Taking your first steps into the world of mental conditioning? This article will provide you with the fundamental knowledge you need to learn before advancing further. In this text, we will cover topics such as what is mental conditioning, what can it help you achieve, and how does the process look like. We will walk through real-life examples and examine practical strategies that can help you achieve your goals and understand the subject of mental conditioning better.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- In order to fully grasp the benefits of a having mental coach, it is essential to understand the detrimental effects of negative mental conditioning. Negative mental conditioning refers to the psychological process through which our mindset becomes conditioned to perceive and interpret the world in a pessimistic and self-limiting manner. This conditioning can greatly inhibit personal growth and hinder our ability to reach our full potential.
- Psychology plays a crucial role in the process of conditioning the mind. By understanding the intricacies of the human mind, mental coaches are able to identify and address the conditioned thinking patterns that hold individuals back. They guide their clients towards breaking free from the shackles of conditioned thinking and adopting a more positive and empowering mindset.
- Conditioning your mind is not a process that happens overnight; it requires consistent effort and dedication. Mental coaches work with individuals to develop strategies and techniques that help condition the mind towards more constructive and empowering patterns of thought. This includes challenging and reframing negative beliefs, cultivating self-awareness, and enhancing self-belief.
- The meaning behind conditioning your mind goes beyond simply adopting a positive outlook. It involves rewiring the way we think, breaking free from the limitations imposed by our past experiences, and embracing a mindset that supports personal growth. By breaking through the barriers of conditioned thinking, individuals can unleash their true potential and achieve success in various aspects of life.
- When we say that someone is mentally conditioned, it implies that their thinking patterns and beliefs have been shaped by external influences or past experiences. However, mental conditioning does not have to be a negative concept. It can also refer to the deliberate cultivation of positive and empowering beliefs that propel us towards success.
- The meaning of the phrase “mentally conditioned” refers to the process where an individual’s thinking patterns, beliefs, and behaviors are shaped or influenced over time through various experiences, training, or practices. It can be a deliberate effort to improve one’s mindset, resilience, and reactions or an unintentional result of repeated experiences and influences.
- The benefits of a mental coach are invaluable when it comes to challenging and transforming negative mental conditioning. Through an understanding of psychology and a commitment to conditioning the mind, individuals can break free from the limitations of conditioned thinking and unlock their true potential for personal and professional success.
What Is Mental Conditioning?
Mental conditioning is a way of exercising the mind that allows high-performance people to improve their key performance indicators and simply do better in the tasks of their choice. People who use mental conditioning are often athletes, business owners, investors, or other persons who want to increase their performance in life or in business. Just like physical conditioning, mental conditioning enables you to achieve peak performance through training, except it is done through working on your mental skills, achieving a limitless mind, and using special mental conditioning techniques such as mind programming, relaxation techniques, positive affirmation, and many others to achieve optimal arousal when required and focus on the tasks that are to be done.
To put it shortly, mental conditioning is a system designed purely to improve performance of those who are willing to train their brains to perform better at certain tasks. It involves specific exercises that aim to increase focus and mental toughness, develop creativity of the highest level, eliminate negative thoughts, and much more. All of that put together points you towards one direction: to achieve a limitless mind.
Mental conditioning is a part of the Power Performance system. By combining mental conditioning with other performance-increasing methods, the Power Performance system helps success-hungry professionals achieve peak performance.
What Can Mental Conditioning Help Me Achieve?
Mental conditioning is used by success-hungry people driven by the urge to grow such as super bowl athletes, entrepreneurs, investors, intellectual workers, managers, and people who want to finally do something about their lives. It can help you achieve peak performance, relieve anxiety, disperse negative thoughts, improve your mental skills, build mental toughness, improve mental health and achieve your life goals.
The main goal of the mental conditioning practice is to achieve a limitless mind that will improve performance of your brain in any task given.
Let’s say you’re a CEO, business owner, or manager. Mental conditioning can help you improve mental skills related to managing people or planning tasks and improve your cognitive functioning, as well as increase your mental strength so you always control your emotions with arguing with your employees. To put it simply, it will make you more efficient at managing people and the company.
If you’re a salesperson, it can help you develop mental skills associated with reading emotions, increase your focus and alertness, and get rid of your own negative thoughts so you make a better impression on your potential clients. With such a set of skills, your sales performance will skyrocket.
On the other side, if you’re a professional athlete, it can decrease your reaction time (which can improve your rate of force development) and help you achieve optimal arousal during a sports event (too much excitement will result in decreased processing of intellectual tasks, not enough arousal will result in decreased sports performance) or reduce stress and improve recovery by using positive affirmation and relaxation techniques. In other words, mental conditioning will help you achieve your true potential used in combination with physical conditioning protocols.
What Is a Mental Conditioning Coach?
A mental conditioning coach is a person who will help you work on your mental skills and mental strength through a set of specific mental conditioning techniques, tailored strategies, and sometimes even physical conditioning exercises regardless of whether you’re a super bowl athlete or just an entrepreneur who wants to get into positive thinking and relieve anxiety.
Mental toughness training is very demanding and without the help of a mental conditioning coach, you might get stuck and drown in your own emotions. The benefit of having a mental conditioning coach is being able to rely on an experienced sensei who can guide you through the mental toughness training and use their own knowledge, experience, and skills to help you achieve the highest level of your performance.
There is much more to mental conditioning than just positive thinking, mental health and wellbeing, or relaxation techniques. If you truly want to achieve a limitless mind and improve your mental skills, you will need someone to guide you through the process. Some of the mental conditioning techniques are easy and pleasant, while others are demanding, hard to master, and even dangerous. For instance, confronting your inner demons requires a lot of mental strength, cold blood, and the ability to control your emotions. If you start using certain advanced techniques without an appropriate introduction, you may end up losing your willpower or even sanity (in extreme cases) but don’t worry, an experienced mental conditioning coach will know how to safely guide you through the process.
Our Minds
Just as our brains are capable of going through neuroplastic changes, our minds can be programmed to do certain things. Depending on the input, you will receive a certain output. If the input is bad, it is unwise to count on a satisfactory output. Think of your mind as a computer. It does what it’s told to do so stop blaming the computer for not functioning as expected because it’s your responsibility to provide it with the right programs. Before you do that, however, you must learn how to communicate with your subconsciousness.
The subconscious mind is responsible for all the calculations and instructions executed in the background, hence the name. All those tasks are done without your conscious awareness because that’s exactly the role of the system. It was created to spare you the necessity of analyzing every trivial action so you can direct your attention toward more important things. Your subconscious mind is very powerful but also very stupid, meaning it works exactly like a computer (or a pet). If you program yourself to be a lazy person, no matter how impractical the programs are, it will continue executing the same instructions over and over again because you previously programmed it to. The only way to stop the vicious circle is to re-program it by clearing out the instructions that are no longer practical and providing it with new programs that can actually be of use to you.
The process of reprogramming the mind must be done with caution and by a professional. Also, the programs have to be coded with an appropriate intensity as otherwise, they might be too strong or too weak. For instance, if you want to program yourself to overcome fear with confidence, you will need to program an appropriate action-reaction ratio. You are searching for the optimal arousal here because if the program is too weak, it simply won’t work and if it’s too strong, it might make you do things you will later regret, for example attacking someone who looked at you. This is when mental conditioning coaches come into play. They will guide you through the process and ensure the stimuli are coded with the appropriate intensities.
The Power of Mental Conditioning
Mental conditioning doesn’t build just mental toughness. Mental toughness training is indeed beneficial for most people but to truly condition your mind, you need more than just be mentally strong. In order to reach your true potential and achieve a limitless mind, you need to go through the full transformation process where you work with your weaknesses, confront your demons and indoctrinate yourself with a whole new paradigm. Such strategy is vital to fully optimize performance and as a high-performance person, you should be aware that we live in a high-performance era so if you want to remain a part of the high-performance culture, the only way is to continuously grow and adapt.
Achieving peak performance has to be done according to a structured plan. This plan needs to include a list of steps to take. A thorough analysis of weaknesses, strengths, and key performance indicators that will be used to measure the outcome in a tangible way is essential. Only then can you make a significant change in your life.
To sum it up, a full mental conditioning transformation will affect the following factors:
- It will change the way you perceive reality
- It will change the way you think of yourself
- It will optimize your daily habits
- It will require you to face your fears, demons, and weaknesses
- It will completely restructure your personality
- It will require you to take control of your emotions
- It will reorganize your whole life
Only by going through all of these changes (and many more), you will be able to achieve peak performance and realize your goals. If you’re not willing to go through this process in full, you better give up now because you will only be wasting your time.
Reject Your Old Self
In order to achieve goals, you must change your habits. This means rejecting your old self and building a new personality from scratch. New habits, new strengths, new routines. Before you do that though, you must be prepared to transgress your ego and possess enough mental strength to detach yourself from your inner devils. Death of the ego can be a painful process if you remain attached and this is why you need mental conditioning techniques. They will teach you how to stay in control and take not just your performance but also your consciousness to the highest level so you can confront your fears and turn your weaknesses into strengths.
As mentioned before, mental conditioning is not just about relaxation techniques, positive affirmation, or even mental toughness. It’s about achieving peak performance and it requires several mental skills to master before you are able to adapt, eliminate negative thoughts and achieve a limitless mind. Remember, you are seeking to achieve peak performance through constant improvement so rejecting useless character traits is a must in this process. Positive affirmation and mental toughness training can be helpful but confronting your dark side and winning the fight is a completely different story.
To put it simply, if you want your mental health to remain intact, you have to prepare before your journey.
The Role of Expanded Awareness
Expanded awareness is a state of mind that differs from your normal state of consciousness. It opens your eyes and expands your comprehension. It can be compared to expanding your field of vision but it does so mentally. To put it simply, it will make you realize things, you weren’t able to realize before. This itself is a very potent weapon against negative behavioral patterns, negative thoughts, and other counterproductive schemes.
Let’s give you an example. Remember when I mentioned optimal arousal before? Let’s say you are deeply afraid of dogs. Fear is a survival instinct but if it becomes too strong without a good reason, it will stimulate the fight-or-flight response too much and (according to the polyvagal theory) leave you unable to act, paralyzed. Now this pattern is counterproductive and impractical, I am pretty convinced every mental conditioning coach will agree with me on this one. In order to delete and substitute this program with an actually useful one, you need to expand your awareness, admit you’re afraid, and understand why are you afraid. Without expanded awareness, you won’t be able to do that and this is one of the reasons my mental conditioning system focuses on self-realization, personal development, spiritual growth, and expanded awareness.
Mental Conditioning Process
The whole mental conditioning process occurs on many planes and requires several techniques and sub-processes to be conducted before significant changes can be seen. In this chapter, I will aim to explain some basic definitions, their roles, and their benefits so you can understand the process better and start your journey well prepared.
There are a few things to consider when you start going through a mental conditioning program. Some of them are quite obvious while others might seem obscure at first. Generally, when you aim to improve your performance, even if it’s “just” physical conditioning such as strength training, you will have to make amendments to your routine. Reaching the highest level and achieving goals requires not just mental strength and willpower but also a decent strategy. This strategy helps you ensure all the puzzles match together and most importantly, see the big picture before you start working towards it.
What Is Behavioral Conditioning
Achieving a limitless mind starts with behavioral conditioning. This process enables you to condition your ego so it reacts in the desired way to specific stimuli. Depending on the stimuli, you want a certain reaction to occur. Behavioral conditioning aims to develop desired character traits and behaviors and get rid of the undesired ones. The first step to changing the world around you is to change yourself so before you begin working on other, more powerful mental skills, you must simply master the basics. Mastering the basics starts here. If you want to learn how to alter your life, you must first alter your perception. A simple micro-macrocosm relationship.
Why is that important?
Because if laziness is one of your demons, you won’t be able to work as hard as you need to. If your fear prevents you from doing something, you won’t be able to achieve your goals. If sadness takes away all the joy from your life, you won’t be happy. The same goes for working with others. If your emotions get in the way and you can’t control yourself, you are much more likely to lose a client, the game, or simply miss your goals. There can be many reasons including overconfidence, envy, or greed but the point is, you must be able to stand aside and objectively analyze your behavior to see if they match previously set standards. If not, you will have to keep working until the criteria are met.
What Is Mental Programming
Mental programming is the process of digging into your subconscious mind and making changes. It can allow you to reprogram yourself just like you program a computer. Mental programming is one of the first advanced tools you will use to change the way you think. It will help you gain mental strength and develop other mental skills. A very primitive example of mental programming is using a positive affirmation to disperse negative thoughts. It consists of repeating a statement over and over until it gets engraved into your subconsciousness and starts acting as an instruction. To give you an example, it could be a simple sentence such as “I am full of energy”. If you repeat that enough times with enough “force” (notice the multiplier), you will eventually believe it’s true. Then, your subconsciousness will do everything in its power to make you feel that way and its power is greater than you might suspect.
By using mental programming, you can program your brain to release certain hormones, make you feel a certain way, disrupt the perception of time, and much more.
Programming your mind will change the way your psyche functions. As your brain doesn’t really notice the difference between imagination and reality, it will react accordingly. Whenever you watch an action movie and get hyped up or remind yourself of trauma from the past and start feeling fear even though it’s just your imagination, you hypnotize yourself. It makes you feel the same, real emotions as if it was happening for real. This is because your brain believes in the story and if you can tell it your own story, you can elicit a specific reaction. This is how mental programming works.
What Is Mental Resistance
Mental resistance is a phenomenon that occurs when your mind refuses to follow your instructions and you can’t realize the process. The mental resistance itself is detrimental to your performance but breaking through it provides you with the experience you need to grow. It often happens when previously programmed instructions are too strong and your brain defends them so much that it refuses to make any changes. Relaxation techniques and positive affirmation won’t help here. To break through mental resistance, you must “untie the knot” and proceed with a mental journey into the depths of your mind.
Most people experience mental resistance at some point in their lives. It could be fear, laziness, hatred, or any emotions that contradict the new programs you are trying to introduce. Experiencing mental resistance means that you are trying to work against your beliefs and you are required to change them before you move on. For some, this process might be very demanding while others, might find it natural. The problem is that natural or not, mental resistance still prevents you from realizing your goals and is a limit on your way to achieving a limitless mind.
What Is Mental Breakthrough
A mental breakthrough occurs when the mental resistance is broken. It is the moment you understand what’s blocking you and use appropriate mental conditioning techniques to break through the resistance. To put it simply, breaking through mental resistance can be compared to entering the next level where new mental skills are unlocked and you are getting one step closer to achieving a limitless mind.
Mental breakthroughs can be achieved through introspection meditation and mental journeys. You first must travel deep into the depths of your mind and then find the real problem. Only after the issue is found, it can be treated but before that happens, it has to be thoroughly analyzed and understood. Some mental resistance is caused by trauma, some by prejudice, and some forms spontaneously as the result of daily habits and life choices. Depending on why it formed in the first place, you will need a different strategy to solve it and break through. Think of it as searching for the right key to open the gate.
What Is Imagery Training
Imagery training is a type of mental skill that relies on visualization. Just as other mental skills, it can be practiced and polished. Imagery training usually involves visualizing an object starting from a very simple image such as a dot and gradually progressing into more complicated objects, sceneries, and so on. With time, you will also engage other senses such as smell, taste or even proprioception, emotions, thermoception, and others.
Imagery training allows you to put yourself in a certain situation or environment while experiencing a mental journey so you can “trick” your mind that it already happened. It can help you familiarise yourself with a certain situation, alter your self-perception or simply practice specific skills in your mind. There are even research papers to back it up.
Nevertheless, the point of doing imagery training is to be able to put yourself in a scenery that is impossible (or impractically hard) to achieve in real life. As your brain doesn’t really distinguish the difference between imagination and reality, such training will help you go through certain events and build your mental strength without the necessity of traveling to a certain location or provoking a certain situation in real life.
A Ritual for Success
Achieving a limitless mind requires the adept to go through mental training first and this can be quite tricky if a routine is not established. Before a routine is followed, it must be programmed and the process of programming itself has to be thought through.
One of the strategies I value the most is setting a ritual for success. It’s a simple strategy that involves implementing certain habits into the routine. These habits aim to increase the efficacy of your actions meaning every action you undertake will be more effective. These habits are often universal, that is they work on most occasions.
Before you go on a mental rampage, you must set yourself the guidelines, principles, goals, and a strategy. Only with an appropriately designed process, you will be able to achieve peak performance and ascend to the highest level. Continue reading to learn about tips and habits I incorporate with my clients to boost their performance.
3 Habits That Improve Learning: Do It for Your Brain
Your brain likes to know what will you be working on in advance. It allows you to prepare the right mindset and new ideas. Mindset is especially important. Before you start writing, organizing your work, or training, you have to get into the groove to achieve maximum performance. Preparing for the task mentally will allow you to boost your efficacy while working.
Divide Your Plan into Small Steps
Dividing your plan into small steps allows you to set milestones that can serve as checkpoints and let your mind rest after achieving them. It will help you in your journey by enabling you to focus on what is important now, rather than on just the future outcome. The big picture is very important but there are times when you need to do something now and it’s more effective to focus on the present more. Dividing your plan into small steps also increases the chance of succeeding as you will be directing your attention toward a single goal at a time which helps to stay dedicated as you’re constantly ticking small checkmarks which boosts your motivation.
Start with a Ritual
Starting with a ritual is a simple, yet effective habit. It associates a certain ritual or a habit with a high-performance state or “the flow”. The rituals can be very simple, for example lighting up an incense stick, drinking yerba mate, and visualizing your goal (the final outcome) for as little as just a single minute before you start working on it, can improve the efficacy of your brain and help you get into the groove. It informs the brain about what you’re trying to do and the more often you go through your personal rituals before starting to work, the more powerful they become.
Use Adaptogens and Supplements
Adaptogens are herbs that decrease stress levels and increase your vitality. Most people are familiar with substances like Ashwagandha but in many cases, this particular adaptogen causes many users to build up tolerance pretty quickly. From my observations, Holy Basil (Tulsi) is a better choice. Also, if you want to decrease your stress levels without making you sleepy, Rhodiola Rosea does the job. It even boosts cognitive performance and can be an excellent choice if you are to start working on a project. If you happen to need to boost your cognition long-term, Gotu Kola (it absorbs better when consumed with fats) will do the job. Need more energy? No problem, 400mg of CoQ10 in the form of ubiquinol will do the job; it starts working within a week or two, improves sleep, energy levels, and has many more benefits without stimulating your heart rate or causing a crash. There are many useful supplements on the market you might not know about so it might be worth discussing them with your coach. For instance, did you know that magnesium l-threonate is a neuroactive form of magnesium that doesn’t cause digestive tract issues and can improve magnesium content in the cerebrospinal fluid, thus boosting the performance of your brain?
3 Tips For Mental Conditioning And Improving Performance
There are many strategies and hacks in the world of mental conditioning. Some of them can help you develop a more practical and positive mindset, while others can improve your performance by pointing you in the right direction. As not all of them are as obvious as it might seem, I want to share with you 3 important tips I found very useful when working with beginners.
Focus on the Process
The big picture is important but you gotta focus on the present moment while working. By directing your focus toward the present task, you are increasing your efficacy. I know that imagery training helps and can change your mindset but there’s a difference between imagery training and daydreaming. If you start consciously thinking about the present moment, what’s important right now, and focusing on your job, you will simply achieve better results because you will pay more attention to it. Yes, attention. Attention is the key, therefore don’t be the guy who can never focus on the current task!
Trust the Process
Believing in yourself reprograms the brain so it starts looking for optimistic outcomes which increases your chance of succeeding. This is because your mind will focus on searching for solutions instead of worrying about problems. This might sound simple but there is a bit more to that. Positive thinking not only helps you to relieve anxiety and repel negative thoughts but also directly aids you in achieving peak performance. For example, hormones that are released when you’re happy such as serotonin or dopamine can make a real difference in your performance. Serotonin is required to produce melatonin, thus it is involved in the sleep-wake cycle. In simple words, it affects your sleep, recovery, mood, mental health, and mental strength. Dopamine, on the other hand, affects your motivation, task processing capability, and learning performance. To put it shortly, positive thinking will help you achieve optimal arousal which is one of the essential factors on your way to achieving a limitless mind. Another important fact is that when you start worrying, your body releases stress-related hormones such as cortisol for example. Too much cortisol will result in a lack of concentration and, in turn, in inappropriate decisions being made. What’s the takeaway then? Do not worry and trust the process and you will achieve a better outcome!
Pay Attention to Your Mindset
If just trusting the process can make such a drastic difference, imagine what can an appropriate mindset help you achieve. By combining mental toughness training with the right mindset, you can truly acquire a limitless mind and achieve goals. If you want to improve performance, mindset is one of the key driving factors that will affect your mental conditioning process. Every mental conditioning coach will tell you that they use specific key performance indicators to measure their clients’ achievement and remember that mindset can, indeed, be one of them. For instance, if somebody is afraid to act independently, that is a mindset issue. Getting rid of the fear or shyness preventing one to act can be measured (resistance broken, fear eliminated) and it can have a tangible effect on the process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Every domain has its own myths, uncertainties, and questions. The role of an expert is to explain the system, the process, and the steps so the doubts are dispelled and the readers’ curiosity is satisfied. Below, you can find some frequently asked questions and thorough answers. Read through to understand the process better.
What Does a Mental Conditioning Coach Do?
Mental conditioning coach teaches you how to work with your mind to optimize your performance. Mental conditioning coaches are there to guide you through the process and explain to you each step so you understand what you’re doing. They are there to make sure you go through your journey safely and to save you the time of making the same mistakes over and over. By hiring a mental conditioning coach, you save yourself from the mistakes that cost you time and money.
Does Mental Training Work?
Mental conditioning is very effective but you still have to do your job. It’s not magic, you will not instantly become a world champion or a successful CEO just because you hired a mental conditioning coach. The system is there to aid you in what you’re doing, not to do it for you. It simply increases the efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness of your actions. You can think of it as an amplifier that boosts the impact of your doings. With a mental conditioning coach, you can realize your goals faster and achieve more than you hoped for regardless of whether you’re a super bowl athlete, business owner, trader, or simply a person who wants to change their life.
What Is Mental Performance Training?
It’s a type of performance training that is done inside your mind. It allows you to realign your mind so you can think clearly, make wiser choices and calculate the data faster. Mental performance training sharpens your mind and allows you to become more resilient. This type of training is especially useful for people who complain about their cognition, brain fog, and general awareness as well as the sharpness of the mind. It will help you plan better and go through the tasks faster.
What Is Mental Calculation?
Mental calculation is a type of calculation done within the mind. It enables one to quickly estimate important things. For instance, if you need to quickly decide if something is worth your time, you are performing a mental calculation. In fact, mental calculations are often executed by your subconscious mind that gathers the data and works in the background without your knowledge. Such calculations manifest as “feelings” and might be mistaken for precognition. The mechanism of action is simple, as you provide your brain with information, it carries out the calculations for you so you don’t have to keep wasting your time thinking about trivial things. A mental calculation can be also conscious but even the unconscious ones can be improved in terms of efficiency. You can train your mind to analyze the data more effectively so it can provide you with better solutions.
How Mental Training Can Be Used for Performance Enhancement?
Mental training allows you to put yourself in certain situations without doing so in real life. As your brain doesn’t recognize the difference, you can use mental journeying to go through certain scenes or talk to specific persons in your mind to solve personal issues and more. You can train specific mental skills on the fly and it converts to real-life performance. It’s a very useful skill, especially when combined with imagery training because they can work in synergy and develop your visualization skills simultaneously so you can kill two birds with one stone.
How Mental Training Can Make You Physically Stronger?
If you’re an athlete, mental training can make you physically stronger by improving your coordination, the strength of the impulses (by increasing motor neuron firing frequency), proprioception, and more. For instance, did you know that you can improve your balance using imagery training? You can also do so in your dreams (lucid dreaming). There are many techniques that can influence your physical body, you can even use mental conditioning techniques to dilate your blood vessels and improve post-workout recovery along with facilitating some morphological changes such as muscle hypertrophy (via increased blood flow and nutrient delivery). The goal is to align the mind with the body as the brain commands all your muscles and joints to move. Those techniques are advanced but they are able to master if you dedicate yourself to mental conditioning and understand its main principles.
P.S. Want to learn more about mental conditioning? Check out my mental conditioning book. It contains a 12-month-long program that will teach you how to control your mind and body.
