Review

A helpful reimagining of our understanding of toughness. Grounded in evidence this book gives some clear guidance to parents, coaches or anyone who want’s to push themselve.This is a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life's biggest challenges.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• The traditional view of toughness is overcoming obstacles with a combination of perseverance, discipline, and stoicism.

Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision. Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can.

Real toughness replaces control with autonomy, appearance with substance, rigidly pushing forward with flexibility to adapt, motivation from fear with an inner drive, and insecurity with a quiet confidence.

• Toughness is having the space to make the right choice under discomfort. Not bulldozing or pushing through, but navigating.
• The four pillars of real toughness provide a tool kit to navigate whatever obstacle you face:
1. Ditch the Facade, Embrace Reality
2. Listen to Your Body
3. Respond Instead of React
4. Transcend Discomfort

Pillar 1: Ditch the Facade, Embrace Reality

• Toughness is about embracing the reality of where we are and what we have to do. Not deluding ourselves, filling ourselves with a false confidence, or living in denial.
• When there’s a difference between what you project and what you are capable of, it all crumbles under stressful situations.
• An honest appraisal of ourself and the situation allows us to have a productive response to stress.
• Strategies to nudge us toward an accurate appraisal and productive stress response:
1. Set goals slightly beyond current abilities to maintain motivation.
2. Choose goals that reflect true self for better follow-through.
3. Focus on process-oriented goals (effort and execution) rather than outcomes.
4. Learn to navigate stress and fatigue by adjusting expectations and actions.
5. Shift focus from threats to opportunities to enhance performance.

• Self-esteem is helpful only when it’s founded in reality, it shouldn’t be the goal itself, but a by-product of hard work

Lasting self-esteem doesn’t come from being told that we are great. It comes from doing the actual work and making real connections.

The pursuit of self-esteem logically sets you up for low self-esteem. Mark Freeman · You Are Not a Rock

• A contingent self-worth is when our self-worth is dependent on outside factors - like what people think and how we are judged. We give over control to external factors. Idle praise and undeserved rewards create an environment ripe for developing contingent self-worth.
• Outward displays of confidence are much less powerful than confidence that comes from deep within.
• When we face a challenge, expectation and reality should have a high degree of overlap. If they don’t our likelihood to persist through a challenge or perform at our best is greatly diminished. We’re more likely to stop and quit.
• Take on challenges above your current ability, and you’re more likely to give up and quit. Those that are self-aware can calibrate their practice to the goldilocks zone of difficulty, and build momentum.
• Four steps to develop true inner confidence:
1. Lower the bar. Raise the floor → As an athlete you want to step onto the track, and know you’re going to be able to achieve a certain standard, no matter the circumstances. When everything clicks you can still exceed expectations - you’re not lowering your ceiling. Confidence comes from knowing that a certain performance level is repeatable, as long as you do what’s in your control. You can’t accomplish a PB every time - don’t judge yourself against your all-time best. Beating the average of your last 5 most recent performances is a better goal. Understand what you are capable of, and set a standard that falls within that realm or just a touch outside of it
2. Shed perfection. Embrace who you are → Real confidence lies in understanding who you are and what you are capable of. You don’t raise your floor by developing an unrealistic view of yourself. You do so by taking a hard look at where you are in the moment. Understanding what you are capable of, what challenges the task brings, and where your weaknesses might lie. Real toughness resides in being humble and wise enough to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses. When we come to terms with our shortcomings, we’re able to adopt a secure sense of self.
3. Trust your training. Trust yourself → Trust your training, trust your fitness. True confidence is founded in doing the work. When the work is done in the name of getting better, of enjoying the process, of searching for mastery of the craft, then confidence gradually grows.

If you have doubt or concern about a shot, or feel the ‘pressure’ of that shot, it’s because you haven’t practiced it enough. The only way to relieve that pressure is to build your fundamentals, practice them over and over, so when the game breaks down, you can handle anything that transpires. Michael Jordan

4. Develop a quiet ego → Quiet ego is about being aware of our strengths and weaknesses, zooming out and gaining perspective. Too much defensiveness and protection are signs your ego’s too loud. Mix perception, awareness, and security together, we can move on from the false-bravado. Confidence is doing difficult things, sometimes failing, but seeing where you lie, and then going back to the work.

• How much we perceive we can control impacts how we respond to stress. When we lack control, our stress spikes. When we have a sense that we can impact the situation, our cortisol response is dampened.
• The desire to exercise control and make choices is paramount for survival. We have a basic underlying need to have some semblance of control over whatever we’re tackling.
• The key to improving mental toughness isn’t in constraining and controlling individuals but giving them choice.
• When we don’t have control, we lose the capacity to cope. It’s when we have a choice that toughness is trained.
• Four exercises that help to develop that sense of control in yourself:
1. From Small to Large. Take a difficult situation that brings about discomfort - and instead of wrestling the giant monster, start with the smallest item that you can have control over that’s related to the problem. Identify a small manageable and feasible action - and that’ll help you get a foothold. Once you have a sense of control over the smallest item, then move to something slightly larger
2. Give Yourself a Choice. When building habits give yourself a choice. For example allow yourself to miss two days per week if you need to. Allowing for a mulligan helps, all or nothing often leaves you with nothing. If you consider quitting you are now training toughness.
3. Flip the Script. Throwing up with nerves? Where would you like to insert throwing up into your warm-up routine? What time should I schedule your puking for? It might suppress the urge. Notice what nudges you toward fear and avoidance. Those triggers are often a signal that we need to flip the script.
1. Address the elephant in the room. Everyone in this room knows more than me, so this is a bit nerve-racking. But I do know about the science of performance, and if you give me a chance, I think it’ll help you → flip the script and take away the power of “the thing.” We give ourselves permission to do something
4. Adopt a ritual. Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams have their particular quirks. According to the theory of compensatory control they are trying to establish order in the outside world in an effort to regain control. They shift our focus to behavioirs that we are in charge of - helping us navigate situations we have have little control over. Rituals can help when doing activities with a high degree of uncertainty and a low degree of control
• Leading Others
1. Learn to let go. When you dictate and control you’re sending a message that you don’t trust others to do their job. Trust but verify instead. Check in occasionally to make sure they are headed in the right direction.
2. Set the Constraints and Let Them Go. Give away control but set up the boundaries. As a coach aim to make yourself obsolete. Coach them toward independence, not dependence. Gradually hand more and more responsibility to those you work with.
3. Allow Them to Fail, Reflect, and Improve. Part of giving back control is allowing them to make mistakes. Start small but give away more control over time, then have system in place that allows for reflection and growth. Give people space to fail.

Pillar 2: Listen to Your Body

• Our body uses feelings and sensations to communicate the data of our internal status to our conscious self.
• The function of feelings is to update us to our condition and drive us toward a possible solution.

The better we can read and distinguish the internal signals that our body is sending, the better we are able to use feelings and emotions as information to help guide our actions, instead of missing the signal or moving straight from feeling to reacting.

• Our brain is a patchwork mess - it operates as a series of modules that have weak connections with each other. Our brain can get contradicting information - competing voices pushing us toward competing conclusions or actions.
• The three tactics that can help us wiin the inner debate:
1. Verbalise your thoughts to get through. Coping statements were more effective when verbalised. Occasionally giving yourself an overt pep talk or instructions might be a way to reach a stubborn you that hasn’t been paying attention to your inner voice.
2. Know what to listen to. Positive self-talk doesn’t increase but performance, but having less negative self-talk does. Those who believe self-talk is effective perform better than those who see it as irrelevant.
3. In stressful situations, adopt a self-distanced inner dialogue to decrease anxiety, shame, rumination. Using second or third person creates distance between the experience and our emotional response. By creating space with a simple change in our vocabulary, we regain control instead of defaulting toward the easy decision.

Pillar 3: Respond Instead of React

• Toughness creates space between the stimulus and response.
• Meditators when faced with a challenge don’t distract or detach themselves they embrace reality and narrow the gap between perception and reality. They suppress exaggeration and can regulate emotions better as a result.
• Affective inertia is the inability to let go of a sensation or emotion that has taken hold in our brain → negative emotions or thoughts compound, triggering an increased reactivity and a more prolonged recovery tail.
• Have a conversation with exhaustion - think of it as feedback.
• Practice Meditation: Sit quietly in a room with minimal distractions. You'll feel sensations that may turn into positive or negative thoughts. Sit with them without focusing or pushing them away. Notice where your mind goes and what it latches onto. Don’t resist; let it dissipate or grow over time. Experience sensations and thoughts without freaking out. Start with 5 minutes, gradually increase to 15 or 20 minutes.
• Practice experiencing without reacting: Observe thoughts and let negative ones pass. Feel the urge to quit, then use strategies like redirecting attention or positive self-talk. Create space between sensation and response.
• Practice avoiding spiralling: Practice your challenging task while allowing your mind to spiral negatively. As you do, try to pull yourself out using these strategies:
• Zoom in/out: Change your focus from narrow to broad.
• Label: Name what you're feeling to reduce its power.
• Reframe: View the situation differently, e.g., stress as positive.
• Adjust your goal: Break it into manageable steps.
• Remind: Recall your purpose for doing the task.
• Give permission to fail: Free yourself to perform better.
• Decide whether to zoom in or out:
1. Visual Zooming: Portrait Mode vs. Panorama Mode Focus narrowly on details (portrait) or broadly on everything around you (panorama). Blurring your vision can help when overwhelmed.
2. Cognitive Zooming: Narrow thinking aids focus, broad thinking aids creativity.
3. Physical Zooming: Our mood follows actions, leaning forward encourages narrow focus, reclining encourages broad thinking. Alter your posture to change your perspective.
4. Temporal Zooming: Imagine the future, consider how you'll feel about current issues in the future. It reminds us that difficulties are temporary.
5. Linguistic Zooming: switch from first person to second or third person to distance yourself from the situation. Journaling in second or third person can help process emotions.
6. Environmental Zooming: Modern writers find quiet, distraction-free environments to be productive.

Pillar 4: Transcend Discomfort

• Controlling leaders use rewards, negativity, intimidation, and excessive personal control to create dependence.
• Self-determination theory identifies three key needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness for well-being and growth.
• A demanding dictator strips athletes of autonomy, using fear and punishment, which kills intrinsic motivation.
• Toughness comes from care and support, not control or punishment.
• In autonomy-supportive environments, leaders guide rather than dictate, helping individuals reach their potential while allowing them to take ownership of their actions.
• Supportive environments focus on choice ownership and control over the journey.
• Seeing progress is crucial for motivation; if goals seem unattainable, complacency follows.
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs shows growth must be chosen repeatedly over safety.

• Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome. Fulfilment could be achieved in three ways: doing, experiencing, and suffering.
• When we are exhausted - we haven’t completely depleted our reserves. Our body warns us through the sensation of effort and fatigue, it tell us we’re at zero before we actually hit zero. There’s always something in reserve. Drive determines how close to empty we can push before our body shuts us down.
• The level of importance and the risk versus reward help us determine how close to zero we can push. Therefore purpose is the fuel that allows you to be tough. .

Real toughness is living in the nuance and complexity of the environment, bodies, and minds we inhabit. There is no one standard pathway to inner strength, no formula for making difficult decisions or dealing with the extremes of discomfort. Real toughness is about acceptance: of who you are, what you’re going through, and the discomfort that often comes with it. It’s living in that place of tension so that the needed space can be created to find the best path forward.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 1 From Tough Coaches, Tough Parents, and Tough Guys to Finding Real Inner Strength

• The traditional view of toughness is overcoming obstacles with a combination of perseverance, discipline, and stoicism.
• For parents and coaches, the key is to have high expectations, but give lots of support.
• Authoritarian parents and coaches have high demands but provide little support, relying on fear and punishment.
• Leads to lower independence, misbehavior, aggression, and higher risks of substance abuse and risky behaviors.
• Creates a facade of discipline without fostering it.
• In sports, leads to lower grit, emotional exhaustion, burnout, and fear of failure.
• Authoritarian parents and coaches produce fragile and dependent individuals.
• We’ve confused toughness with callousness (having thick skin, fearing nothing, suppressing emotions and signs of vulnerability).
• We make high demands but without the support that make high achievement possible.
• In trying to toughen through callousness, we’ve trained ourselves to respond to fear and power.
• The external becomes more important than the internal.
• The facade of toughness becomes more important than handling difficult times. Appearance over substance.
• The problem is if you remove the fear, power, and control they won’t have the skills to navigate adversity.

Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision. Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can.

Real toughness replaces control with autonomy, appearance with substance, rigidly pushing forward with flexibility to adapt, motivation from fear with an inner drive, and insecurity with a quiet confidence.

• The key to generating mental toughness is creating an environment which emphasises trust, inclusion, humility, and service… not the authoritarian, or oppressive style.
• Real toughness is about providing the tool set to handle adversity.
• Toughness is having the space to make the right choice under discomfort. Not bulldozing or pushing through, but navigating.
• Toughness is about making good decisions when under discomfort - it’s far more than merely grinding through.

Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can.

• The four pillars of real toughness provide a tool kit to navigate whatever obstacle you face:
1. Ditch the Facade, Embrace Reality
2. Listen to Your Body
3. Respond Instead of React
4. Transcend Discomfort

Chapter 2 Sink or Swim: How We Took the Wrong Lesson from the Military

• Many sports coaches adopt the darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to sport training camps. The idea is that you siphon off the weak; let the strong remain. Those who survive will thrive. No water, go until you puke, harden players, develop thick skin.
• The goal of the Navy SEALs’ hell week is to sort those who can survive the challenges of war from those that can’t. It’s not how they actually develop soldiers to survive extreme adversity.
• 96% percent of soldiers experience dissociative symptoms under extreme stress: amnesia, depersonalisation or derealisation (detachment from surroundings). Some though can stay calm and retain their cognitive abilities.
• The Airforce SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training program has three stages: classroom, evasion, and detention
• SERE training is based on stress inoculation - expose troops to a safe amount of stress and it will help them operate under extreme stress in combat.
• The first step is all about teaching the skills necessary to cope with the situation.
• Stress inoculation doesn’t work if you put individuals in a harrowing environments without first teaching them the skills to cope.

The lesson wasn’t that we just need to put people in difficult spots and force them to deal with adversity. We need to teach them how to navigate the discomfort they’ll soon face.

• The soldiers who did well under extreme stress…
• View stress as a challenge instead of a threat - due to a better assessment of what they encountered.
• They utilise a diverse array of methods to cope with stress - demonstrating a high degree of cognitive flexibility
• They process internal signals better - without reacting to them
• They didn’t react to negative stimuli - instead they changed their physiological state.

Negative thoughts of quitting are normal. They don’t mean you are weak. They represent your mind trying to protect you.

• We all face an inner battle, sometimes our inner world screams at us to quit. The key to toughness lies in navigating the biological and psychological cacophony.
• How do we get from discomfort to action?
• Feel → Inner debate → Urge → Decision (freak out OR find our way through)
• Our brain is an uncertainty-reducing machine. Uncertainty demands a conclusion - we have a need for closure, however we can reach it.
• Sometimes that means giving up.
• Other times it means changing our expectations before even beginning a task.
• Or we can explore, accept or avoid.

Pillar 1: Ditch the Facade, Embrace Reality

Chapter 3 Accept What You Are Capable Of

• When it comes to just about any endurance task, regardless of whether it’s cycling, swimming, or running, we utilise a simple metric to fine-tune our pacing: the sensation of effort.
• Performance = Actual demands ÷ Expected demands If the pace feels much more comfortable than you expected, you pick it up. If it feels more challenging than expected, our feeling of pain and fatigue will go up, our inner dialogue will become negative, and we’re more likely to slow down.
• Pain and fatigue are our body’s way of nudging us toward a course correction. We can’t sustain the pace, so we’d better slow down. If we don’t listen, our body will take matters into its own hands, shutting us down to prevent catastrophic failure or damage—like
• Toughness is about embracing the reality of where we are and what we have to do. Not deluding ourselves, filling ourselves with a false confidence, or living in denial. All of that simply sends us sprinting off the line, only to slow to a walk once reality hits. Being tough begins long before we enter the arena or walk on stage. It starts with our expectations.
• Research consistently shows that tougher individuals are able to perceive stressful situations as challenges instead of threats. A challenge is something that’s difficult, but manageable. On the other hand, a threat is something we’re just trying to survive, to get through. This difference in appraisals isn’t because of an unshakable confidence or because tougher individuals downplay the difficulty. Rather, those who can see situations as a challenge developed the ability to quickly and accurately assess the situation and their ability to cope with it. An honest appraisal is all about giving your mind better data to predict with.
• Our body cheats. Instead of waiting to see whether a task is hazardous, our brain makes its best guess about what we need to survive or thrive.
• our biological response and the sensations that come with it are guided not only by the actual experience but by our expectations. How we see the world shapes how we respond to it.
• Some responses prepare the muscles for actions, others open up or slow down the blood flow, while some marshal the immune system to prepare for potential damage or injury.
• On the other hand, if we see the stressor as an opportunity for growth or gain, as something that is difficult but that we can handle, we’re more likely to experience a challenge response. Instead of relying mostly on cortisol, our body releases more testosterone and adrenaline. We shift toward figuring out how to win the game, how to accomplish our goal.
• If our expectations swing too far in the other direction, our brain goes into what I call “What’s the point?” mode.
• Our ability to be “tough” and handle adversity starts well before we even encounter any difficulty. It starts with embracing the reality of the situation and what you’re capable of.
• Our appraisal of a situation as a threat or as a challenge depends on the perceived demands of that stressor versus our perceived abilities to handle them. Do we have the resources to handle the demands?
• “Everyone wears a mask. We carry around a facade, projecting an outer image of who we want to be. But when you are under stress, that fades away and you’re left with what’s underneath. Stress exposes you.”
• “When there’s a difference between what you project and what you are capable of, it all crumbles under stressful situations. If, on the other hand, you’re honest with yourself, and acknowledge what your strengths and weaknesses are, what you’re capable of and what might scare you, then you can come to terms with what you’re facing and deal with it.

Embrace reality. Accurate appraisal of demands + accurate appraisal of our abilities

• A key component of real toughness is acknowledging when something is hard, not pretending it isn’t. An honest appraisal of ourself and the situation allows us to have a productive response to stress.
• There are research-backed strategies that we can use to fine-tune our mind, to nudge us toward an accurate appraisal, and even more so toward a productive stress response that prepares us for action.
• Set Appropriate Goals: Aim for goals slightly beyond current abilities to maintain motivation.

1. Set Authentic Goals: Choose goals that reflect true self for better follow-through.
2. Define Judgments and Expectations: Focus on process-oriented goals (effort and execution) rather than outcomes.
3. Course-Correct for Stress: Learn to navigate stress and fatigue by adjusting expectations and actions.
4. Prime Your Mind: Shift focus from threats to opportunities to enhance performance.

These techniques emphasise setting realistic and authentic goals, focusing on effort, adjusting for stress, and maintaining a positive mindset.

Chapter 4 True Confidence Is Quiet; Insecurity Is Loud Leonard

• World-class performers are human - they aren’t emotionless machines immune to the effects of pressure or poor performance.
• If confidence is too low, athletes become irrational, unable to control nerves or maintain focus on their usual routines. Competition is seen as a threat, not a challenge. They become timid, indecisive, withdrawn and lacked fight.
• When confidence is high, we’re able to completely focus on the task at hand.
• Confidence is a filter, tinting how we see the challenges before us.
• The old model of toughness emphasises acting instead of doing.
• True confidence is grounded in reality, and it comes from the inside.
• You can’t eliminate doubt - so use it to keep yourself in check.
• Self-esteem is helpful only when it’s founded in reality, it shouldn’t be the goal itself, but a by-product of hard work, overcoming challenges and making meaningful connections with others. Self-esteem represents a summary of our sense of acceptance, both from ourself and from our social group.
• We can change our inner narrative through when we are challenged and overcome adversity.

Lasting self-esteem doesn’t come from being told that we are great. It comes from doing the actual work and making real connections.

• In 1990 Vasconcellos started the self-esteem movement - calling it a social vaccine that could inoculate us against all sorts of societal challenges.
• It didn’t matter that the research was inconclusive at best - the narrative was already written.
• The movement tried to give self-esteem without the action and work to validate it.
• It shifted the focus away from the joy of actually doing the work and toward external praise and rewards.
• Research later showed it didn’t work - it created only an artificial kind of self-esteem, a fragile one based on a delusion.
• A contingent self-worth is when our self-worth is dependent on outside factors - like what people think and how we are judged. We give over control to external factors.
• Idle praise and undeserved rewards create an environment ripe for developing contingent self-worth.

The pursuit of self-esteem logically sets you up for low self-esteem. Mark Freeman · You Are Not a Rock

• Athletes who are extrinsically motivated (e.g to get praise or avoid criticism from parents). show the least amount of improvement.
• Don’t base your self-esteem or confidence on things you can’t control (praise, rewards, avoiding criticism) or things which are unearned or undeserved.
• With self-esteem and confidence, there’s a real version. One that’s deep, based on evidence Delusion and fake confidence go hand in hand.
• We confused outward displays with inner confidence. Confidence has to come from deep within.
• When we face a challenge, expectation and reality should have a high degree of overlap. If they don’t our likelihood to persist through a challenge or perform at our best is greatly diminished. We’re more likely to stop and quit.
• Take on challenges above your current ability, and you’re more likely to give up and quit. Those that are self-aware can calibrate their practice to the goldilocks zone of difficulty, and build momentum.
• If you adopt a manifestation strategy your telling your brain that we won’t have to work hard to achieve our goal. Why should we waste resources if this is going to be easy? When reality hits us - the mirage is broken.
• Pretending to be confident can be effective to some degree but it won’t last when things get tough. False confidence works only on easy tasks, where the challenge is low and a bit of extra motivation is needed to get you started.

Confidence is knowing you can accomplish whatever is within your capabilities. It’s not in being able to do the impossible.

Four steps to develop true inner confidence:

1. Lower the bar. Raise the floor → As an athlete you want to step onto the track, and know you’re going to be able to achieve a certain standard, no matter the circumstances. When everything clicks you can still exceed expectations - you’re not lowering your ceiling. Confidence comes from knowing that a certain performance level is repeatable, as long as you do what’s in your control. You can’t accomplish a PB every time - don’t judge yourself against your all-time best. Beating the average of your last 5 most recent performances is a better goal. Understand what you are capable of, and set a standard that falls within that realm or just a touch outside of it
2. Shed perfection. Embrace who you are → Real confidence lies in understanding who you are and what you are capable of. You don’t raise your floor by developing an unrealistic view of yourself. You do so by taking a hard look at where you are in the moment. Understanding what you are capable of, what challenges the task brings, and where your weaknesses might lie. Real toughness resides in being humble and wise enough to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses. When we come to terms with our shortcomings, we’re able to adopt a secure sense of self.
3. Trust your training. Trust yourself → Trust your training, trust your fitness. True confidence is founded in doing the work. When the work is done in the name of getting better, of enjoying the process, of searching for mastery of the craft, then confidence gradually grows.

If you have doubt or concern about a shot, or feel the ‘pressure’ of that shot, it’s because you haven’t practiced it enough. The only way to relieve that pressure is to build your fundamentals, practice them over and over, so when the game breaks down, you can handle anything that transpires. Michael Jordan

4. Develop a quiet ego → Quiet ego is about being aware of our strengths and weaknesses, zooming out and gaining perspective. Too much defensiveness and protection are signs your ego’s too loud. Mix perception, awareness, and security together, we can move on from the false-bravado. Confidence is doing difficult things, sometimes failing, but seeing where you lie, and then going back to the work.

The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness. Alain de Botton · Confidence

Chapter 5 Know When to Hold ’Em and When to Fold ’Em In Russian

• Learned helplessness: Take away control, and humans resign themselves to their fate and give up. When we lack control, we feel like no matter what we do… our brain is getting the message “What’s the point?”
• Viktor Frankl was told by another prisoner that to increase his chances of survival he should do two simple things: shave and stand tall. In other words, control what you can.
• Many of us struggle to get out the door to exercise - we blame it on lack of will, or motivation, but the truth is when we lack a sense of control over our life, apathy naturally takes over.
• How much we perceive we can control impacts how we respond to stress. When we lack control, our stress spikes. When we have a sense that we can impact the situation, our cortisol response is dampened.
• Control also affects our ability to persist. When we believe we have influence over an outcome, we’re more likely to persevere, even if we face a setback.
• Self-determination theory and self-efficacy are the two most prominent theories of motivation. When we feel like we can have an impact on whatever it is we do, we are better off. Feeling we have control is central not only to overcoming adversity
• Self-determination theory: our level of autonomy is correlated to our well-being. It is one of three basic psychological needs that allow us to flourish and bolster our motivation.
• Self-efficacy: reflect our confidence in our ability to exert control over one’s own motivation, behaviour, and social environment.
• Those who report feeling more autonomy and less micromanaging have higher levels of job satisfaction and performance.
• We need to train hopefulness. Small actions that remind you that you have a choice go a long way to training the ability to put your brain back online.
• When we lack the ability to choose, our prefrontal cortex learns to shut off, to let the stress response run wild.
• The desire to exercise control and make choices is paramount for survival. We have a basic underlying need to have some semblance of control over whatever we’re tackling.
• Athletes that train in an autonomy-supportive environment tended to have higher levels of mental toughness and better performances.
• The key to improving mental toughness isn’t in constraining and controlling individuals but giving them choice.
• When we don’t have control, we lose the capacity to cope. It’s when we have a choice that toughness is trained.

Training to Have Control

• If your goal is to train toughness — you have to give people a degree of autonomy.
• Four exercises that help to develop that sense of control in yourself:
1. From Small to Large. Take a difficult situation that brings about discomfort - and instead of wrestling the giant monster, start with the smallest item that you can have control over that’s related to the problem. Identify a small manageable and feasible action - and that’ll help you get a foothold. Once you have a sense of control over the smallest item, then move to something slightly larger
2. Give Yourself a Choice. When building habits give yourself a choice. For example allow yourself to miss two days per week if you need to. Allowing for a mulligan helps, all or nothing often leaves you with nothing. If you consider quitting you are now training toughness.
3. Flip the Script. Throwing up with nerves? Where would you like to insert throwing up into your warm-up routine? What time should I schedule your puking for? It might suppress the urge. Notice what nudges you toward fear and avoidance. Those triggers are often a signal that we need to flip the script.
1. Address the elephant in the room. Everyone in this room knows more than me, so this is a bit nerve-racking. But I do know about the science of performance, and if you give me a chance, I think it’ll help you → flip the script and take away the power of “the thing.” We give ourselves permission to do something
4. Adopt a ritual. Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams have their particular quirks. According to the theory of compensatory control they are trying to establish order in the outside world in an effort to regain control. They shift our focus to behavioirs that we are in charge of - helping us navigate situations we have have little control over. Rituals can help when doing activities with a high degree of uncertainty and a low degree of control

Leading Others

1. Learn to let go. When you dictate and control you’re sending a message that you don’t trust others to do their job. Trust but verify instead. Check in occasionally to make sure they are headed in the right direction.
2. Set the Constraints and Let Them Go. Give away control but set up the boundaries. As a coach aim to make yourself obsolete. Coach them toward independence, not dependence. Gradually hand more and more responsibility to those you work with.
3. Allow Them to Fail, Reflect, and Improve. Part of giving back control is allowing them to make mistakes. Start small but give away more control over time, then have system in place that allows for reflection and growth. Give people space to fail.

The Second Pillar of Toughness Listen to Your Body

Chapter 6 Your Emotions Are Messengers, Not Dictators

• Emotions help to alert, advise, and regulate us. In the old model of toughness, we’re told that emotions should be ignored or suppressed.
• The interoceptive system provides an overview of the homeostatic function of the entire body, a type of status update on how your body is doing. Temperature, glucose levels etc.
• Our body uses feelings and sensations to communicate the data of our internal status to our conscious self.
• To navigate discomfort - we need to listen to the messages our body is sending.
• The function of feelings is to update us to our condition and drive us toward a possible solution.
• Emotions are telling us important information. They nudge us toward a behaviour - but they are also subject to distortion. The better we understand the interoceptive signals reaching our awareness, the better our interpretation—and ultimately the decisions that come from them—will be.
• Tough individuals develop the ability to discern the nuance that most of us are blind to.
• We can interpret very similar sensations in drastically different ways—from nervousness to excitement (increased heart rate, sweaty palms, a touch of jitters). When we label emotions or experiences, we can change not only our interpretation of them, but also how our body responds.
• Poor interception → Poor predictions → Lower toughness and worse decision making

Developing Nuance Exercises

• Find ways to experience the feelings that are closely related to the situation you are working on.
• Direct your attention at what you’re experiencing or feeling and sit with that sensation. Find the nuance between the different signals.
• Name it - expand your vocabulary to find more nuance and clarity in feelings.
• Try to separate the physical sensations from the feeling. Sweaty palms and a racing heart are the physical sensations.
• Reframe the signal as helpful information. You have a name for what you’re experiencing, take control of the message. Can you see anxiety as excitement?

The better we can read and distinguish the internal signals that our body is sending, the better we are able to use feelings and emotions as information to help guide our actions, instead of missing the signal or moving straight from feeling to reacting.

Chapter 7 Own the Voice in Your Head

• Callahan a shipwreck survivor divided his mind into two different characters and it helped him survive:
• A crewman - his emotional self. That acknowledged the reality of the situation: his pain, fears, and desires.
• A captain - his rational self. That kept him in check and made the difficult decisions that were necessary to survive.
• Our mind function like different selves arguing with each other, competing for attention. The voices are conveying information to you. Reframe toughness as something defined by awareness of these voices and they can become tools that help us make better decisions when things get hard.
• Our brain is a patchwork mess - it operates as a series of modules that have weak connections with each other. Our brain can get contradicting information - competing voices pushing us toward competing conclusions or actions.
• Five voices are common:
• Faithful Friend—tied to personal strength, relationships, and positive feelings
• Ambivalent Parent—associated with strength, love, and caring criticism
• Proud Rival—a voice that appeared distant and success-oriented
• Calm Optimist—a relaxed voice with a positive outlook
• Helpless Child—embodying negative emotions and a lack of a sense of control
• The old model of toughness told us to not to recognise those inner voices.
• BUT everyone has an inner devil spurring on fears and doubts.

If the messenger (feeling) shouts loud enough, a corresponding thought will enter our awareness to motivate us toward a behavioral response or action. Our inner speech serves to integrate our variety of systems or selves. To bring concerns and motives to awareness and decide what to do with them.

• The three tactics that can help us wiin the inner debate:
1. Verbalise your thoughts to get through. Coping statements were more effective when verbalised. Occasionally giving yourself an overt pep talk or instructions might be a way to reach a stubborn you that hasn’t been paying attention to your inner voice.
2. Know what to listen to. Positive self-talk doesn’t increase but performance, but having less negative self-talk does. Those who believe self-talk is effective perform better than those who see it as irrelevant.
3. In stressful situations, adopt a self-distanced inner dialogue to decrease anxiety, shame, rumination. Using second or third person creates distance between the experience and our emotional response. By creating space with a simple change in our vocabulary, we regain control instead of defaulting toward the easy decision.
• A good internal voice is a genuinely decent judge. It should be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what's going on, and interested in helping us deal with our problems.
• When in a situation that requires toughness - we need to make sure the right self is in charge.

The Third Pillar of Toughness Respond Instead of React

Chapter 8 Keep Your Mind Steady

• Those who meditate can turn a nearly automatic reaction into a thoughtful response - they reappraise the signal that usually triggers alarm bells - they respond, they don’t react.
• When we face discomfort - we often jump from the sensation of pain straight to the emotion that it comes with. Toughness creates space between the stimulus and response.
• Meditators when faced with a challenge don’t distract or detach themselves they embrace reality and narrow the gap between perception and reality. They suppress exaggeration and can regulate emotions better as a result.
• The alarm bell in the brain (the amygdala) has a distinctive response to a stressor, it spikes within the first 5-8seconds, then declines for the next 5 seconds as the signal returns toward the baseline.
• Affective inertia is the inability to let go of a sensation or emotion that has taken hold in our brain → negative emotions or thoughts compound, triggering an increased reactivity and a more prolonged recovery tail.
• Lose control of your reaction and you can get trapped in a negativity spiral. At that point we’re no longer responding to the actual stressful event but the reverberating waves.
• The average person is getting a triple dose of pain (before, during, and after) - long-term meditators however simply respond when the painful stimulus is delivered.
• Meditators muster the appropriate stress response for a situation and let it do its thing.

Respond to reality. For most of us, we are not only responding to the actual stress but the reverberations of it. Tough individuals learn to match perception with reality so that they marshal the appropriate response instead of an exaggerated one.

• Four ways to deal with an unpleasant sensation:
• Avoid or ignore
• Fight
• Accept
• Reappraise
• Have a conversation with exhaustion - think of it as feedback.
• Practice Meditation: Sit quietly in a room with minimal distractions. You'll feel sensations that may turn into positive or negative thoughts. Sit with them without focusing or pushing them away. Notice where your mind goes and what it latches onto. Don’t resist; let it dissipate or grow over time. Experience sensations and thoughts without freaking out. Start with 5 minutes, gradually increase to 15 or 20 minutes.
• Practice experiencing without reacting: Observe thoughts and let negative ones pass. Feel the urge to quit, then use strategies like redirecting attention or positive self-talk. Create space between sensation and response.
• Practice avoiding spiralling: Practice your challenging task while allowing your mind to spiral negatively. As you do, try to pull yourself out using these strategies:
• Zoom in/out: Change your focus from narrow to broad.
• Label: Name what you're feeling to reduce its power.
• Reframe: View the situation differently, e.g., stress as positive.
• Adjust your goal: Break it into manageable steps.
• Remind: Recall your purpose for doing the task.
• Give permission to fail: Free yourself to perform better.

Chapter 9 Turn the Dial So You Don’t Spiral

• What to do when at breaking point.
• Adrenaline junkies amplify fear by focusing on the situation, using immersion, maintaining visual attention, and reminding themselves it's not real; white-knucklers do the opposite.
• Coping strategies vary: thrill-seekers reframe fear as excitement, while white-knucklers suppress inner and outer experiences to get through.
• Elite runners use an associative strategy, paying close attention to bodily sensations during discomfort, contrary to the hypothesis that they zone out.
• Narrow focus directs all cognitive resources to immediate tasks but can lead to missing important cues and signals.
• Prolonged narrow focus can contribute to rumination and depression.
• The broaden-and-build theory states positive emotions expand cognition and action opportunities, while negative emotions narrow them.
• Broadening attention leads to more creativity and better problem-solving.
• The old toughness model limits options, emphasising grit and perseverance without flexibility.
• Decide whether to zoom in or out:
1. Visual Zooming: Portrait Mode vs. Panorama Mode Focus narrowly on details (portrait) or broadly on everything around you (panorama). Blurring your vision can help when overwhelmed.
2. Cognitive Zooming: Narrow thinking aids focus, broad thinking aids creativity.
3. Physical Zooming: Our mood follows actions, leaning forward encourages narrow focus, reclining encourages broad thinking. Alter your posture to change your perspective.
4. Temporal Zooming: Imagine the future, consider how you'll feel about current issues in the future. It reminds us that difficulties are temporary.
5. Linguistic Zooming: switch from first person to second or third person to distance yourself from the situation. Journaling in second or third person can help process emotions.
6. Environmental Zooming: Modern writers find quiet, distraction-free environments to be productive.
• When it comes to using coping strategies we need flexibility to use different strategies and capacity to be able to utilise them.
• Athletes describe two peak performance states:
1. Letting it happen: Like ‘flow,’ it was easy, enjoyable, and came naturally.
2. Gritting or grinding: Difficult, requiring forced effort, focus, and deliberate action.
• Both states shared enhanced motivation, control, absorption, and confidence but differed in attention, arousal, and effort. Flow involved effortless attention and optimal arousal, while clutch required deliberate focus, heightened awareness, and intense effort.
• Clutch states needed a conscious decision to increase effort and intensity, unlike flow which came naturally. Athletes had to "flip the switch" during tough moments.
• Two states, both leading to top performance: flow requires grace, clutch requires grit. Clutch involves choosing; flow involves experiencing.
• Toughness is choosing the right strategy based on abilities and situation.

The Fourth Pillar of Toughness Transcend Discomfort

Chapter 10 Build the Foundation to Do Hard Things

• Controlling leaders use rewards, negativity, intimidation, and excessive personal control to create dependence.
• Inner drive matters more than external motivators like salary for job satisfaction and engagement.
• Success and persistence are linked to enjoyment and alignment with personal values, not fear or external pressure.
• Tough individuals can reengage and shift their goals when necessary, maintaining motivation.
• Self-determination theory identifies three key needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness for well-being and growth.

When we satisfy our needs, we are allowed to fulfill our potential. Satisfying our basic needs is the fuel that allows us to put to work all of the tools we’ve developed to be tough.

• A demanding dictator strips athletes of autonomy, using fear and punishment, which kills intrinsic motivation.
• Toughness comes from care and support, not control or punishment.
• In autonomy-supportive environments, leaders guide rather than dictate, helping individuals reach their potential while allowing them to take ownership of their actions.
• Supportive environments focus on choice ownership and control over the journey.
• Leaders must consider whether they motivate through punishment/rewards or by encouraging mastery.
• Seeing progress is crucial for motivation; if goals seem unattainable, complacency follows.
• Fear of punishment for failure stifles risk-taking and innovation.
• Workplaces with psychological safety allow voicing thoughts without fear of punishment, encouraging risks and genuine interaction.
• Progress and competence thrive in challenging but supportive environments with risk-taking without fear.
• Cohesion comes from genuine interaction, not forced activities.
• Trust is built through vulnerability. Vulnerability has to come before trust.
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs shows growth must be chosen repeatedly over safety.
• Maslow didn’t actually think self-actualisation was the peak; self-transcendence, rising above individual concerns, is the highest level according to Maslow.

Chapter 11 Find Meaning in Discomfort

• Newton’s final lecture “Experimentum Crucis” is used to describe an experiment that puts the nail in the coffin in one scientific theory and elevates the new theory to superiority.
• Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome. Fulfilment could be achieved in three ways: doing, experiencing, and suffering.
• Suffering wasn't to be sought out, but if it happened, meaning could be found. Meaning was a way to endure suffering. To work through adversity, suffering needed to be meaningful, determined by the individual alone.
• Performance = Actual effort / Expected Effort * Drive
• Whether we call it drive, motivation, or purpose, the last component determines our bandwidth for how far into the depths of fatigue we can push.
• When we are exhausted - we haven’t completely depleted our reserves. Our body warns us through the sensation of effort and fatigue, it tell us we’re at zero before we actually hit zero. There’s always something in reserve. Drive determines how close to empty we can push before our body shuts us down.
• The level of importance and the risk versus reward help us determine how close to zero we can push. Therefore purpose is the fuel that allows you to be tough.
• Survival depends on your inner world - you always remain free in your own minds. Having a greater meaning and something can fight for can pull you through.
• Coherence is made up of: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness.

When we explore instead of avoid, we are able to integrate the experience into our story. We’re able to make meaning out of struggle, out of suffering. Meaning is the glue that holds our mind together, allowing us to both respond and recover.

Outro

• It's time to abandon the old notion of toughness. Leading through fear and control might offer a temporary sense of strength, but it soon fades.

Real toughness is living in the nuance and complexity of the environment, bodies, and minds we inhabit. There is no one standard pathway to inner strength, no formula for making difficult decisions or dealing with the extremes of discomfort. Real toughness is about acceptance: of who you are, what you’re going through, and the discomfort that often comes with it. It’s living in that place of tension so that the needed space can be created to find the best path forward.