to willpower and the ability to handle greater life responsibility.
Learn to use the power of life against it by making everything into an exercise. This simple shift in attitude will revolutionize your personal development.
II – Make it an exercise.
The first step is to simply decide to make your situation into an exercise. It sounds overly simple, but to simply decide to improve yourself creates the level of concentration necessary to actually make improvements. Sometimes decision alone is enough to create change. It may not create the level of change that you want, but it will give you some degree of results instantly. Let’s look at the overview of how you will make your life situations into exercises, then we will look at some basic examples.
- Reframe It.
- Be grateful for it.
- Endure the discomfort of it.
- Improve resilience.
- Make it a Habit.
- Reinvest the dividends
Reframe It
First, you need to shift from thinking negative to thinking positive. If you are mentally framing a situation negatively, it will continue to be an annoyance to you forever. You will never be able to improve your ability to tolerate it and you will not increase the strength of your character. You must first shift your mental thinking so that it promotes growth and improvement rather than stagnation or degradation.
Short circuit your thinking. The instant you catch yourself complaining about something, reframe it. Instead of thinking “I hate when this happens, this is the worst!”, think “This is an opportunity for me to train my patience”. Whatever bit of your character you are trying to train at the moment, reframing the situation in your mind will improve it. This shift in attitude is foundational. It will provide you with at least 50% of the improvement that you will get. The key to making something into an exercise is to think of it positively. People can sometimes exercise with a negative mindset, but they will never get the results they truly wanted. They will always be substandard, mediocre, instead of making incremental progress towards the desirable character they want.
Be Grateful for It
learn to be thankful for every situation in life. Every instance you encounter is an opportunity to train some ability. Whether it be patience, strategy, or general emotional control, you have the opportunity to improve. Gratitude will also help to tone down unproductive negative emotions. As you know, I am all about harnessing the power of negative emotions. But if we are not harnessing that power and actually channeling towards some goal, then those emotions are wasteful. And the negative nature of those emotions will cause us more harm than good. So, learn how to tone down those emotions until you can take action and simply be grateful for the opportunity to train your character.
Endure the Discomfort
Regardless of gratitude and reframing, you are still going to have to manage a certain degree of discomfort. We understand this perfectly in physical exercise. If you want to make progress, you have to endure a certain amount of pain. But by understanding that the discomfort leads to growth, we can actually not only endure the discomfort but learn to enjoy it.
Marinade in the discomfort of certain situations. Enjoy the exercise of your will and mind. You are building an unbeatable character. Exercising your willpower this way will positively impact many other areas of your life. This conscious practice will produce non-conscious results in your normal life. If you practice patience and emotional control consciously, you will reap the benefits in later situations without even thinking about it.
Improve Resilience
Just as with physical exercise the tolerance for certain weights, reps or pain is increased. So also, your mental pain threshold is increased with training. This allows you to tolerate more discomfort and recover even faster. This resilience will be encouraging and will push you to develop even more strength o character and will. It is a never-ending positive cycle of personal development.
Make it a Habit
This exercise cannot work if you only do it once. You need to make mental exercising a habit. You cannot go to the gym once and make progress, you need a degree of consistency. So, you need to increase the odds that you will remember to make everything into an exercise so you can actually reap the benefits of it.
Put a notecard in your car or in a place you will see it regularly. On that notecard write “Everything is an Exercise”. Read that card whenever you are about to go into a situation that involves people. It can be work, school, going to the store, dealing with your kids, or taking out the trash. Any and every situation has the opportunity to be a character-building exercise if you have the openness of mind and willingness of attitude to make it happen.
Reinvest the Dividends
You will likely want the results you gain in the exercises to spill over into the rest of your life without even thinking about it. That is the whole point of this exercise. That is the passive income of the mind. By following the above steps, you will find that this one comes automatically. By intentionally training your patience, you become a more patient man. And by concentrating on increasing your emotional control, you become a more stoic man. Every exercise builds the mental muscle that will be usable in other situations. All you have to do is front-load the work. And is that not the best type of work? The kind where you can invest time and energy upfront and reap the benefits for the rest of your life? All you have to do is make everything into an exercise and invest a small amount of energy into maintaining the character you build.
III – Examples
- Kids crying in the church.
- Waiting in line
- Dealing with people
Kids crying in the church
This is something that annoys me more than anything else. It angers me beyond belief. Not that a baby would cry, but that the parents of the child are so stupid that they cannot realize their child is literally drowning out the speaker. And they just sit there and let the baby scream for years.
This has been an annoyance for me for many years, but recently I have been able to turn even crying babies into exercises of patience and emotional control.
First, I become aware of my normal response when this situation would unfold. I noticed that when a baby started screaming and the parent did not take it out, my head instantly become hot and my heart rate increased. I realized I wanted to limit these physical reactions and I could do so by controlling my mind. So now each Sunday I walk into the church and remember that there will likely be a screaming baby somewhere in the church today. By simply being aware and preparing in advance for this situation I know angers me, I give myself the advantage. Now all I have to do is control my response.
So, whenever the baby inevitably begins to fill the church with high frequency wailing, I take deep, diaphragmatic breaths, center my thoughts on peace and slowly turn my attention away from the situation. This took some serious practice and still takes a lot of work, as it is very difficult to ignore something that literally causes ear pain. And I do not always succeed with this exercise, I am still learning how to control my anger at parents who possess no self-awareness whatsoever. But I have turned this annoyance into an exercise, a chance to build character and improve myself, and that makes it valuable.
Waiting in line
Another typical annoyance for many people. You have the option to pull out your phone or get angry, or you can turn this into a patience exercise. Center your thoughts on the present moment. Control your emotions and breathe deeply to slow your heart rate and lower your blood pressure. Once calm, sit back and just do some people watching. See how other human beings behave and interact instead of being absorbed in your own world.
If you are waiting in line at the grocery store and are holding groceries by hand, use this as an opportunity to build some mental toughness. See how long you can hold your groceries without switching hands. Everyone who has stood in line with a gallon of milk knows it gets heavy after a few minutes. Build the strength of mind by refusing to let go of the milk. Seems silly, but you create a small win for the mentally tough person you are one day going to become.
Dealing with people
Nowhere in the world is there a better exercise than this one. And you have the opportunity to perform this exercise nearly every day. Go into every social situation with the preparation of the mind. Expect people to behave poorly and plan to react intelligently. Human beings are always going to act like human beings, so you need to prepare yourself for this.
I stopped getting angry at the behavior of others by adopting this simple mantra: “I do not get angry at people for acting stupid. I get angry at myself for being stupid enough to expect people to act intelligently”.
By simply lowering your expectations of the behavior of others, you will increase your mental control exponentially. Let go of always trying to control people. You will make yourself miserable anytime you attempt to worry about things outside of your control. Control everything you can and worry about nothing else.
Observe people as if they were plants or animals. You do not get mad at a cactus for being a cactus or an armadillo for being an armadillo. Those things simply are, and nothing can be done about it. Instead, learn how to maneuver around people. Work the social setting to your favor by detaching from yourself and then interacting with others with an elevated mind. There is no need to stoop to their emotional level. Maintain your calm and collected nature – this is a strength of men.
Watch people, learn their mannerisms and behaviors.
Figure out how you can manage them better or interact with them in a way that is productive and beneficial to all parties. Never get angry at people for being people. Use everything as an exercise to strengthen your own will and power.
There is no limit to what can be turned into an exercise of the mind if you are willing to change your attitude about it. This is how you make every negative into a positive. By doing this you ensure that you can turn any situation into an opportunity to improve yourself. If you do this for even one-tenth of your life situations, you will be ten times ahead of the average person. Apply this technique today and improve yourself.
