Be a Badass - Tools

Deciding to be a badass means deciding to face challenges.

You are not signing up for an extraordinary life with no resistance. You are signing up to develop the mental strength and work ethic that allow you to meet the resistance.

Make that decision seriously.

You are choosing to do the work that produces results, strengthen your mind, and keep showing up when it is uncomfortable.

In this final part of the series, I want to give you tools for practicing that decision. You will need to return to them as you grow.

Commit to the work, not only the result

I recommend setting an impossible goal you genuinely commit to.

A goal like this helps you identify as someone who creates something extraordinary. Long before I had a multimillion-dollar business, I identified as the person who would build one.

But believing in a result is not enough. You need to believe in the work that creates it.

You cannot only want the goal. You have to want the work.

I want goals that increase my strength and capacity. I want to become someone who can take on a challenge that helps me evolve.

That is why an impossible goal is useful: it changes how you see yourself, invites hard work, and gives you opportunities to develop mental strength.

Build strength through repetition

How do you get stronger at anything?

You practice. You build capacity through repetition and exposure.

The work can be intense for short periods. It needs to produce results, and those results will likely include stumbling and failure.

When that happens, it is your opportunity to work on your mind.

You may need coaching or support. You may need to deliberately fill your mind with thinking that helps you keep going. The failure is not a reason to abandon the decision you made.

Anticipate the obstacles

Consider what might go wrong and create a plan ahead of time.

What is the worst that could happen if you pursue this goal? What would you do if it happened?

Preparing allows you to strengthen yourself before the obstacle arrives. Even if it never occurs, you can benefit from having considered how you would handle it.

There is an important caveat: I think the worst scenario is never trying and never discovering who you could have become.

Once you decide you will not stay on the sidelines, you can consider the problems that might happen while you participate and plan for them.

Managing emotion means allowing it

When I teach emotional resilience, I am not telling you to avoid feelings, pretend they are not there, or fight through them.

I am telling you to let them in.

An emotion is a vibration caused by a thought. Even an intensely uncomfortable feeling is something you can learn to experience.

There are situations in which you will want to think and feel negatively. The aim is not to remove all negative emotion.

It is to feel on purpose rather than escape through buffering.

You can let an urge to escape be there without reacting to it. You can love yourself through fear, doubt, and insecurity and experience what is on the other side.

This is not a recommendation to put yourself in unproductive danger. I am talking about facing the things your survival-oriented brain fears as you create and grow.

Let emotional strength support action

We often know what we want to do and what would create the result, but we do not do it.

Avoiding the emotion becomes more important than following through.

When you become willing to feel, your ability to act can become stronger. You can begin obeying the commitments you make to yourself.

Instead of using a mistake as a reason to quit, double down on the work, the mind management, and the emotional processing.

Notice the difference between experiencing pain while supporting yourself and experiencing pain while beating yourself up, complaining, or feeling sorry for yourself.

The first experience includes strength. The second adds thinking that weakens you.

Developing a work ethic includes learning to experience dread on purpose when it is part of doing the work you chose.

Choose the inputs going into your brain

Pay attention to what you read, listen to, and spend time thinking about.

When I began learning these tools, I spent hours each day reading and listening to material that supported the idea that I could create a life I wanted.

I focused on what I could do, what I could control, and where I could take responsibility.

Coaching, self-coaching, and useful material can support that practice.

Gossip and unnecessary drama pull your energy in a different direction.

Being quietly negative toward yourself matters, too. Keeping a thought private does not keep it from affecting your life.

When you notice thoughts about not being good enough or not being capable, write them down. Challenge them, work through them, and process the feelings they create.

Practice fierce self-love

I distinguish coddling from loving yourself.

Coddling attempts to create comfort in a way that weakens you. Self-love supports you in a way that strengthens you.

Self-love includes nourishing food, caring for your health, resting when needed, planning ahead, obeying yourself, and creating the life you want.

It can also mean lovingly calling yourself out when you know an excuse is keeping you from what you want.

I still catch myself in this pattern. Sometimes I feel tired because I have been doing things that weaken me rather than work that energizes and strengthens me.

I want to be honest about that and respond with care rather than use it against myself.

Define the problem without drama

One of the most useful skills you can develop is defining a problem in pure circumstance.

Remove the judgment, added fear, doubt, and insecurity. What is actually happening?

A clear problem is easier to solve than a problem wrapped in a story about what is wrong with you or everyone else.

Then return to your original decision: you are committed to the work and to developing the emotional strength it requires.

Your accomplishments do not have to be visible to everyone else. One of mine is removing the compulsion to overeat. I know what changed in my own life, and that amazes me.

Use your desire to become stronger for yourself, never against yourself.

Keep practicing the tools. Prepare for challenges, feel your emotions, manage your mind, and do the work. Give yourself the opportunity to discover what you can create.