Mental Toughness-Part 9

A second component of Mental Toughness: 2. Re-framing is substituting a word or statement with another word or statement, that conveys a different meaning with a different connotation. It’s important to have a positive emphasis or positive idea in place of a negative one. In discussing a physical procedure I eliminated the word “exercise” because for many that has too many negatives associated with it like boring, repetition, grueling, no fun, etc. and replaced it with the word “conditioning.” Conditioning conveys a level of fitness, indispensable to some result or even the state of health. It is simply a word that has an absence of any negative affect. So when I planned one of my runs, I referred to it as a conditioning run. It was nothing more nothing less, it was simply conditioning. In other words, I was always in my conditioning mode.

 Another example was taken when I was running my 100 mile trail run and I had crossed the American River at roughly the 80 mile mark. I verbalized to myself that I had completed 80 miles and “only” had 20 more miles to complete. The key ideas included what I had completed and what was left; and by employing” only “I minimized the remaining task ahead of me. I didn’t get weighed down by my discomfort [I inserted and re-framed the word discomfort for pain], the number of hours that it would take me to complete, the difficulty of the terrain or how tired and exhausted that I felt. The words “I can” were part of vocabulary and not the words “I can’t.”

Believe me, there were plenty of opportunities during that long day to re-frame my thinking. Because I know, that negative ideas and/or negative thoughts create negative emotions which can affect behavior dramatically. It’s important to keep the ideas and thoughts positive or neutral at the worst, so that thinking and emotions do not get in the way of goal attainment. We know that perceptions and thoughts create our emotions. We also know that negative thoughts create negative emotions that can become automatic and can turn into self-defeating behaviors. We don’t want to have negative thoughts that distort the reality of what we want to accomplish and unravel and sabotage behavior.  Yes, there is power in how we think, and the words we employ that accompany our behavior.

More to follow