1173: The Tools for Greater Mental Strength with Amy Morin

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome back!

Amy Morin
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get mentally strong with you here today. You’ve got 50 whole tools for us at The Mental Strength Playbook. We’re probably not going to talk about all 50, I’m guessing. But give us the big picture in terms of a big discovery that you had when putting this all together.

Amy Morin
Well, you know, I’ve been writing books about mental strength for years, but most of them are about what not to do. And the biggest thing I realized was the skills and tools that work at home don’t always work in the office.

I can’t put off something that I’m anxious about at work. If I want to keep my job, I might have to figure out how to work through my anxiety, or if I’m bored, I can’t just be like, “I know, I’m going to wait till that report is feeling a little more fun.” But we can do those things at home.

So I wanted to write a book that was about what do you do when you’re sitting at your desk at 2:00 p.m. and you’re struggling with something, and the tools and skills that you might use at your house aren’t available to you.

And also when you’re struggling maybe with something in your personal life, how do you keep showing up at work? For me it was when my mother died, my husband died, like my 20s were like a bad country song. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and I was a therapist and I had to keep going to work.

And there was no playbook back then for, “How do you keep showing up when your own life is in shambles and how do you get through the day?” And one of the big pieces of this was like, if you’re going through grief or you’re going through stress or a hard time, you don’t want to push it down.

We know that suppressing things tends to make it pop up even worse. But at the same time, you probably can’t cry in the middle of a business meeting. You have to figure out, “How do I put it on the shelf and save it until later?”

And that’s really what I wanted this book to be about is, “How do you get through tough times, difficult emotions, maybe just temporary anxiety, maybe get anxiety from sales calls? But what are some tricks you can have up your sleeve so that you can still think, feel, and do your best, despite whatever your boss throws your way?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s super handy, and, yes, I want to talk through a few of those. For starters, though, could you share with us a cool story about someone who made use of some of these tools and saw some great results?

Amy Morin
Well, I will share my own story because, I will say, I used all 50 of these strategies in my and they’re what has gotten me through some of my toughest times. But when I first wrote my first book, I was a social worker in rural Maine.

I wrote an article that went viral, got invited to get on a big stage and I accepted without even really knowing what I was walking into. It was like this huge conference where pretty much everybody else on the stage was a household name.

So the day I got there, I’m watching Gary Vee up on this giant stage, and I’m thinking, “Oh, good, and I, like, have to give a presentation tomorrow. I literally have no idea what I’m doing.” So I had, like, 24 hours, and I thought, “What do I do? Do I go cram my notes? Do I call in sick tomorrow? How am I going to get through this?” because I knew I just really didn’t have, like, the skills and expertise to be there.

But I decided my best strategy at that moment was to act as if. I’m going to act as if I feel confident. So I watched other people that day to figure out like, “What do you do? Where do you step on stage? What do you do when you come out? How do you stand there? How do you look at the audience when you have this massive audience in front of you?”

And that’s what I spent the evening doing is saying, “If I stepped out on stage feeling completely confident, what would that look like, as opposed to the sheer terror that I knew that I was actually going to feel when I stepped out there?” But got it all down, okay, “If I were really confident, I’d step out there like this, I’d hold my head like this, I’d look at the audience this way.”

And I knew if I just did those things, then somehow my brain would be like, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe we are confident.” And I could at least get through it that day. And it worked. I felt like, “Okay, it’s not quite the same as like fake it till you make it, where people think you’re just going to get out there and act like somebody you’re not.”

That wasn’t my goal, but it was like, “How do I step into this as the most confident version of myself, even though I don’t feel confident?” And that strategy got me through it that day and, fortunately, they invited me back to speak and I still get to speak now, but I feel much better about it because I’ve had a lot more practice.

But sometimes, that’s the best strategy you can have is when you get on a sales call and you’re nervous or you’re filled with self-doubt, just ask yourself, “If I felt completely confident, what would I look like and how would I pull it off?” And then try to step into that persona even when you don’t feel it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, what’s on the other side of those questions? Like, what would it look like in terms of, are you talking about, specifically, how you’re holding your body, how you’re talking to yourself? What are some of the bullet points that come as the answers to that question?

Amy Morin
So if I had stepped out there and allowed myself to just act like I felt, which would have been terrified, scared that I was going to bomb, worried that I was going to stumble over my words, I probably would have done all of those things, right? And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So when I watched the other speakers, I was like, “All right, they stepped out into the middle of that stage like they own the place. So how do I do that?” Or, when I saw, like, how they made eye contact and interacted with the audience, like, “Okay, how do I do that to make sure that when I get up there, I literally make sure that I’m standing up straight, I’m making eye contact, I’m trying to take up space while I’m up there?”

As opposed to what I felt like, which would have been like stand in the very back corner of the stage, speak as fast as you can to get out of there and try to exit before something horrible happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And then I’m curious about some of the other acts as if that have been transformational for you.

Amy Morin
Well, you know, as a therapist, it’s a play that I’ve run with lots of clients over the years. So, for example, I had a woman who said, “I need you to give me some confidence. I really want to go back to college, but I’m not sure I can do it later in life. I wasn’t the best student before, and now I’ve taken all these years off. How do I make sure that I feel like I’m confident?”

Well, the answer was, “Let’s act as if you feel confident now. Like, call the college, sign up for a class, and it’s really about the experience so that you can finally feel confident, but you have to take the action first.”

“So what would happen if you felt confident in yourself, what might that first phone call look like when you call the school? You might be asking for information, you might be really clear on, ‘This is what I’d like to do. How do I sign up?’ as opposed to giving them your whole spiel of, ‘I don’t know if I can get through school. I’m not really sure I’m meant to be there.’ If you do all of that, you’re less likely to get what you want.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, let’s maybe zoom out and talk about mental strength, generally. First, what is it and is it learnable, build-able, doable for all of us, as opposed to like a trait like, “Oh, they’ve just got it”?

Amy Morin
Right. So, yeah, mental strength has got three parts to it: the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you behave. And the thinking part is your brain lies to you a lot. It will tell you that you can’t do something. It will overestimate how bad something is going to be, underestimates your ability to cope with it, and it will try to keep you safe.

So it will talk you out of doing anything where you might embarrass yourself or where things might not turn out well. So part of being mentally strong is knowing you don’t have to believe everything you think, and you can be in charge of talking back to the thoughts that aren’t helpful.

And then the other part is your feelings, and again knowing that whatever you feel is okay, but there’s times when your feelings don’t serve you well. If I’m incredibly sad, the last thing I want to do is ask for a raise, because research shows, if I try to negotiate when I’m sad, I’ll take a pretty bad deal and I won’t offer a counteroffer or anything because I’ll be like, “Ugh, my self-esteem can’t handle it.”

So just knowing, “How do I feel today? How might that affect my decisions? And what can I do about it? Maybe I woke up sad, but I don’t have to stay sad. I could choose to do something to boost my mood.” And then the third part is about the action that we take. It’s one thing to say, “Okay, I think positive,” but what are you going to do about it?

And at work, we don’t get paid for thinking positively. Most people get paid for what you produce or what you do. So how do you get through a day when you just don’t feel like doing anything? Or how do you take the positive action when it’s scary?

And I do believe everybody has the ability to build mental strength. Just like you could choose to go to the gym and build bigger biceps, you can certainly choose to build your mental muscle. It’s all about the little choices that you make every single day. And we always have opportunities to build strength when we want to. And I think no matter how strong people are, there’s always room for improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so how you think, how you feel, and what you do, those three components. What’s intriguing about how you feel is it seems like, also maybe it’s just my own experience, the amount of influence/control I have over how I feel seems to be quite variable.

In that some days, it’s like, “Oh, I’m not motivated. Well, I’ll just do this, and now I’m motivated. That was easy.” And other days, it’s just like, “I’m not motivated.” And I do the things like I remain unmotivated.

And so help us with that. If we’re mentally strong in the dimension of how we feel, just what’s possible for humanity with regard to how much influence we could wield over our feelings?

Amy Morin
Yeah, so I think the first question is to ask, “Is what I’m feeling right now helpful or hurtful?” Or some people say, “Is it a friend or an enemy?” Because we talk so much about emotions as if they’re positive or negative, people will be like, “Well, anger is a negative emotion.” But it’s not.

Like, anger can really help you. Like, it gives you the courage sometimes to speak up for yourself or somebody else. Or, people might think sadness is a negative emotion, but sadness helps you honor something that you’ve lost. So you don’t want to get rid of it.

But again, at the same time, if you’re about to walk into your boss’s office, or you’re about to lead a team meeting and you’re so sad that you have no energy, like, by all means, it’s important to pull yourself out of it so you can do your best.

And we have choices of how we respond to our feelings. Sometimes it makes sense to just sit in them. If I’m sitting on my couch at home on a Friday night and I’m sad, maybe I just allow myself to be sad. But if I’m about to walk into my boss’s office and ask an important question, maybe I need to boost my mood.

And there’s two ways that we can do that. It’s about the way you think or about the actions that you take. So if I’m thinking about all the sad things that have happened in my life, I’ll probably feel sad. So maybe I do something like visit my smile file.

That’s a play from the book, where you just have some like positive pictures, maybe some pictures of what you did last fall, some pictures of your kids, your latest vacation, any pictures that bring a little smile to your face can give you a boost in your mood.

So then it would be my job to know, “Hey, I’m about to lead this team meeting, feeling really low energy and sad. Let me just pull this out for a minute.” I pull out a funny photo of my dog and I start to laugh for a minute, my mood gets a little bit better. We’re not going from a zero to a 10, but maybe I go from like a 2 to at least a 4. So then I feel a little bit better before I walk into that meeting.

And then it’s about what we do as well. So I could spend my lunch break being stressed out about something, staring at my computer and not doing anything, or I could say, “You know what? I’m going to take 15 minutes to go for a walk around the block because I know being in nature and moving my body helps. So that’s what I’m going to do to try to shift my energy before I come back for the rest of the afternoon.”

And I think when we decide that, when an emotion isn’t helpful, we can either change what we think, change what we do, or sometimes a combination of both to make it so that we take a little more charge of our feelings.

And you won’t get rid of those emotions altogether. If you’re anxious about something going on at home, or you’re waiting for a call back from your doctor about some test results and you’re pretty anxious about it, you probably aren’t going to make it disappear, but you might bring it down to a level where you can say, “Okay, I can concentrate on this task right in front of me right now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, well, we got 50 tools here. Can you share with us what are some faves to shift how we feel? We got the ‘act as if,’ we got the ‘smile file.’ Any other just wildly effective ones that your clients just love?

Amy Morin
So another one is to visit your ‘victory vault.’ We know that when we get rejected for something, it stings. And the problem is, suddenly, your brain will bring up all the other times that you felt that emotion. So maybe I apply for a promotion and I don’t get it.

Suddenly I’m like, “Oh, gosh, I also didn’t get picked for the basketball team in the seventh grade. Three years ago, I applied for a different job. I didn’t get that.” Like, it’ll just bring up all the rejection in your life. And before you know it, you might feel like a loser because you’re remembering every single time in your life you’ve been turned down or passed over or rejected.

So the strategy then is to have a list of some of the biggest victories you have in life. And they don’t even have to be just be professional ones. They can be the personal ones, too. Maybe you advocated for your mom at a doctor’s appointment once and got her the medication that she needed. Like, that is a huge victory in life.

And then you say, “Well, what did you learn from that? Well, I learned I could speak up when it’s important.” Great. That’s a wonderful victory to put in your victory vault list. Or, think of the time when maybe the odds were stacked against you.

Maybe in college, there was a test that you didn’t think you could pass, and maybe nobody else thought you could, too, but you stayed up all night cramming, and, lo and behold, you passed the class, and you learned not to give up.

Or, maybe there was a job that you went for at some point and you knew it was a long shot, but because you showed and you nailed the interview, you got the job. Like, these are all amazing things. But we don’t remember those. We tend to kind of tuck those away and forget about them.

So I think we should all have a written list. It might be a written list on a piece of paper, maybe you keep it on your phone, that you can visit when you’re feeling down, when you’re filled with self-doubt, or when you’ve been rejected, just pull out that list and read it. And there’s something really powerful about seeing this list of, “Here’s the things I’ve actually done in life.”

And it’s written in my own words, because it’s one thing when you have a friend who says, “Oh, no, you can do anything. You’ll get the next job.” This doesn’t quite sit the same as if I look at this list of things that I’ve created and reminded myself, “There’s been times when the odds were against me, or times when the chips were down, times when I really wasn’t expected to rise to the occasion, and look what I did.” Just reminding yourself of that in some of your lowest moments can give you a huge boost.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I also want to hear, you’ve got some specific tools in the universe of dread. Walk us through some of these.

Amy Morin
So dread is one of those things, right? Like, you dread the meeting on Thursday, and it’s only Tuesday and you’re already thinking about it, and it’s already ruining your Tuesday afternoon because you’re like, “Ugh, it’s going to be terrible, horrible, and awful.”

Or, maybe you dread working with a particular coworker and you spend six hours dreading the meeting, and it’s only a 30-minute meeting. So I think we all need some dread diffusers to make sure that that emotion doesn’t take over the whole day.

Pete Mockaitis
Give us some.

Amy Morin
So sometimes we’ll take, like, the 10-minute rule. That’s one of my favorites. So let’s say I have a report I have to write and it’s really boring. And I don’t want to do it because I know it’s going to be boring. And so in my head I’m like, “Ugh, I have to write that report.” Maybe I put it off for two more days and I’m procrastinating because it just seems like it’s going to be too boring and painful to do.

Use the 10-minute rule, which means I’m going to tell myself, “I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes writing this report. If at the end of 10 minutes, I don’t feel like doing it anymore, I’ll give myself permission to quit.”

And, like, 99% of the time, once you do something for 10 minutes, you’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll keep going now,” because getting started is the hardest part. And we realize it’s not as bad as we thought it was. And we start to build some momentum. And once you start to build some momentum, it’s easy enough to keep going.

And this works with stuff outside the office, too. Maybe you’re like, “Ugh, I should work out today, but I don’t feel like it.” Just decide you’re going to do it for 10 minutes. And then if you get to 10 minutes and it’s really as bad as you expect, quit. But I don’t think you’ll find that very often. Most of the time you’ll say, “I could do it with this for another 10 minutes,” and you keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I want to hear more of them. You’ve got ‘create the mood,’ ‘behavior bingo,’ ‘curiosity quest.’ Can we hear about them?

Amy Morin
Yeah, well, I’m going to give you one of my other favorites, which is ‘text to motivation buddy.’ This one is, again, for like a task that you’re struggling to do. Maybe you’re procrastinating or you’re just staring at the blank page. You send a message to somebody that you know will hold you accountable.

So maybe you have a friend who will understand or a coworker, or maybe it’s your grandmother. It really doesn’t matter, but you just send a text message and say, “Hey, I’m working on my slide deck. Check in with me in an hour and ask me how it’s going.”

And as soon as you send that message and somebody says, “Hey, I got you,” all of a sudden, you’ve just created a deadline for yourself and some social pressure, but some positive social pressure, because you’re like, “Okay, I really want to have some progress to report back in an hour.”

You will probably get more done in that hour than maybe you did all week because, suddenly, you’re motivated to get to work. And then if the person checks in with you in an hour, you might be like, “Hey, I’m half done,” or, “I got three-quarters of the way through this. I’m going to finish it up.”

It is an amazing strategy that works a lot better than just this vague idea of, “Well, I have an accountability buddy, and we check in every Friday.” That doesn’t work. Most of us need a really short-term objective of, “I have one hour, 60 minutes. The clock is ticking.” You can get way more done in that hour than you probably expect that you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And having that ticking clock, I really do think is transformational because I’ve had accountability groups and people and experiences and it’s been swell and, you know, meeting weekly or whatnot, and we had these spreadsheets of all these things we were going to do, and say, “Hey, so what happened with your sheet?” But, yeah, zooming way in on one hour amplifies that a whole lot.

Amy Morin
It does. I use this. I’ve used it when I’m writing on the days where I’m like, “Oh, gosh, I got a lot of words to write. Here we are. It’s already 11:00 a.m. and I pretty much haven’t written anything.” I swear if I text somebody, my friend who’s also a writer, and say, ‘Check in with me in an hour,’” suddenly, that next hour, I will get so much more done. It’s amazing what that does to us.

And when it’s somebody that we like to, it’s not like your boss looking over your shoulder to ask what you got done, it’s like, “Hey, I want my friend to be proud of me,” or, “I want this person to congratulate me.” So it’s a different kind of pressure and it can be a really positive way to say, “Yeah, I’m going to get some work done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And what’s the ‘curiosity quest’?

Amy Morin
So that one is just really when we’re doing something boring, maybe I’m working on a spreadsheet, maybe I’ve done these spreadsheets every week and it’s just one of those things that I hate doing. We know that curiosity is the antidote to dread.

If I decide, “All right, even though I’ve done eight million of these spreadsheets before, and I don’t really learn much when I do it, but what could I learn? Maybe I just learn something about myself. Like, maybe every three minutes, I actually just pick up my phone.”

But I didn’t know that until I got curious to be like, “Well, what do I do? What am I feeling while I’m writing this spreadsheet? How do I handle that emotion? Maybe while I’m doing the spreadsheet, it’s that every 20 minutes, I get up and I take a break and I don’t come back for an hour.”

Sometimes when we get curious about, “What is it I’m doing?” that we then see these patterns that start to break out. Or, you can give yourself a challenge to get curious, too, like, “All right, if it weren’t an option to use my computer, how would I get a spreadsheet like this done?”

You don’t really have to do it on paper, but just in thinking about it, sometimes that opens up new neural pathways and, suddenly, you’re like, “Oh, you know what? I actually found a shortcut or a way that would make this better, or something I hadn’t even thought about.”

Because when we have repetitive tasks, we tend to just do them the same way today as I did yesterday and the day before that, without really looking at any other opportunities or ways to make it easier or even more fun. But if you start asking yourself some questions that help you to get curious, you might find it opens up some new strategies you hadn’t thought of before.

I think any way that we can add curiosity to our lives is going to help us to be more patient and help us to see things just a little bit different than we did before.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, on to the action side of things, can you tell us about ‘calibrating your state’?

Amy Morin
Yeah, when we are going to do something at a certain task, knowing what state you do it best in is important, but often we have no idea. So we’re talking about our energy level. So if I’m going to lead a team meeting, I kind of want to have some energy for that.

But if I’m going to sit down and, say, edit a boring report, I probably need to be in a bit of a calmer state. Otherwise, if I have tons of energy, I’m just not going to sit still and concentrate. So this one is all about knowing, “What state do I need to be in to do something?”

So we’ll take public speaking. Some people I know like to calm themselves down. They’re backstage meditating and listening to really calming music so that they step out on stage and they feel like they can be present.

But other people, myself included, I’m going to do better if I pump myself up. If I walk out there feeling all calm and zen, one of two things is going to happen. I’m either just going to kind of mumble through my speech.

Or, if I were to get anxiety, then I’m like, “Ah, my anxiety doesn’t quite match that meditation I was just doing. This is terrible, horrible, and awful.” So I do better when I pump myself up. So I’m going to listen to more upbeat music, or I might be the person who’s moving around behind the stage. I’m not going to sit still and meditate.

But if I were to sit down and do a spreadsheet, that’s when I want to say, “Okay, how do I calm my brain and my body a bit so I can focus?” And any task we face, I think we should know like, “What’s the best energy state to be in?” You’re about to make a sales call, like, “What’s the best state? And then how do I get myself in that?”

So for some people, it’s, you know, “I do a couple laps around the office before I make an important sales call.” Or somebody else might say, “You know, I listen to some calming music before I get on a sales call, so I can just really feel like I’m present.” But you don’t know these things until you do some trial and error. But when you do, you figure out what state you perform best in for each task.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and as you describe state, I’m hearing mostly sort of a level of energy or arousal that’s ideal. But now in my mind’s eye, I’m seeing the How We Feel app with those like 144 beautiful bubbles. It’s totally free. I recommend it, How We Feel app, so good.

So are you thinking about a state primarily in terms of just like energy level low, medium, high, or more precise in terms of, “I want to be curious. I want to be enthusiastic. I want to be thoughtful”?

Amy Morin
For this one, I’m thinking more about your energy state, and so the state of mind. So again, sometimes, clients will be like, “You know, if I do three laps around the building before I make a call, that, like, gets out a little bit of energy, but also makes sure that I’m still, the blood’s still flowing and I’m in a good state for that phone call.”

Somebody else might be like, “You know, I’m actually better off to, like, I water my plants, kind of take a few minutes to myself to get my thoughts together. And then I walk into that meeting and I feel like, ‘Okay, I can be present right now because my desk is cleaned off and I’ve taken care of a few things.’” So it’s really about, I guess, the mental state that you’re in and your energy and arousal level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. And what is a power phrase and how do we activate one?

Amy Morin
So a lot of us have negative thoughts before we walk into a situation. So it might be like, “Ugh, here we go again,” or, “Another performance review, it’s not going to go well.” But if you just have some short power phrase that you give yourself and you put it on repeat in your head, not only does it drown out the negative thoughts, but it can remind you, “It’s okay. Like, I’ve got this.”

And making it in the present is important. So let’s say I’m going to walk into a performance review. I don’t feel all that hopeful. I assume my boss is going to point out lots of transgressions and things that I don’t want to hear. Maybe they’re mean during performance reviews, and I’m thinking, “The last five years have gone terrible, this is going to go bad, too.”

But the more I keep dwelling on that, the worse I feel. The worse I feel, the less likely I am to walk into that performance review and objectively point out, “Here’s the value I’ve added.” So I might be better off to have a power phrase that says something like, “I’ve done amazing things for the company. I can continue to do hard things.” Some sort of a phrase that really empowers me. And I just keep repeating it in my head before I walk into the room.

And then if I’m in the room, my boss is like, “Hey, Amy, we need to talk about these 72 things you did wrong last week,” and I’m about to come out swinging in terms of, like, getting defensive or I’m going to start crying or doing something that’s not helpful in the moment, I just go back to that power phrase, repeat it to myself, remind myself like, “Hey, you’ve got this. It’s okay.” Drown out the negativity and give myself a little boost right when I need it.

Pete Mockaitis
So I’m hearing you say you’ve got this. What are some choice power phrases that have come up for a lot of people?

Amy Morin
So for some people, it’ll be like “I can be brave.” So for people who say, “Ugh, I can’t really ask my boss for a raise,” just telling themselves, “I can be brave,” repeating that over and over as you walk in the room can give them the courage to do it.

Or, for people who are on a sales call and their anxiety is going through the roof, just saying to themselves, “I have value. Things I’m going to say are helpful to them.” Maybe you repeat a phrase like that just as a reminder of, “I’m not a bother. I’m not trying to convince them to do something they don’t want to do, but I’m offering a valuable product,” can remind somebody, “Okay, stay in the present and do your best.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine you want to believe the phrase, like it to be true as opposed to, “I’m a money magnet. Wealth flows to me effortlessly,” style affirmations.

Amy Morin
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If I, like, wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and I’m like, “Oh, you’re the greatest human being on the planet,” we know from the research that doing that, like coming up with something that seems really far fetched, actually backfires.

It makes us feel worse because repeating something like that over and over feels like a lie, and then I’m like, “Ugh, I don’t really measure up. I’m not actually the best human on the planet.” So you don’t want to do that. You want to come up with something that feels more believable, something actionable and something doable that you can buy into.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, this phrase is so believable and tame. I don’t even know if I can call it a power phrase, and yet, it has been quite powerful for me. Lately, especially when you sort of have a series of losses, you can start to think or believe, like, “Eh, why bother? What’s the point?” in terms of like, “This will just be another thing that doesn’t work out, you know?” which is not a great place to be. My power phrase was, “Sometimes things work out better than you think.”

Amy Morin
Ooh, I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I actually wrote down a lot of occasions, like, “Hey, remember when you bought this thing, you didn’t know, you thought maybe I’m going to return it, and you’re like, and you used it almost every day?”

Or, “Hey, remember when you emailed this guy totally out of the blue, and then that turned into, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of business over the course of years? So, hey, sometimes things work out better than you think. And it’s just true, and look at all that evidence.” It’s like, “All right. Well, I guess we’ll try this, too. Maybe this will be one of those things.”

And when I’m not fired up. I don’t have high hopes, and yet sometimes things work out better than you think.

Amy Morin
I like that because it’s realistic, right? And then you have the evidence that shows, “Yeah, a lot of times, things I think about aren’t necessarily going to happen or they do work out better.” And I’ve used one for a while, too, which is just like, “I can make it happen.”

And the reason is, like, if I want to complain about something, well, like, “Gee, Amy, do you want to do something about that or do you just want to complain about it?” Or, when I see a problem, like, “Ooh, boy, I don’t think I could do that.” Like, “No, I could make it happen.”

Like, there’s things I could do. Sometimes I choose not to, but just reminds me like, “No, like, there’s action you could take if you wanted to make this better. Maybe it’s not worth it, but if you do want to make it better, make it happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been trying to run some judo, if you will, mentally, on dread, resistance, not feeling like it, kinds of things. And I was chatting with AI while watching my children’s karate class because they had a long, very long mission statement about building determination, like, “How does one build determination, Gemini?” So we’re pondering this.

We talked about the anterior mid-singular cortex as a portion of the brain. And when this is stimulated, if people tend to have a feeling, like there’s a growing storm that they’re going to rise to it. And so then I think about your David Goggins-type characters of the world who kind of sort of lean in and embrace the adversity, suffering, unpleasantness of a thing, as a benefit unto itself. Like they are being strengthened by the engaging in the very thing they can’t stand.

And so sometimes, I try to hype myself up with the power phrase in that zone, but it’s more of a power paragraph and it’s clunky. Do you have any advice or experience in this kind of a judo move of, “Yes, you hate that, and that’s why it’s great. So let’s go do it”?

Amy Morin
So there’s another play in the book about give yourself a pep talk. So, whereas, a power phrase is just going to be one sentence, sometimes you need the pep talk, right? And we know from the research that a coach’s halftime speech makes a big difference in how players do in the second half of a game.

If their pep talk is motivational and aspirational, they’re going to do much better than if the coach were to point out all of the mistakes that they made in the first half, they tend to come out and they do worse.

And so we can create our own pep talk and it’s kind of like it doesn’t have to be worthy of, say, a TED Talk, but maybe you do have a longer speech that you give yourself. And I’m not a huge fan of the ones that put you down, like, “Hey, loser, you did it again. Quit messing up,” because I don’t think in the long term that the speeches like that tend to help us.

And I think when that happens, when people say no, like, “A lot of the negativity motivates me,” sometimes it’s more of a deeper rooted self-worth issue. But for most of us, I think, “Yeah, if I just asked myself, like, what would my coach say right now? If I had the world’s best coach sitting next to me, they were to give me a motivational speech, what would they remind me of?”

And if you just give to yourself those same words, that same speech of like, “Okay, this is, you have two hours left to get this report done and you’re four pages shy of where you need to be,” are you going to do it? Like, what would this coach say to you?

And if you really do best with a coach that’s going to, like, yell and scream and motivate, like great. But some of us do better with a coach that would be a little more positive. But to know, “What kind of a coach would motivate me the most?” and then you just give yourself that speech. It can do wonders in how you’re going to perform in the next short-term period.

Pete Mockaitis
Have you seen the Chris Hemsworth video “You Need,” which is like a one-minute of him just saying, “Hey, you’re beautiful, you’ve got this, you’re amazing,” just unabashedly bringing it. It’s a treat. We’ll link it in the show notes.

Amy Morin
Okay, because I haven’t seen it, but I’ll have to check it out, too.

Pete Mockaitis
And, yeah, it’s a fun one. But, you’re right, when it’s coming from you to you, like in a reality way with your own words, it’s not silly. It’s not, you know, Disney Sports Movie magic. It’s like, “Hey, you know what, yeah, that kind of, yeah, kind of you’re making some sense here, Pete, yeah.

Amy Morin
And there’s some research, too, if you were to write it down. So let’s say I’m just going to, like, write a kind letter to myself. I could do this exercise today. So for the next time I’m feeling kind of low in life, I just write maybe a paragraph that’s all, “Okay, Amy, chips have been down before, but you’ve been able to rise to the occasion. You’ve been through hard times. It’s okay, you’ll get through this, too.”

And this paragraph, I write it down on a piece of paper, maybe I just tuck it in my purse or I put it in my pocket, put it in my desk drawer. I’m training my brain, “Hey, this way of thinking actually matters and it’s important to me. Like, the self-compassion or the kind words that I’m giving myself, those matter and they’re important to me.”

And then I’m more likely to think in a more self-compassionate and kind way. Because there’s another play in the book that’s the opposite of it, which is ‘take out the mental trash.’ So in a day when I’m like, “Ah, I am such a loser. I can never do anything right. Things are going horribly,” all of those thoughts are going to drag me down. But to tell myself, “Well, just don’t think about that,” actually doesn’t help.

But if you get it out of your head and you write it down on a piece of paper, and then you literally throw the piece of paper away, or if you’re in an open office, maybe you just cross it out with a Sharpie, and instead of crumpling it up, but you throw it away, you’re teaching your brain, “I actually don’t value this way of thinking,” and you’re less likely to continue to have those same negative and unhelpful thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Amy, tell us, is there any tool which is just too good to not mention?

Amy Morin
If I were to bring up one more, I would say, if you are a worrier, one of the most important things you could do to reduce your worrying is to actually schedule time to worry. And it sounds so far-fetched, but there’s research behind it that if you set aside 20 minutes a day to worry, and you actually put it in your calendar, so maybe I worry during my lunch break, 12:00 to 12:20, or maybe I worry from 7:00 to 7:20 in the evening.

And whenever I worry outside of that window, I’m going to tell myself, “It’s not time to worry about that yet. I’ll worry about that later.” And at first, your brain is going to keep pinging you about these things, “No, no, worry, worry, worry.”

But the more that it does that, that’s just more proof that this is a great play for you, “I’m going to worry about that later.” And then when your worry time comes around, you sit down, maybe you write down your worries, maybe you just sit and think. But the goal is to worry as much as you can for 20 minutes. And then you get up and you go do something else. Distract yourself to get your mind off of it.

The therapy clients I do this with will often look like the weight of the world has literally been lifted off of their shoulders within about two weeks. And they’ll say, “You know, gosh, I used to worry like 24/7. Or, even when I was working on a task, I had these worries that were always in the background, kind of nagging at my attention or pinging me all the time.”

“And now my brain trusts me, like, ‘Hey, I’m going to worry about it, I just can’t do it right now.’ And it stopped like trying to get my attention all the time, because before I was trying to push those worries down or I was entertaining them constantly, thinking if I worried enough that I’d make it go away.”

So for anybody that worries a lot, and maybe it’s about something specific, maybe you have something in your life, and maybe it’s a real problem, maybe your spouse has a health issue and you find yourself worrying about it all the time. Or maybe you just worry, in general, about everything, the economy, your kids, the family, whatever else is going on.

Either way, this strategy can work and it can work wonders. It’ll take a little while. The first couple of days you’re going to think, “This doesn’t work” but that probably means it is working. If you stick with it, you can literally contain your worrying to 15 or 20 minutes a day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool, and I’ve heard this advice before, and I’m making a connection here. I’m thinking about David Allen, a guest of the show, awesome dude, of “Getting Things Done.” He mentions that when we’ve got a lot of stuff to do, our brain keeps popping that, pinging us with that in terms of, “Oh, you got to do thing.” It’s like, “Yeah, I can’t do anything about that right now.”

And yet when you have a trusted external system where you’ve listed your projects, your next action that’s out there, it’s up to date, you trust it, and you review it regularly, there’s this tremendous peace that comes like that’s just handled.

And so, in a way, this seems like a similar phenomenon, specifically in the zone of worries. And I guess maybe “How am I going to get all my things done?” isn’t one large category of worries, if you will. So that’s intriguing.

And I’d like to know, during this scheduled worry time, because many of us have never actually proactively worried, it just sort of pops up, it’s like, “Okay, now is my worry time. I’m sitting down. All right.” What do I do when I’m proactively worrying?

Amy Morin
So for some people, they’ll have a journal, and they’ll just jot everything down, “I’m worried about the economy. I’m worried about whether I have enough money. I’m worried about my mother,” and that helps them.

Other people just want to like sit and be like, “Let me just put my head in my hands and just think.” And people that do that, it’s often about one thing. Like, maybe you’ve got an adult child with a substance abuse problem and you want to worry about it, “I can’t fix it, but let’s just worry about it for 20 minutes.”

And they might find that they worry about the same things every single evening. That’s fine. Other people say, “You know, my brain kind of drifts. Maybe I’m worried about that, but then I start to worry about money or my own health or something like that, too.” So I think you can either write it down or just sit and worry.

Occasionally, I have somebody who says that they have somebody in their life that they’ll just speak their worries to out loud, but they’ll make a deal, like, with the other person, “I don’t want you to fix it. I don’t want you to validate it. I don’t even want you to say anything. I just want you to sit there for 15 minutes, and I’m going to basically spill all my worries on you, and then we’re going to move on.” And I’ve had people that will say that works, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, Amy, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Amy Morin
I would say one of my favorites is probably from my women’s book is, “Be the kind of woman who fixes another woman’s crown without ever telling the world that it was crooked.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Amy Morin
So I really like the research study that shows – it’s probably because I’m becoming middle aged myself – the research that showed that when they took people who were aging, older men, and they put them in a house together and they kind of reset time, like they rewound the clock to make all the decorations and everything to like the ‘50s, and they had them just talking, like, news stories and everything like they were back years ago, all of a sudden, their physical health improved.

People didn’t need canes. They were like tossing a football around and, like, life changed all because they no longer started treating themselves like they were older. And for some reason, I just love that study. That a lot of, I think, our aging and our thoughts about what happens to us as we age has a lot to do with our state of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Amy Morin
I just read the book Platonic and I absolutely loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. She was on the show. She’s great.

Amy Morin
Yeah, I love her.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool? We’ve been through a lot of them.

Amy Morin
Yeah, if I were to pick, say, just one more tool from the book, I’m going to say ‘go for the gold.’ You know, when you walk into a room, you can either think, “Ugh, I hope I don’t embarrass myself,” or you walk in and say, “I hope I crush this.” So if I were to pick a tool, I’d say, ‘go for the gold.’ Walk in the room and say, “I’m going to crush this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a favorite habit?

Amy Morin
So I run almost every day, but I don’t run, like, long distance. I run a timed mile as fast as I can, and then my goal is to do it even faster tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Do you warm up first?

Amy Morin
You know, I don’t. I just go from walking outside to a dead sprint. Probably not recommended, but here we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so fun. Well, when it comes to exercise, I don’t know. I don’t want to, you know, shame or advise anyone on anything because, for me, it’s like, “Oh, I finally found a groove. Don’t touch it. Don’t. This is working. Don’t do a thing different. I’ve been doing exactly this because it’s working. And a lot of things have not worked.” A lot of gym memberships, not made good use of financially, etc. So do the thing.

Amy Morin
The best exercise is the one you will stick with.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And is there a key nugget you share that people really dig, they retweet at conferences and such?

Amy Morin
So there’s, I guess, from my first book, I said that we make our best decisions when our emotions and our logic are in check. And that one seemed to resonate with people that, yeah, you can either reduce your emotional intensity, you can raise your logic, but to make sure that they’re in some kind of balance if you want to make a good choice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Amy Morin
My website, which is called AmyMorinLCSW, as in Licensed Clinical Social Worker, dot com. And on it, you’ll find info on all seven of my books, my TEDx Talk, and my podcast, which is called Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Amy Morin
You know, I think, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of things you can’t control about your job, about what your boss did, about the economy, but the one thing you can control is if you grew mentally stronger.

So if we just asked ourselves, at the end of the day, “What did I do today to grow mentally stronger?” you’ll be able to pinpoint something that you did, and it will give you hope for tomorrow and remind you of what you do have control over.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Amy, thank you.

Amy Morin
Ah, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.