Be Your Best Self!Five Powerful Habits of aMentally Strong Person

by Paul Melinte

Copyright © 2015 Paul Melintehttp://www.rqmind.com/5-habits

Table of ContentsA Word about Me

Introduction

The nature of habits

Being a mentally strong person

How this book can help you

Chapter 1

Habit 1 / Actively engage in daily positive self-talk

Using inner dialogue to start and stay with a new habit

Exercise 1: Imagining the elephant

Exercise 2: Triggering positive thoughts

Exercise 3: Meditation

Chapter 2

Habit 2 / Invest time and effort into gaining clarity

What do I want?

Why do I want it?

What are my options?

What will I do?

Chapter 3

Habit 3 / Stick with one primary goal at a time

Chapter 4

Habit 4 / Take time to relax and train your mind

Chapter 5

Habit 5 / Constantly be aware of, and manage, your emotions

Conclusion

A Word about Me

Before you read this ebook, I’d like to tell you a few things about myself.

I was born on February 5, 1985, in a little village in Romania.

Romania is a picturesque country in the southeast of Europe, but compared to most western countries, is quite poor and undeveloped, especially in the rustic regions.

As a child I was quite shy and began spending a lot of time reading books.

I started with novels, and then moved on to psychology books, astrology, esotericism, business books, political analysis articles, self development, psychiatry, and so on. I actually read everything that crossed my path and that piqued my curiosity, especially if the book was related in some way to subjects like personal evolution, the future, money, and offered either uncommon or general knowledge.

Not having anyone in my life, either as a child or as an adult, who would share their interests and passions with me, I often avoided telling people what I was actually thinking. I was afraid they’d see me as a weird individual. Ironically, that ended up happening anyway because, unfortunately, reading books or ebooks was not such a popular habit in my village (especially among children).

At school I handled myself quite well and was one of the top pupils in my class. But the truth is that I was completely bored with most of my classes (often due to the teachers) and in those classes I never gave my all. In contrast, when I really liked a class, I worked to my fullest capacities and got the highest grades.

After finishing high school, I didn’t have enough money to attend a good university, nor did I have any idea what I wanted to do with my life. So I chose to get a job and I worked in a variety of places until 2010. That’s when I quit my last job, which was with the Romanian Army.

Since 2010, I have been working only for me, and there are more details about that within this book!

It has already been twelve years since I finished high school, and I’ve taken my life seriously as an adult. I’ve experienced a great deal during this period of my life and I’ve had a significant number of life lessons, which you’ll learn about in the chapters you are about to read.

If I could give you one piece of advice for reading this ebook, or about reading in general, it would be this:

“Don’t EVER forget that the main role of education is not to fill your head with new information; it’s to bring about beneficial changes in your life, helping you think and act in better ways, compared to how you thought and acted previously.”

I sincerely hope this ebook will make this happen for you.

Yours,Paul Melinte

Introduction

There are 24 hours in a day and 365 days in most years. This is true for all of us, whether we are performing at our peak or struggling to survive. We are all given the same amount of time to live out our lives.

But you’ve probably wondered why some people are able to achieve in one lifetime what others can’t achieve in a thousand lifetimes. Maybe you are one of those people whose life seems to be drifting along slowly, and you haven’t seen much progress toward your goals.

If that’s true, you might ask yourself: What is the difference between my life and the life of someone who has accomplished a great deal? The answer is simple, and all you need to do is start to look more deeply into yourself and your actions.

Think about it: What were your main activities yesterday? What were they a day or two before?

Now think about what you expect to do tomorrow or in the next few days. Looking at this closely, you will notice that a great deal of your life takes place in the form of automatic behaviors that you “rehearse” or repeat daily, or almost daily.

Stop and look closely at your habits!

Now think about all the dreams you’ve had; the ways you have hoped to make the most of your life. Ask yourself honestly: Am I living my dreams? Do I really want my life to look just like it looks now?

Probably not. I’m guessing there are a few things you would change about your current lifestyle, no matter how well things are going.

Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be reading this ebook.

So what can you change about yourself in order to live the life of your dreams? I believe that examining and working with your habits is the most

powerful action you can take. And there are five powerful habits in particular that can help you to become a mentally strong person—the kind of person who is most likely to accomplish what you really want to accomplish.

I’ll be discussing more about this in a moment, but first let’s look a little more closely into the nature of habits.

The nature of habits

The first step in changing your life is to realize that you are the sum of your habits. Much of your life, as you probably realized from the little exercise above, is carried out in daily repetitive behaviors.

People often point to concepts like willpower or talent to explain both the success of others and their own failure (or rather their lack of action), but the truth is that willpower and talent are overrated.

Talent is not the subject of this book, but if you want to discover more about it, the book Talent Is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, contains many fascinating studies and explanations.

However, let’s talk about willpower. Have you ever seen top performers (in any field) working hard and meeting challenges, day in and day out, without really liking or loving the work they are doing?

I certainly haven’t. Instead, I have noticed that top performers are always very passionate about what they do, sometimes to the point that others consider them freaks, or mad, or crazy. They overcome obstacles, easily doing things that seem difficult to others. They have developed habits that allow them to perform in this way.

Importantly, these people seem quite disciplined, working in a steady and calculated way (this concept is called “deliberate practice”) in order to become more proficient.

Why do I say, “these people seem quite disciplined” instead of, “these people are quite disciplined”?

I say it because it has become increasingly harder to achieve our goals based on willpower and discipline alone. Our attention is often disrupted by a variety of external factors. The very technology that we use on a daily basis has the side effect of weakening our “attention muscles.”

These days, we have smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and many other applications and devices, all “screaming” at us to engage with the Internet or divert our attention in other ways.

As Nicholas Carr explains in his excellent book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, humanity has started onto a path from which it will probably never return.

In today’s world, attention is rare, and people have a hard time concentrating on a single task, especially if it’s a difficult one. The only activities that we can perform easily are the ones we have managed to turn into habits.

Once you realize that a set of good habits can take you anywhere you want to go, and that their lack can lead to disaster, your life will never be the same again! When more and more people realize this, businesses will be based on this concept, which will give birth to a veritable industry around our habits. It will be a real revolution that will change the world we live in.

When people understand that we can use our minds to develop as many habits as we want, without too much effort, I believe they won’t be willing to return to the life they led until then. People will see how much they can achieve if they develop suitable habits, there will be no limit to humanity’s imagination, and the world in which we live will truly flourish.

These changes have already started to happen, because I am seeing increasing numbers of people who strive to master their habits.

Unfortunately, there are still many people who believe that nothing is possible without hard work, and this makes them blind to the power of habits, which could ease their lives considerably.

The right habits are the key to open the treasure chests of our imaginations and the locked-up solutions to all our problems!

The only problem with habits is that we can’t develop all of them at the same time. This is precisely why I propose that you begin with the first five habits of mentally strong people. Only after you have integrated these into your life will it be time to move on to the next ones (learn more on www.rqmind.com).

Being a mentally strong person

One of the most constant universal truths is that people who are the happiest, who cope with stressful situations better, and who have the greatest achievements, are mentally strong people.

To be mentally strong, you need to learn how to manage your emotions, thoughts, and habits in ways that set you up for success in life.

Those who learn to do these things are the people who will lead their communities, and possibly even the world, to new levels. The truth is, it’s the people who are best able to “lead” themselves (efficiently managing their emotions, thoughts, and habits) who are most able to lead others.

Writing this, I can’t help wondering how good it would have been if I knew people like this earlier.

When I was about 14 years old I started dreaming about what it would be like to be an important man; a man who brings a significant contribution to the world in which he lives. I wanted to be a leader.

I was well motivated and well intended, but unfortunately, I didn’t know the importance of habits. At about 20 years old, I was broke and had a shitty job. What did I do to get out of this situation, except to complain? Absolutely nothing!

Although I had a lot of free time, all I did was worry about how I’d pay the bills, I played silly games on the computer, and I watched TV or read the tabloids.

The result: my head was filled with nonsense, unimportant things, and negative ideas that were of no use.

I was on the bottom of a pit, but instead of trying to get out of it, all I did was complain about how hard life was while I continued to deepen that hole through my behaviors and thoughts. Pretty silly, huh?

The child who used to dream about leading the world, and who was determined to do so, was becoming a young adult without hope. I did not yet understand the importance of having the right people around to support me and help me grow. As a result, I left my faith in myself to chance and to the much-less-than-brilliant community I lived in.

However, miracles do happen. I eventually managed to learn some very important things with the help of some books that I borrowed, and I promised myself that when the time was right, I would do anything to help others in the same situation.

That’s why you are reading these lines today.

My message to you is:

“It’s possible. You can do it, too!”

How this book can help you

If I managed to get out of the morass I was swimming in, I am sure that anyone can do the same.

Let’s review. Your life is largely built on habits. Mentally strong people have developed habits that differentiate them from others and that set themselves up for success. And the secret of a fulfilled and prosperous life is mastering those habits.

Mastering your habits is not as hard as it sounds, especially if you have an easy-to-understand guide that you can follow, such as this book.

By reading this book, and acting on what you read, you will learn which habits will help you to become a positive person, a person who attracts positive experiences. And when you are faced with difficulties, you’ll be capable of dealing with them with a smile. That’s because you will have learned that tough experiences strengthen us; that is the only reason why we have to endure them.

Now, don’t worry that I’ll stop with just telling you what the habits are. This book is going to show you, step by step, what you need to do to integrate these habits into your life.

If you fully develop them all, I guarantee that your life will change so much for the better that the result is going to feel almost unreal.

And you won’t be the only one who will notice these changes. From my own experience, I can tell you that the people around you will notice the difference in you. Whether they admire you or envy you, they will find it hard to believe how much you have changed, and they’ll respect you for it (even if some might not want to admit it!).

After reading this short book and taking the actions I recommend, you will:

• learn how to think like a champion;

• learn how to easily achieve dreams that formerly seemed impossible;

• become more relaxed;

• feel like a master of your life;

• learn how to create more time for yourself and for your own pleasure;

• be able to activate positive habits in your life and let go of the bad habits that now torment you; and

• be able to overcome every difficulty you encounter with a smile, and move forward feeling stronger with each experience.

There’s no time to lose, so let’s get started!

Chapter 1

Habit 1 / Actively engage indaily positive self-talk

It is often said that our lives reflect an average of the qualities of the five closest people we surround ourselves with. If you accept that idea, as I do, it’s important to remember: the person you spend the most time with is yourself.

I’m not saying that those five people aren’t important, but that little voice in your head can be a powerful positive influence.

For a majority of people, the inner voice is just an echo of the most significant voices in their lives. But a mentally strong person is one who understands that the real power springs from inside; the interior voice is authentic to you and you alone, and it can be more than a mere echo.

Acting on this, you can be a true force of nature.

If you want to become mentally strong, you have to work daily at positive inner dialogue, until you reach the point where this dialogue will work in your favor at all times.

This means you have to stay on track (“get out of your way”). This is the thinking of a true champion.

Using inner dialogue to start and stay with a new habit

When I decided to change my life after that low point at age 20, I wanted to be sure that I would be doing it right. Not only did I observe, test, and analyze my own and other people’s habits, but I also wanted to know what scientists say about habit building. So I read a variety of books, articles, and

studies. One very important fact emerged from all this research: Reward is one of the most significant parts of creating a new habit.

In the absence of adequate rewards, habits are usually not created; and if the reward starts disappearing, the habit will also disappear.

Here’s a key fact, though: Positive inner dialogue is, in many situations, the only or most important part of the reward. Even when other elements of the reward are quite important, inner dialogue appears to have the most impact on habit formation.

Let’s look at an example.

Trigger: You want to buy a new car, but you know that with your current salary you can’t afford it.

Possible Actions: You may get another job, increase your salary, renegotiate the price of the car, etc.

Reward: You get the car you dreamed about.

Now, what is going to cause you to take similar actions the next time you decide you want something? Is the car itself going to change your behavior to that extent? No, it’s the inner positive dialogue (such as “Did you see that? Anything is possible when you truly want it!” or “Well done, dude, you’re the best!” and so forth) that will set you up for further successes.

There does appear to be a direct correlation between the size of the prize and the praises that you give yourself. When the value of the prize is higher, the more you’ll tend to praise yourself, self esteem will increase, and you will act more positively in future situations.

But beware! It works the same way when you don’t get the prize. In case of failure, there is also a direct correlation between the size of the effort, the intensity of the effort, and the seriousness of the negative inner dialogue.

The more powerful the trigger and the greater your efforts, the more strongly the negative effects of failure will impact you.

James Clear, one of the best known experts on building good habits and a man from whom I have learned a great deal, says “Make your habits incredibly easy to start.”

Leo Babauta, one of the most famous personal development bloggers, says “Make it so easy you can’t say no.”

I’d add one other element: make a new habit so easy to start that you stay with it for as long as it serves you.

If you start many things and don’t finish any, you will do more harm than if you had not started in the first place. When you don’t finish what you started, you create an image in your mind, and a feeling, that will cause you to endlessly perpetuate that harmful behavior.

This does not mean that you are not allowed to have big dreams! You can overcome fear of failure.

When what you want is not easy to realize (you have to “eat a big elephant”), all you need to do to ensure success is to split it into pieces small enough to digest.

For example, I used to be that guy who dreams all the time of great things. I would start a lot of projects, get enthused, but never finish anything. I did not understand how I could split the elephant into pieces small enough to be digestible (I didn’t know how to manage my projects in chunks).

You may have heard this advice before, and it sounds very simple, but the question is: Have you applied it?

Or have you applied it so well that those chunks seem ridiculously small?

I honestly thought I understood this concept for a long time, but I rarely put it into practice. Consequently, I gave up quickly on most large projects I started.

This flaw of mine was so visible to people around me that my mother once said to me when I started a business (where I stayed for three years, which was quite long enough for me), “If you abandon this too, I will kill you!”

Finally, after far too many apologies and excuses, I began to understand the value of small, constant actions and how important it is to start with only what you can easily accomplish.

In 2012, although I was always a guy who avoided exercise or sports, and I was also overweight, I managed to run a marathon (42 kilometers or 26 miles) in less than five hours, after a few months of training. I also lost about 15-20 kilograms (about 40 pounds) during this process.

At the time, I figured that this was largely my accomplishment. But now I understand that if it had not been for the training program that I had been doing on the My Asics website, I probably would not have been able to make those radical changes in my life. Or maybe I would have succeeded, but it would have been much harder.

What was so unique to the My Asics program? And how did it help me integrate such a challenging habit into my life? (I completed four runs or trainings a week, in good or bad weather, even if I felt ill or didn’t feel like doing anything.)

The answer is, My Asics fully understands the way a habit forms in our minds.

Before you do this program, you are asked to state your objective/goals and what your current running abilities are (distance and speed). This gives them the information they need to create the exact training program suitable for your needs and capacities.

At first, I didn’t understand why my initial runs were so slow that even a snail could run faster than me.

Now I understand what my training was based on: I needed to enjoy the reward of running without being overwhelmed by the intensity of it (I ran distances that seemed unbelievable at the time, but I ran very slowly). I felt mighty proud!

During my runs, two types of thoughts ran through my mind:

• “You can’t do it. It’s impossible to run so many miles.”

• “Come on, you can do it. Maybe it’s not as difficult as you imagined.”

After a while, without even noticing, I began to reward myself with thoughts such as:

• “Wow … I rock!”

• “I had no idea I was able to do something like this.”

• “If I can do this, how many other things can I do if I really want to?”

These thoughts gave me incredible energy and a head start on many other challenges I wanted to meet. But here’s what I didn’t yet comprehend: It wasn’t about how many other things I could do if I really wanted to. It was about how many other things I could do if I broke them down into small, “easily digested” pieces, just as I had done in the race.

Getting back to the positive inner dialogue that we all should have with the small tenant in our head, it needs to be more than just a motivational dialogue like “I know I can.” It also needs to be a positive rational dialogue such as “I know I can, because I know how to divide this burden into digestible pieces.”

For most people, it is clear that individuals with negative inner dialogue have few chances to succeed in life, because they will be so focused on problems that they won’t succeed in finding proper solutions to those problems. But guess what? “Positive thinking” has as little chance of succeeding as “negative thinking” for people who believe it is all that they need to do to change their lives.

Much of the personal development literature tells us that the subconscious mind is like a faithful servant, able to perform miracles, but at the same time, such an idiot that it doesn’t distinguish reality from fiction. We’re led to believe that if we say something is true, the subconscious mind will turn it into reality.

That’s why so many people have tried desperately to fill their heads with positive affirmations.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid it isn’t so. We all hear that voice that says “You’re lying, you don’t even have money to/for…” when we try to convince ourselves of affirmations like “I am a millionaire.”

The question is: Do you really think your subconscious mind is an idiot or deaf?

Does it not hear that voice? And if it hears and sees the contradiction of the reality that you are trying to impose, what voice do you believe it will take into account, turning it into a stronger reality?

I think you get the idea why a positive rational internal dialogue does a thousand times more good than the usual positive affirmations often do, which might even be harmful, or at least ineffective.

So let’s do a few exercises that will help you to focus on positive self-talk.

Exercise 1: Imagining the elephant

At least once a week, reserve an hour to sit and talk with the most important “person” in your life (you already know who this is). Do this right now, today, if you possibly can. Pick a time when you will be able to easily remember to do this. Talk about the things you want to do, no matter how large or seemingly impossible, and how they should be split into small pieces so you can easily digest them. Find a quiet place without technology around you, or people you might annoy. For an hour, just think about how to split the “elephant.” Don’t be afraid to speak your thoughts aloud! Speaking adds power to thought.

But don’t just think about it. Take notes!

If you got a phone call right now and someone said you had won a million dollars, and they needed to give you an account number, what would you do? Would you run desperately to find a sheet of paper and a pen to write it down, or would you say something like, “Tell me the account number, I might remember it”?

Discussions with yourself are very important, so do not rely on just keeping things in your mind. It’s your life and that’s an extremely serious business, so be just as serious.

Use a calendar, call it your personal agenda of accomplishments, and right then and there, as you split the elephant into pieces so small that they seem ridiculous, write it all down. Then check it off on your agenda each time you “eat” one of the pieces. Don’t worry about the fact that at the beginning it will look like you’re taking baby steps. It might take forever to eat the elephant, but you’re still making progress!

Concentrate only on this one thing: Make the pieces so small that you will find it hard to come up with a good excuse to postpone them. Make them so small that you think, “the heck with putting this off!” and you simply “swallow” each piece without even having to think about it.

You’ll start to notice in yourself what most people have experienced: craving comes from eating. Soon the elephant, which scared you at first, will seem as small as a baby chicken, and you’ll want to keep “eating!”

For example, let’s say you want to build a house. At first glance, especially if you have never done this before, it will seem extremely complicated. You won’t know how to start and you will begin to tell yourself how hard it is to build a house, even if you’ve taken no steps towards doing it.

But what if you were to take a step back and think about other related tasks you’ve done in your life? What if you started simplifying housebuilding into manageable tasks and you improved your positive inner dialogue about it?

You’ll begin to realize that building a house is doable. You’ll understand that once you break this project down into small pieces (deciding on a location, style, size, finishing materials, tools you’ll need, etc.), all you will need to do is maintain your patience and put one foot in front of the other.

Exercise 2: Triggering positive thoughts

The hardest thing for any human being to do is to quiet their mind and focus only on positive thoughts.

It’s not necessary to eliminate thought completely. Even in meditation, our minds are not designed to shut up! But what’s important is to learn to encourage only those thoughts that are helpful to you.

To take a step toward this, you first need to be aware of the thoughts you have throughout your days. Are they positive thoughts that will help you evolve, grow, and move forward? Or do you often engage in just plain bullshit and insignificant negative thoughts?

A very simple method that you can use as you become more aware of your thoughts is to use a reminder or trigger that you associate with a mental habit. The habit is to check your thoughts whenever you see this trigger and make sure they are positive.

In order for it to work, this trigger needs to appear as often as possible, but without disrupting what you are doing. For example, you could have an image on the screen of your desktop or on your phone display, or keep an object on your desk that you’ll see very often.

And speaking of meditation….

Exercise 3: Meditation

This is another extremely good method that you can use to become more aware of your thoughts. You owe it to yourself to test it out, even if it requires more effort than the previous method.

Humans are the only beings who are able to understand and analyze their own thoughts. But if you don’t train this ability consistently, you won’t profit from this advantage and your abilities will grow increasingly weaker.

If you’ve never experimented with meditation, it’s not difficult. Simply find a comfortable location where you won’t be disturbed. You can spend as much or as little time as you’d like, but the aim is to get yourself into a very, very relaxed state.

Start by taking three very slow, deep but gentle breaths in through your diaphragm (lower abdomen) and gently blow your breath out through your lips on the exhale.

You can imagine your mind traveling to various parts of your body to relax them and release any tension they may be holding.

Then you can use a positive phrase or word to help calm your mind. Use this phrase or word to gently bypass any other thoughts that want to enter your space. You don’t need to “push” the unwanted thoughts away; you can gently usher them away by repeating your positive thought over and over

again, letting them flow in if they want to, but just as quickly letting go of them as soon as you are aware they are occupying space in your mind.

With practice, your meditation time can become a wonderful way to develop the habit of positive self-talk, to the point that it becomes more and more automatic, even in your daily, non-meditative activities.

Imagine that there are some specialized neurons that help you examine your own thoughts. If you don’t ask them to mobilize consistently and seize the job, these neurons will weaken and eventually die.

But when you mobilize them to do what they were designed to do, they enjoy themselves and multiply. With practice, these neurons create so many new connections with each other that they begin to constitute a true muscle of attention focused inwardly.

This muscle will propel you to the next level of awareness, in which you perceive thoughts so clearly that you can change them just as easily as you change television channels.

And this leads us to the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Habit 2 / Invest time and effortinto gaining clarity

In the previous chapter, we discussed how the habit of daily positive self-talk can help you to maintain a positive, rational inner dialogue to achieve your dreams and goals. But I believe that the vast majority of you who read this book probably feel like something is still missing.

I know this because I have observed this reaction in almost all of the clients who I have coached so far, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. And I’ve felt it, too, in many situations.

This feeling is something that all successful people have to work on periodically.

If you feel that “something is still missing” at this point, what you lack is clarity.

Mentally strong people are powerful precisely because they regularly invest time and effort into gaining more clarity.

But what does clarity mean?

Gaining clarity means that you:

• establish precisely what you want to have, do, and be;

• know exactly why you want these things;

• see very clearly what your options are, what price you must pay (financially, physically, emotionally) for each one, and what benefits they bring you;

• establish exactly what you’re going to do and how you will do it (breaking the elephant into small pieces).

Let’s look at each point individually.

What do I want?

Although it might seem counter-intuitive, the first step in gaining more clarity is to ignore your reality when deciding what you want.

This is a very important first step because “reality” is often a subjective matter; basing your goals on what might be a very limited perspective can often lead you astray.

If people always based what they want on “reality,” we’d almost never make any progress. Progress, in its essence, means creating things today that seemed impossible yesterday.

I’m not saying that you should become completely irrational. What I’m suggesting is that you think of “reality” only after you have sincerely answered the question: “What do I really desire?”

Here’s a personal example: One of my goals is to earn $100,000 per month from coaching and/or consulting. Is it possible? That remains to be seen as we go through the next points, but I know very well that this is what I want.

Why do I want it?

This, my dear friend, is a crucial question. You see, when you sit in an armchair and plan how you want your life to look, things will always seem much easier than when you have to rise from the chair and put your body and brain to work.

Without that “why” very, very clearly expressed, you’re likely to quit the first moment things become heavy or confusing.

Using my previous example, if I do not know very clearly why I want $100,000 per month, I might easily conclude that it’s impossible to make that kind of money. I might give up the idea and say to myself: “To have

$10,000 or even $5,000 per month is good enough … others might not earn even that amount in an entire year.”

But let’s say that you use a technique that I will explain in a moment, and you come to the conclusion that you could make $100,000 per month if you do “x”.

If you don’t have a clear and strong “why”, there is a very high probability that at some point you will give up and say, “Yes, maybe others can do it, but I can’t.”

And this is far more serious than if you would have said from the beginning that it’s not possible at all, because starting something and then giving up will shake your confidence and will compromise other objectives that you have.

So it is mandatory that you first define your “why” before you engage in achieving a goal.

I know, for instance, that I want a minimum of $100,000 per month for at least three very strong reasons:

• If I am paid that well, it means my help brings people as much or more, and knowing that I have made such a valuable contribution to my clients’ lives is a strong motivating factor for me;

• I want to travel the world and do what I please, without worrying about tomorrow;

• I wish to build and finance businesses that will radically improve people’s lives, and for this I need money … a lot of money.

What are my options?

Now that you know what you want and why you want it, you can ask yourself: What does the reality that I perceive look like now? What are my options?

If the reality you perceive is close to your desires, I think you should start following your dreams. Even if this does not guarantee your success, it makes it so much more possible. But if it doesn’t turn out as you wanted, at least you will be at peace, because you did what was logical to do from your point of view.

But if there’s a large gap between your aspirations and the reality that you perceive, then you should ask yourself these questions:

• Are my dreams unrealistic because they are simply impossible from any point of view? Or are they unrealistic because the reality I live in makes them seem that way?

• Should I change my dreams or my reality? (The question depends on your answer to the previous question.) And how should I change them?

Here’s my example….

I’m a coach and a consultant in Romania, a country where the minimum wage is around $250 per month. This means that if I propose to earn $100,000 a month serving the average population, it might seem, if not a bit unrealistic, at least very difficult to do.

If I remain in my perceived existing reality, my calculations would look like this: 1 hour of coaching in Romania = $25; to earn $100,000 at that rate, I’d have to bill 4,000 hours per month = 133 hours per day = IMPOSSIBLE. Even if I charged $100 per hour, it would still be impossible.

But when I look a little closer, I see that there are consultants who are coaching and charging sums like: $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 per hour or even more, and the people that pay this kind of money don’t even feel like they’ve paid.

So $100,000, when you have such clients, is in fact quite a bit easier to achieve.

So instead of changing my dream, I should simply change my reality to begin to find and serve the clients who are able to afford my services, which

these days has become increasingly easier. In fact, I have already started to do that in several ways; for example, I’m addressing the public outside of Romania by writing this book.

Another thing I could do is think of a business model that can serve more clients in the same amount of time as it takes to serve one. For example, I could coach groups of managers who each earn over $2,000 to $3,000 per month and who are accustomed to investing thousands of dollars annually in various training programs.

With 50 to 100 of these clients, I would accomplish my goal of earning $100,000 per month.

I could come up with yet another model, too; that does not matter so much. What matters is that when you start from your dreams and from a strong self-image, your reality can change, and many things that you thought were impossible become suddenly very real!

What will I do?

When you know what you want, why you want it, and you explore the options you have, the only thing left to do is decide what you will do to make it happen.

But don’t forget about splitting that elephant into bite-sized pieces!

In Chapter 1, when I talked about splitting the elephant, I wanted to show you how to view challenges like a champion. Now let’s take a more practical look at this.

One of the easiest ways to split the elephant into pieces is to think of it as a mind map. To demonstrate this, I’m going to show you how you can, for instance, split writing a book into pieces small enough to easily digest.

Using mental maps gives you the ability to split any project into “chunks,” even when you don’t yet know what all the parts will contain. All you have to do is start by writing down the main items that you know your book will contain, such as an Introduction, chapters, etc. Follow the map and check

off the items you are able to complete. Then continue to divide your items into smaller portions, such as main ideas, stories, etc. As you learn and think of new information, add them to the map.

To create the map below, we used a free tool you can find at https://coggle.it/.

Chapter 3

Habit 3 / Stick with oneprimary goal at a time

Do a brief search on Google and you’ll find a multitude of studies and articles that say essentially the same thing: multitasking makes us weak and stupid!

That’s one of the reasons that most mentally strong people have made it a habit to work on one main purpose at a time. Some people are even able to spend 80 to 90 percent of their time working on this one purpose, and nothing else, during their waking hours.

While this is not very easy to do, and it requires strong willpower until it becomes a habit, it is possible; especially if you remember to split the elephant. A good approach is to increase, each day, the percentage of time you spend working on your main purpose.

It might seem contradictory for me to suggest that you should break every project down into small chunks, and at the same time advise you to increase the amount of time you spend on a project. But it’s not quite so.

Slicing the project into pieces so small that they are super easy to complete does not necessarily mean that you have to limit yourself to accomplishing just one tiny aspect of the entire project each day.

Yes, there are activities in which that is exactly what you need to do, such as preparing for a marathon. Running the marathon is a perfect example of how much you can accomplish if you see the big picture but you concentrate on just the one goal you need to reach each day. The gradual daily training of your body in small increments is what gets you into top form for completing the entire race on the big day.

But there are many activities where it would be in your best interest to stay with the “meal” for as much time as possible in a day, and not stop until you’ve managed to “swallow” at least two to three more bites. One concrete example is this book.

I wrote three-quarters of this book in one day. That day, I decided to do nothing else except write page after page, almost non-stop, without thinking about how much I had written.

With the small exception of a couple of 10- to 15-minute breaks, I wrote almost the entire day, until 3:00 in the morning, when sleep defeated me.

Why did I do this instead of choosing the classical method of writing a little bit every day? There are four reasons:

1. Even if you take several days to complete a project instead of doing it all in one day, there may not be substantial improvements in the quality of what you create. Remember when you were in school and you often waited to hand in your reports until the last days or even hours before the deadline? Or maybe you’ve had this experience at work, if not in school. Would your work on those papers or reports have been any better, in hindsight, if you had started to work on them as soon as they were assigned? Maybe … but not necessarily.

2. When you work on one specific task for large amounts of time, especially a creative one, innovative ideas and solutions can arise more easily than if you were to work on other tasks simultaneously. We know that the mind needs up to several minutes to enter a deep state of concentration. From a practical standpoint, by focusing on just one task at a time, you are actively developing a strong mind.

3. Moving between tasks inevitably results in a certain amount of downtime. Most people typically spend at least one-third of every day on things like preparing to start different tasks and on nonproductive breaks.

4. Disciplining your mind to do what you ask of it, when you ask, without unnecessary delays and excuses, means you are on your way to becoming a mentally strong person.

Have you heard of the Pareto principle? This very widely accepted principle within a variety of fields and disciplines states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort.

This means that if you normally engage in five main activities every day, one of those five will result in 80% of your results.

Imagine what would happen if you eliminated time spent on four of the activities and spent all your time (20% x 5) on the most productive activity. Yes, at first you would lose 20% of your results (the results you would have achieved from those four less-important activities. But overall, your results would increase by up to 400% (that 80% of your existing results multiplied by 5).

And don’t forget the time and effort you can save, in general, when you concentrate all your attention on one single objective, as discussed above.

It’s true that we can’t always focus on just one single activity at a time. Maybe you are rarely able to do so. But if you have asked yourself the questions in the previous chapter that are designed to give you clarity, then it should be pretty easy to figure out which activities are most important for you, and that you might want to focus most of your effort on those activities.

Speaking of important things, it’s a fact that reading this book is not going to help you if you don’t start to put what you read into practice. So while I know you’re probably very eager to read what’s in the next chapter, my advice is to apply what you’ve learned in this chapter before you keep reading.

Decide what the most important thing is for you to do, assign this task a few hours of uninterrupted work, and then come back to this chapter so you can really get a feel for what I’m saying and understand it deeply.

I promise that if you do this, and reread this chapter, you’ll integrate the ideas more meaningfully, and the odds of keeping this new habit will grow substantially.

In concluding this chapter, I just want to say that I know how hard it can be to take in new ideas and try to stop or change bad habits. But think for a moment what it might look like, and how you would feel, if you were to concentrate all of your effort, at least three to four days a week, on your single most important task. Can you see the benefits?

I am not just asking you to do this work; I am asking me, too. Lack of concentration on a focused activity is the biggest mistake that I have made so far. As I said earlier, I’m a guy who gets enthusiastic quickly. You can imagine what has happened to me in the past, all too often caught up in so many activities that I couldn’t even remember them or keep them straight.

Over time, though, I learned that if I didn’t willingly let go of some of them, I would eventually be forced to quit all of them.

The worst strategy, when you see that you have too many things to do, is to put your head in the sand and wait to see what happens. Activities will not disappear, only time will. So yes, the more time you lose deciding what to do and what not to do, the more activities you will eventually be forced to give up.

Chapter 4

Habit 4 / Take time to relaxand train your mind

Every athlete knows that the training that leads to their best performance has two main components:

• the training itself (often quite hard)

• rebuilding

Remove one of those two elements from the picture and an athlete’s chances of achieving their best performance will slide towards zero.

Imagine an athlete who competes all day long without rest and without training. Do you think he will reach peak performance this way? Obviously not. Sooner or later he will snap, and will no longer be able to compete. Or if he doesn’t break completely, his results will be increasingly weaker due to the principle of surmenage (mental strain, fatigue, overwork).

Most people would probably agree with me on this. But look how most people spend their days:

• On one hand, there are those who work eight hours a day, five days a week, for whom personal or professional development (training) seem insignificant, so in their spare time they aren’t doing anything to improve their lives;

• On the other hand, there are workaholics who are up and at it from morning to night all week long, but they forget to devote a little time to relaxation, to enjoying the results they’ve obtained from all their work, or to learn things that would make their life and work much easier.

If you belong to the category of those who have too much free time at their disposal and thus end up bored, things are relatively simple for you. All you have to do is start investing in your future by devoting part of the time that you don’t consider important to improving yourself or your life in some way.

But if you belong to the workaholic category—if you’re addicted to results—things are a bit more complicated (at least at first glance).

Looking honestly at myself, I actually spend time in both categories. I still have some difficulty in giving myself permission to relax more often, but I have also been a semi-professional athlete who has trained and competed and has always made time to rest.

Every time I have done this (work hard and also make time to rest), whether I was running the marathon or working on a business project, the feeling of power and control over my life was at my highest level. I really felt in those moments that I was a mentally strong man, capable of doing anything I put my mind to. I think that’s why my performance in those times reached a peak to which I normally would not have reached.

But I didn’t always understand that I could pace myself; that my actions didn’t have to take on an “all or nothing” quality.

I know what it feels like to think that if you stop, if you let up for even a moment, you’ll lose your results. Even though logic tells you that if you relax a little—that you might get the same results more easily and maybe even learn a few new things—you just don’t feel comfortable doing it.

If logic doesn’t work, maybe we can examine our emotions. The best way to do that is to ask yourself the right questions.

For me, the right question is: If you accept the idea and know that you would be more productive if you allow yourself time to rest, relax, and learn new things, why not do that?

It’s not an easy question to answer, but if you really dig deep for it, I’m sure you’ll recognize it.

The answer for me is: relaxing brings up feelings of guilt.

Considering the fact that in my work, I don’t have a boss, I think this feeling of guilt is caused by two factors:

• big dreams and short deadlines;

• awareness that I could have done more if I really wanted to.

Although these feelings can be a motivating factor to help you get more and better performance out of yourself, they can also push you into a vicious circle from which it is pretty hard to escape.

What I, and you, and all who are in this same situation have to understand is that as long as we run around inside that circle, it’s pointless to increase our speed. What we need to do is to take our foot off the accelerator a little and look for ways to perform and work more efficiently and effectively.

Chapter 5

Habit 5 / Constantly be aware of,and manage, your emotions

Habits are actions that can define your life; emotions are factors that can trigger, maintain, or shortcircuit your habits.

Managing your emotions is absolutely essential if you want to become a mentally strong person.

How do we do that?

We need to first understand the role of emotions, and that managing emotions does not mean removing them—at least not all of them.

Emotions are one of the fastest forms of thinking, and they have played an important role historically in our evolution and survival as a species.

Consider, for example, fear. If we had not had this emotion in our arsenal and had to think about what to do every time a starved animal attacked us, our species would probably not be here today.

However, what carries you to one level might not give you the ability to move to the next. That’s why I propose the elimination of so-called negative emotions; their identification and management is in the highest interests of any mentally strong person.

Figuring out what you feel is not that difficult. And yet, emotions can still be incredibly confusing. But that’s not surprising, because just like with other important things, we often pay little attention to how they actually affect our lives.

Here’s how fear can affect you.

You have a not-so-great job, so you’ve been thinking for a while that you want to hand in your resignation and start your own business. But every time you think about it, fear (a “negative” emotion) paralyzes you and makes you say, “I have to think things through,” “It’s too dangerous,” “It’s a bad idea,” etc.

The problem is not that you have these thoughts or that you’re afraid. The problem is that you don’t stop to analyze the message that fear wants to deliver.

Fear is only a messenger, and in a situation like this, it might have a few things to tell you, such as:

• you haven’t researched what it’s actually going to take to start a business;

• you haven’t decided whether your plan is a good one or not;

• you don’t have a backup plan in case the first plan fails;

• your workplace presents certain advantages that you don’t want to lose and you haven’t weighed the advantages and disadvantages of leaving vs. staying;

• and so forth.

So the first step in managing emotions is to always remember that every emotion contains a positive intent within itself, even if you can’t always see that at first.

Let’s look at what might happen with an unmanaged emotion.

Say a colleague buys something cool that you’ve wanted for a long time, and in his enthusiasm he shows it to you because you are good friends. In that moment, a small sense of envy enters your soul. And because you are not accustomed to analyzing your feelings, you’re not alert to how it’s affecting you.

This feeling of envy, left “untreated,” magnifies within you. Your friend keeps praising the thing that you have wanted so much, and after a few minutes, totally unexpectedly, the envy you feel makes you say something

mean to him. Before you know it, you are arguing, even to the point of breaking up an old friendship.

Now imagine how this same scenario might go if you were to stop for a second and analyze the message that envy wants to deliver.

Your friend begins to show you and praise the item that you also want very much. That small sense of envy causes you to exclaim to him, “Oh man, that’s great! I want one of those, too!” Your envy tells you that it’s possible for you to have great things, too, and you think to yourself, “I’m really glad for my friend. I’m going to figure out how I can buy one of those for myself. Who knows, maybe he’ll even help me!”

Always remember: If you put your head in the sand, negative feelings won’t go away and your life will not improve. On the contrary, rather than becoming a mentally strong person, you will become increasingly weaker. Analyze well all the emotions that life brings you, and then do what you have to do.

If you do not change anything about yourself, nothing will change.

Conclusion

You have now learned five of the most powerful habits you need to develop within yourself if you want to become the best you can be, capable not only of being successful in this volatile world we live in, but also of becoming a leader who will make this world a better place.

Becoming a mentally strong person is a struggle, yes. But it’s a beautiful struggle, because you are not struggling alone.

First of all, you have me beside you. All you have to do is subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll be just a few clicks away. You will be among the first to know when my next book is published.

And if you haven’t already requested it, you can receive a surprise bonus chapter in which I elaborate on some very important aspects of this book. I won’t tell you what that’s about because I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Find out all the details here:

http://www.rqmind.com/5-habits/bonus-chapter

I’d like to ask you a big favor. Now that you’ve read this ebook, and if you feel you have gotten value out of it, I’d appreciate it so much if you would write a review. It will help others to find the same information that has been of benefit to you! You can easily do that right now by clicking this link:

http://www.rqmind.com/5-habits/review

So, coming back to your struggle, you have a character in your head who can be both a friend or an enemy in this fight, depending on whether or not you actively apply the three exercises designed to help you develop positive inner dialogue (splitting the elephant, triggering positive thoughts, and meditation).

Once you decide to make this character an ally and stop its whining, you can begin to work on gaining clarity on what your most important and cherished goals are.

Once you realize your main purpose, you’ll be amazed at how quickly your work and all activities improve, and how much more free time you’ll have to relax and improve your life even more.

And of course, none of this would be possible without proper management of your emotions, which you learned about in the last chapter.

To conclude, I just want to tell you a little story….

Ten to twenty years ago, the Earth was constantly changing.

People were confused and tired, because their lives were changing every day at a breakneck speed under the influence of technology.

Even though technology evolved, and it was supposed to release people from the time they spent working, the truth is that people were getting busier. The majority of them lived their entire lives under immense pressure and stress, and they had no peace until they reached retirement (and often not even then).

Unfortunately for many of these people, this made them consume the time they had on this Earth a little too quickly.

Worse than that, many of them noticed at the end of their lives that life, for certain other people, had been a completely different experience from the one they had lived through.

All along, a group of initiates seemed like they were living in another world. These people were not nearly as stressed or busy as the majority of people. Not only that, they had managed to achieve all of their dreams.

Their secret? They had obtained a short ebook in which they were taught the Five Powerful Habits of a Mentally Strong Person.

The truth is, they were not the first nor the only people to have read this ebook. Others tried it before, without success. The difference is that while others ran after the next shiny object, this group of initiates didn’t move forward until they had applied what they learned.

This could be your story over the next few years, too!

The question is: which story are you going to live?