Top5 Tips to Improve Mental Performance

Tara Thurber interviews Tom Sterner, founder of the Practicing Mind Institute, on mental performance. Sterner emphasizes mental sovereignty, the ability to control one's mind, and shares insights from his 45 years of research. He highlights the importance of thought awareness training, which involves focusing on the breath or a simple phrase to detach from thoughts. Sterner advises setting goals with accurate data, using premeditated procedures for high-pressure situations, and interpreting experiences positively. He stresses the need to balance learning with performance and to embrace challenging situations as opportunities for growth.

Transcript

Tara Thurber: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back. I'm Tara Thurber, Founder and Director of Partnerships at define talent. And joining me today is a really special guest, Thomas sterner, the founder and CEO of the practicing MIND Institute, as a successful entrepreneur. He is considered an expert in Present Moment functioning or PMF, with over 45 years of research into sports psychology, neuroscience, centuries of Eastern thought, systems, meditation and more recently, the science of consciousness and quantum physics, he has accumulated a thorough understanding of how we can use our mind instead of being used by our mind to function at our highest level and to reach our goals in the shortest amount of time and without a sense of resistance and struggle, Tom has worked with a wide range of high level individuals, from CEOs and corporate team members, professionals in the medical field, college coaches and athletes as well as high school students. He is the author of the international bestseller, The practicing mind, developing focus and discipline in your life and fully engaged using the practicing mind in daily life. And most recently, it's just a thought emotional freedom through deliberate thinking. That's quite the list. Tom, today, he is here sharing with us his top five tips on improving mental mental performance. Tom, how you doing today?

Tom Sterner: 1:32

I'm doing great. So glad to be here. Tara, excellent.

Tara Thurber: 1:36

So happy to have you here as well. And I guess what I would love is just do a little bit of an intro to what is mental performance? Well, I guess the simplest definition would be mental sovereignty. I mean, in other words, that you are the one who is in control of your mind, and not the other way around. And there was a time where I was doing a presentation for high school kids in an auditorium, and I said, look, let's just do this. I'm

Unknown: 2:06

going to set a timer for two minutes. I want you to sit, close your eyes and stop thinking. And of course, I knew they couldn't do it, but they didn't know they couldn't do it like so at the end of the two minutes, you know, the timer went off, and the chattering started, the murmuring like this was an epiphany for these kids, because they realized that even though they were telling their mind not to think, it was continuing to think. And so I asked them the question is, what if? What did you learn? And there was a bunch of information, you know, a bunch of questions or answers that came up. But I said, I think the core of what you learned is that if you are telling your mind you, the real you is willing your mind to stop thinking and it's ignoring you, then who's in charge? Because it's not you. And this was an epiphany for these kids, and it actually sparked a meditation practice for a number of them, which I found out later. You know, their parents had said that they're all of their academics had improved and just their personalities had improved. But the point is, is that neuroscience says that we have between 55 and 65,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. Most of them are negative, and they are not us. They're just programs that we have installed over our lifetime, or that other people have helped us install into our subconscious. And our subconscious is just responding to the different the different types of triggers that are outside of us. So mental performance is the ability to stop that and the ability to be focused, you know, like, you know, to be focused on, you know, to tell your mind, this is what we're working on. We're working on this right now, and this is where you will stay, and this is what you will think about like, and that is mental performance. And it's a lot easier to talk about it than it is to develop it.

Tara Thurber: 3:56

I love that, Tom, and actually, I was thinking about you this morning as I was sitting down and preparing for my day, and a lot of times I'll sit and write a like a to do list, but what I transitioned was do now instead of a to do, and it shifted me, and I was able to kind of find myself being present for the first time in in quite A few weeks, to be honest, and again, it's the do now. What can we do now and be present now with and eventually, everything else falls into place.

Unknown: 4:31

Yes, we're so used to not being in the present moment that it feels normal. We don't feel like our mind is running our day, because you know your mind. You don't notice your mind until you try to stop it. You know, your mind thinks all the time, and it runs all over the place. One thought begats another thought, you know, like, I got to stop at the store. I need milk. Maybe I should get bread. I don't like that bread I got the last you know, it just kind of one thought just creates another thought, and it just keeps running. Um, and it's almost like you're watching a movie, but you forget the fact that you're not in the movie, you know, and this is happening. And of course, every thought that the mind begats, you have stored a an emotional response to it. And so you experience that emotional response, and you know, it's really when you understand the system, it can really work for you, but when you don't understand it, you're a total prisoner of the system, which is where most people live,

Tara Thurber: 5:29

absolutely, absolutely. And I want to kind of dive in here you and you emphasize the importance of focusing on the process rather than the product. How does this shift in mindset contribute to improved focus and discipline in both our personal and professional settings.

Unknown: 5:49

Well, in all settings, you know, we are taught to be attached to the goal we you know, we're unhappy. There's a feeling of incompleteness inside of us, and we want that feeling to go away. This is the engine that drives marketing, you know, if you don't have this car, if you're not taking a vacation, if you're not, you know, drinking a Corona on the beach, or whatever it is, life is passing you by. And so we're taught that happiness is not in the process of what we're doing right now. Process exists over there somewhere, and if we could just get there, then this feeling would go away. Um, so we spend our life chasing this, this place that we're not at, you know? So when you learn, first of all, you have to learn to be aware of when you're not in the process, because you can't pull yourself into the process if you're not even aware of it. That's why I said it. You feel so normal to not be in the process that you don't notice it, but once you get to that place where you begin to notice I'm not in the process, and you can give yourself permission to let go of everything that you're not doing and just do what you're doing. It's an amazing experience, because all of a sudden the stress leaves, your performance level goes way up because you're not asking your mind to process all these different things. You have access to all of your cognitive abilities. Because normally you have this, if you think of it like computer RAM, you know, computer Ram has background tasks that are going on and when you were thinking, when you're thinking extraneously about something that's going to go on yesterday or later in the day, or something you shouldn't have said to somebody this morning, or all these different things. Your mind has to process all those things. And we also know that the mind doesn't multitask. It's switch tasks. It just shuts off, and it's so it's constantly turning on, shutting off, turning on, changing directions. And this is why we're so fatigued during the day, and so fatigued at the end of the day. So when we learn to be in the process of what we're doing and just doing that, and we give ourselves the permission to do that, all this other stuff falls away. And it's a it's I find that even the stuff, many times when you're stressful about stuff, it's because you're not actually doing it. You're thinking about doing it, but, you know, if you're doing it like and you're just focusing on the here and the now and what you're doing, your mind becomes, you know, time goes away, your mind becomes very immersed into the process of what you're doing, and there is no other extraneous thinking going on. And it's a very it's really a wonderful experience. And and what science has shown us is, if you look at people that are in quote, flow and all these, this is where they're at. There is nothing else going on but what they're doing right now. They're only thinking about this moment, this second, and so their mind is free to perform at its highest level. And that's, you know, in the introduction, when you're reading, that's when you experience accomplishing your goals. And those goals don't have to be physical goals, meaning you're improving your golf swing. They can be learning to deal with a stressful person at work. They can be learning to I want to stop procrastinating, you know, like, I mean, all those types of things. What happened is the perception of difficulty starts to drop away, because you're not thinking about any of that. You're not all you're doing is processing what you're doing. And so the mechanics are, you know, when you hear the mechanics, they say, oh, that sounds you know, the mechanics are deceptively easy. You know, hear them, but, you know, learning them. It's a faculty. Tara, it's a faculty and a skill. We all have it, but we're not taught it, at least in the West, in any country that's westernized, we're not taught it. So it's something that we can learn. And unfortunately, because we've learned the opposite. And if you think about if you went back to 150 years ago and you lived on a ranch and you had to go to town, and it was 20 miles away, you know, you just get on your horse and clippity clop along in the countryside, and there really is nothing to distract you. But now we've got a smartphone on our face. So much distraction. So our mind is being it's being asked to perform at process so much stuff all the time, and as it does that what we. Learned is that it's atrophying in terms of its ability to concentrate, because we're not asking it to do that. We're asking it to process all this data. So it's going okay. And so we're evolving. You know that our brain is evolving in that direction, but because we're not, you know, you ask most people to just sit still for 15 minutes, and they really struggle with it, because they feel like I got something to do. I got so much to do, I'm not doing anything. And their their mind is driving them to get going, get going, get going. Like, so it's but at least we realize this now, and you know, we know the way out of it,

Tara Thurber: 10:33

which, you know you're as you're talking, my brain is going because I'm thinking so much about everything that you're saying to me too, and you know, in my mind, I'm racing, because I want to explore so much more and be in that flow, but knowing too, how do we quiet that in order to be able to show up and be present in business and professional lives. You know, I feel that we talk about this, this, or you talk about this mental quietness, right? How can we find that acknowledgement? How can we build that, I guess, build or grow the ability to observe the thoughts without attaching them to us and and be able to develop this level of awareness, not only in our day to day, but in high, high pressure situations. Well,

Unknown: 11:30

that's a great question, and the simple answer is, through thought awareness training. Now, what is thought awareness training? Yeah, well, thought awareness training, you could, you know, you have to understand the word is not the thing. So I could say meditation, you know. But meditation has a lot of connotations. You know. Some people think of it as a religious practice, you know. Other people think of it as looking for peace. But if you look at a very simple either a breast breath based meditation or phrase based. It could be phrased base. And what you do is, you know, you sit in a chair with you want your back to be fairly upright. You know, you don't want to be in a position where your body distracts you, so you need to be comfortable. You also don't want to be in a position where you're going to get drowsy and fall asleep, because you will become relaxed. And then, you know, you take a few deep cleansing breaths, close your eyes, so you shut out all of the extraneous stimuli. And I usually tell people, it's really nice if you can have some white noise, whether that's an I give my clients like ocean waves that I recorded actually at the beach, and I start them out with 10 minutes, and then we move to 15 and then to 20 minutes. So you just have this thing that kind of shuts off the outside stimulus, and then you just watch your body breathe. And that sounds like so simple, but what ends up happening is you're either watching your body breathe or you're saying a simple phrase to you're hearing it in your head. You're not saying it with your mouth, right? You're saying something like, I am still. You're hearing it in your head, yeah? If you're watching your body breathe. What ends up happening is that you're, well, two things happen. One is you generally the ego starts to try to control the breath, because you've never paid attention to before. You just breathe, you know. But once you start paying attention to it, then you start trying to modify it. Like, well, maybe I should be breathing deeper, maybe I should be breathing slower, like, maybe that will make this work faster, you know. Like, go, you know, all the ego gets involved, all this sort of stuff. And so if you can just drop back to, know, just sit there and let your body breathe. You know, that's, you know, that's one thing. But then the mind wants, this is where things start to happen very quickly, within 30 seconds. If it takes that long, the mind goes, I got this. Why you do that? I'm going to go work on this, and it takes off. And when it takes off, you go with it, because you've always done that your whole life, and you go with it, and you start to do whatever it's thinking about. You start processing whatever it's thinking about. And then the magic happens. And the magic, which a lot of people think is a failure, but it isn't, is that you wake up and realize, I'm not paying attention to my breath. And it's in that moment, in that second when you wake up and you notice that that you have reconnected with you, the observer, the observer who was watching what the mind is doing. You've left and gone into the mind, and now you're in the mind, and it's doing all of its stuff, and you're there, and you're experiencing all the emotional content of whatever it's thinking about. And then, but when you notice that you're there and you've realized that the mind has grabbed you and pulled you off, and then you stop, and you pull your attention back onto your breath, and every time you do that is like a repetition at the gym. It's basically you're strengthening your will and you're reaffirming who you really are. Who is the conscious creator, who is the creative thinker, who is the person that makes the thoughts that you want to make? And as you go through that, and so very it's a very interesting experience, because what happens is it feels like nothing is happening. I mean, you're doing this on a daily basis, what's. Starts to happen is you realize you begin to experience I am not my thoughts. You begin to notice thoughts, but the thoughts start to lose their power over you, because they become just like in meditation. They just become this thought, and you begin to hear yourself saying things like you, where, where you used to have a thought that would make you very anxious or or fearful. You say something like that thought has nothing to do with me. It's not me. It's a thought that is happening to me like and I tell people, you know, you can tell that, because if I asked you if you could stop that thought, would you do that? And they go, yeah, what I said, That's because you weren't the thought. The thought is happening to you, and what this meditation, simple, simple process of thought, awareness training that you do every day. What happens is that skill become expands, and your strength within that skill, very much, like any exercise, becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. And that's why, you know, people ask me. I mean, I've been meditating for 50 years. I mean, people ask me. One guy said, I want to, I want to know what it feels like to go through the day in your head and and I said, Well, I'll tell you that as soon as you describe the color blue. And it only took him a second to figure I couldn't do it like I said. I can't give you what I experienced, but I can tell you that I used to be when I was growing up, I was a worry wart. I had a rabbit brain that was running all over the place. I was not focused. I had all kinds of creative ideas. I didn't stick with them, I didn't finish them. And I said, by the time I was in my early 20s, I was the complete opposite. And I've been through many, many situations. I have my parents both transitioned with with arduous deaths, and I was there with them the whole time. I've been through divorce, I've been broke, I've been through all these different things. And I can tell you that this stuff that we're talking about, Tara got, took the took the sine wave and flattened it out. People have said to me, they said, you're very flat lined. And I, um, said, Well, I do experience almost indescribable joy. I said, but I don't experience the panic and all those sort of things. They just don't have any power over me anymore. And so that's really what we're talking about. If you just do this thought awareness training, it's the key to the prison. If you don't do that, you're you're, unfortunately, you're set to be a prisoner of your mind, you know, which is where most people live. So it's a very simple process, but you have to practice it, you know. And the like I said, the mechanics are very simple. But you know, what people don't realize is that, yeah, the mechanics, the mechanics of playing a Beethoven symphony are simple. If you look at the sheet music, yeah, you just play this note and push this key, you know. But you can see the mechanics aren't hard, you know. You understand that note is this, that note on the page, this note on the instrument. But you can't do it like because there's a gap there, you know, between your skill level and what the mechanics are, and that's why you under you. You go into this and you understand that part of the piece that comes from this is learning what meditation, if you want to call it that, what it does is it develops a sense of equanimity, like you stop judging everything you're doing. But judging is a thought. It's just a yes. So when you have that thought, you go, you know, that thought has nothing to do with my performance. It's just degrading it so you just let it go, and it becomes easier and easier, and then eventually it becomes of a part of just who you are and how you operate.

Tara Thurber: 18:33

Wow, I, you know, listening to you and and being riding this wave of of learning, to me, is is phenomenal, because I find you say the judge, and the thought I so many individuals are struggling with the judge, and the thought right now, you know, look at, I mean, with what I do, with recruiting, and all of the individuals that are out of work right now, right? And it's the thought, it's the imposter syndrome, it's the judge that comes in that is really, I feel, when I'm talking to a lot of individuals, that's the biggest thing that we're trying to break down, is that judge and to just be present in the now and to not worry about the future, not worry about the to do's, but to be able to come back and the meditation aspect is huge for for all of this, to come into the now and and be present. Because I find when people are present and in the now, they can take a breath.

Unknown: 19:44

They can take a breath. And I think that the follow up on that is a premeditated procedure of what you're going to do when that moment comes where the two things come together, meaning, if there's a particular situation, for example, that stresses you. Out. It's a certain person that comes in the room. It's a certain situation, a job interview, you know, yeah, I've had people where I say to the you know, they'll say, like, you know, this person always just stresses me out. They intimidate me or something. So I'll say, like, Well, okay, do you do you meet this person often? Yeah, every week I have to deal with this person. Okay, so I'm going to touch you on the head with a magic wand, and right before that person comes into the room, and it will make you any person you want to be. Who is that person? And the answer is, I don't know. I said, Well, there's the problem if you don't know who you need to be who you want to be in that situation. You can't become that person, I said. So let's start there. You know, let's give you a target like I said. You know, if you just step back from my interpretation, you have an extreme tactical advantage in this situation. Number one, you know when that that confrontation is going to happen, because it happens on a regular basis. I said number two, you know how that person is going to act, but they only think they know how you're going to act, because you're going to change how you're going to act like so you're going to change how you process their behavior. And they're not ready for that, so they're going to be stepping and fetching in that situation, but yeah, you're going to be heart centered and you're going to be focused. I said, what I want you to focus on is not what they're saying or doing. Is, how are you feeling? I want you to focus on, how am I feeling in this moment? That's all I said. Like, am I starting to feel nervous? I said, then that's a thought. It's not you. It's just a habitual reaction to this situation. Understand that. And and go back to, I'm still whatever it is I said, I want you to do it now. What I have found over and over again, when, when people do this, you know, always the next session, like, oh my gosh, it was so crazy, yeah, because they didn't have all this, this power over me, and I it's, I could have done that years ago, and like all that stuff and but I, you know, the answers are not real complicated. It's just that people get so immersed in their habit of reaction. And I call it, there's a big difference between a reaction and a response. A reaction is just a reaction, but a response has willpower and conscious choice making in it. And if that's why they call them, you know, first responders, not first reactors, because you know they know what they're going to do when they come on an accident scene. They're not, you know, they may have to make certain decisions, but they know what they're going to how they're going to respond to certain situations. They're not having a coffee break and trying to figure out, what do you think we should do? They know they've practiced this, and I can tell you as a pilot, all of those emergency situations are taught to you when you're getting your your license, and they're written down, and you know, if you have, if the engine quits, you're going to do this, this, this, this, this, you know. And they have a saying, I think, is great. It's also transferable into business and personal life, which is, aviate communicate, or, I'm sorry, aviate navigate, communicate. And the reason what that translates out into fly the plane first. What happens is, if something goes wrong, what kills people is they start trying to figure out what's going wrong instead of flying the airplane. And then the airplane gets in a situation that they can't recover from. So when you're in a situation where you start to feel like the engine just quit. In this situation, fly the airplane first. What's the airplane? What is the airplane? You go inside, check in, ask yourself, Where am I in this situation? Is this situation in control? Because if you don't have this terror, then you're only ever as happy and free as whatever's going on out here. The next thought that comes in is going to take away your freedom. You're going to take away your power, if you're not aware of that. So these, these are situations where you have to have a process, you know, a procedure that you're going to go into, and you're going to look at it as a repetition, oh, boy. You know, this craps happening. I get to, I get to practice this, you know, like, that's what I say. I Yeah, I'm in gratitude. You know, when stuff happens when you're not good at when you notice something and you start to struggle, it's because you're not good at it. The stuff that you're good at just flows past. You don't notice it. You only notice the stuff that makes you have to work, either mentally, emotionally, and it's just you haven't mastered it yet. It doesn't mean that you can't get good at it. So those situations, to me, I look at them as just data. It's like, when I start to feel uncomfortable, it's just data. It's information that's coming in. The reason it's making me feel uncomfortable is because I'm interpreting it as that. And, you know, I know you and I talked the other day, and interpretation creates your experience, you know? And that's another that's another gift that you get from from thought awareness training, you get to make the choice of, how am I going to interpret this situation? I can interpret it in a way that makes me experience it in a horrible way, or I can interpret it in a way where I can say, Oh, goody, like, you know, this is. Hard, and that means it's my chance to practice everything I've the procedure I've come up with, you know, to deal with this situation.

Tara Thurber: 25:07

And I like, I like, where you went with you get you get to, do you get to? You get that? You get the choice, right? You get the choice. Absolutely amazing. Tom, I want to ask a couple more questions. You've mentioned that you can't learn and perform at the same time. How can individuals balance the need for continuous learning with the demands of high performance in today's fast paced environments?

Unknown: 25:37

Well, some of this is taken care of just by practicing thought awareness training, because it gives you the ability to separate yourself from the situation. But I also think in professional sports, that's where that term came from. Sports Psychology, what you have to recognize is, which phase Do you want to be in you make, you make a conscious choice. So to use golf, for example, if you're going to go out on the golf course, I think most people, if they don't even they don't play golf, they have some idea of what goes on in the golf course besides the bad language

Tara Thurber: 26:13

or the drinking. I mean, I know there's definitely drinking on golf courses,

Unknown: 26:18

but the thing that you do is, when you step out on the course, and this is, you know, I used to play a tournament golf, and I the you make a choice, is this a practice round where I'm going to learn how to hit certain certain types of shots, or am I going to score? Because you can't do both at the same time. So, and what's interesting is you can't learn to perform unless you learn to practice you like, so you have to give yourself permission. Like, I can't perform at my highest level if I can't take a moment to practice what I'm going to do when I need to perform at my highest level. Like, so to me, that's what you're doing. You know you go when I used to work with a PGA pro all the time, he would take me on the golf court, and he would throw balls down underneath of a tree, and I had to hit, you know, a low cut, you know. So I had to hit a ball. The ball couldn't get more than, say, 10 feet off the ground, and it had to turn, you know, so many yards. And he would say, let me see you do that. Well, we're not trying to score here. We're trying to he's trying to see, can you do it like and I want you to do this with your mechanics to make that happen. And so when I would do that, I wasn't trying to score, I was trying to execute the shot. And so that's the you know, to me, when you're in business or in a personal situation, sometimes I think you really have to give yourself permission if you start, if the situation starts getting the better of you, you have to give yourself permission to drop back and say, You know what this is. This is my chance to learn. Just in that comment to yourself, you have gotten out of your thinking. You're out of the thought. The Thought has lost its power, and now you're attached to your your observer, your true self, what your true self, your left brain, whatever you whatever you want to call it, it's just not word is not the thing you're out of the subconscious because you've taken away that you said, like, No, I'm not going to do your automated responses. I am going to because that. You know, the thing with the subconscious that people have to realize is it's a very elegant recording system, but it does not critically think. It doesn't analyze. It's not creative. It just gives you what it thinks you want. And what it thinks you want is what you've told it to give you, which may have nothing to do with what you want. You know, like, um, but it's just doing that. It's doing it very dutifully. And so you have to understand there's times where you have to go now you're not as right. Now, I'm shifting over the left side of my brain. I'm making creative I'm making my own creative decisions. Here I'm going to look this, and then you try stuff, you know, give yourself permission to try different things in these difficult situations, and don't judge because you're in the process of gathering data. What works, what doesn't work, you know, like, so you can't be like, Well, that should have worked. Well, now all it did was it showed you what's a mistake. It's just information. That's all it is, you know, it's information that, what that theory didn't, it didn't, it didn't track, you know, like it was gone too. It seemed like, on paper, seemed great, you know, but it didn't. But you got valuable information from that. And stop judging, because that's, you know, it's okay to analyze. We have to analyze. But judging always comes after analysis. And if you can just stop that flow and go, I'm just, I am in the process of learning how to perform, you know. And then that's the other thing about using golf is you have to learn to let go of the analysis and just perform. That's why Annika Sorenson said she had a thinking box and a performing box. So when she would stand behind the ball, she was in the thinking box. In the thinking box, she would say, the wind's blowing this way. I'm this many yards, you know, the pin is tucked behind the sand trap. You know, whatever was, that's the thinking box, you know. So she was making her decisions once she stepped across this imaginary. Mine, she had already made her decisions. Now she's in the performing box, and then she would make her swing with just performance in mind. So we really need to look at our lives and again, this is if, if it's like your kids sometimes are just driving you nuts, you know, like if you look at those situations, if you stop getting sucked into your habitual reactions and start looking at, okay, if I could handle this situation any way I wanted, what is do I even know what that looks like, like, um, and give yourself a target, and then just start trying things. It starts to become almost like a video game.

Tara Thurber: 30:34

Yes, I was just gonna say, almost like a game that you get to play, and you then start to have fun in any of the situations.

Unknown: 30:43

That's right, you do use that's why I'm saying. That's everything we're talking about here. Tara is about you start losing the drama. Yes, you know, because, um, the drama starts to drop away. Because you are performing at your highest level. You know, mentally, you're operating with mental performance, you know, high level mental performance, and you're at, you know, when you're not in fight or flight. You know, as soon as you start feeling stressed, you know, your body goes into fight or flight, and you immediately lose a lot of your higher thinking capacity. And so, you know you don't go there because that it doesn't impact you. You know, in that regard, that's why some people are really good at handling with difficult situations, and other people just surrender all of their consciousness to panic, right? You know, that's a spectrum. You know, like most investors, some it depends on the situation. But, you know, and it really is interesting, the experience is interesting, how separate you become from the environment. In other words, you know, you know, you can be with someone who's really angry with you, and they're just, they're just spouting off, and you're looking at them, and their anger is not, it's not doing anything to you emotionally. And you're having this opportunity to think, how do I diffuse this? You know, you know, other types of things and so, but you, the real you is not impacted by and boy, you talk about a satisfying feeling. It's you feel so powerful, you know when you're in those situations, because you feel like in fact, I told one woman who was in there couples counseling, I said, what I want you to focus on her partner was very intimidating to her, and would start whenever they got into these things. And it really, it really derailed her. And I said, I want, what I want your thought to be is you don't get to touch my inner peace. He said, I want you to just stay with that. You don't get to touch my inner peace and don't ignore what he's the content of what he's saying. Let him talk. You know he's going to do that. He's going to go right where he always goes. It's just his habit, like, and he's expecting you to get intimidated. So instead of, you know, reacting to his content, just focus internally, you know, and say, I'm not going to let you. Don't get permission. I'm the gatekeeper, and you don't get permission to impact my inner, inner peace. And she was one of the people that came back. This is like, she said, like, for the first time, really was in control. She said, this was so easy, like, so anyway, it's magic.

Tara Thurber: 33:08

It is it is magic. It is magic. And one thing that I've always said is, you get to choose, I think a lot of times, individuals and people that I've, I've worked with some of my clients, even my kids. You know it's you choose how you want to respond and and how you want to feel in situations. And it's such a it's such an empowering way to think of things.

Unknown: 33:40

Well it is. And the thing is to give yourself what thought awareness training does and everything we're talking about, yeah, it opens up a gap right between the moment you have to choose and the moment you when the you gotta make a choice. And how much time do you have to make the choice? Is it a split second, or is it five seconds, you know, like, um, because that's important, you know. It gives you a chance to, how do I want to handle this? You know? Like to ask yourself that and actually go there instead of reacting, reacting to, what do I want my response to be here, you know? And that's where, you know, we've lost that, because everything moves so fast, and we have all this information cram, being crammed into us all day long. Most of us are trying to do more in a day than we should. You know? I mean, it just, you know, I was working with a psychiatrist one time, and he said he was asking me to help him with all the paperwork and everything that he did and the struggle that he had with that. And I said, Well, look, if you're asking me to teach you how to do 40 hours of work in 10 I can't do it. It's 40 hours of work, I said, but I can tell I can teach you how to experience the 40 hours. I said, you know, because right now what you do, because it came up, because he wanted to spend more time with his patients, but he couldn't because he had the paperwork. He said, sometimes I do that. He goes, but I know it's going to just cause this problem. I said, Well, there you go. I said, you've given yourself permission to spend more time with your patient, but now you're. Polluting the experience of spending the more time with your patient. Because why you're spending the extra 10 minutes within patient you're thinking about this is, this is going to come back and bite me. I said, Yeah, you're not even present. I said, and you're not giving yourself the gift of the 10 minutes. You know, so again, but that again is he's not, he's in his thoughts. He's not actually the thinker, the thought.

Tara Thurber: 35:21

Tom, last question for you before we get to your your top five, what in a world driven by instant gratification and rapid results? How can individuals cultivate patience and presence in both their personal and professional growth while still being able to strive for high performance. Well,

Unknown: 35:46

I think what's important is to ask yourself, one of the chapters in one of my book was called and then what if you ask yourself, Okay, I've done it. I got everything here. I want that right? And then what you're fully realized, like, you know you're done, you know you're 35 years old. I got everything like it doesn't work that way. You know, is to really recognize within yourself that we are built our DNA is built to expand. It's part of our DNA, and the instant gratification comes from what I said earlier. We are marketed to and taught that you cannot be happy with who you are right now, in this moment, there's something, or many things, missing from your life, and that feeling is interpreted as being uncomfortable. And I got to stop this feeling, because it makes me uncomfortable. I want to get some place, and if I could just get there, like if I just made another 25 grand a year, if I just had that car, whatever it is, you know, like, then this feeling would go away. And what we're real, we're not realizing is, no, we're supposed to have the feeling, because the feeling is what we're the Sistine Chapel has come from. And all our technology and the symphonies, you know, all this, the great art is come from the fact that we, we want more. You know, we want more. And that more isn't necessarily, shouldn't be just confused with material things. It's of ourselves. And I often ask people, you know, what is perfection? You know, Perfection isn't, um, it's not another$100,000 a year. It's not a bigger house. Perfection, by definition, has to be the ability to expand limitlessly, because anything else is a limitation. If it's a certain number, if it's a certain amount of possessions, if it's a certain skill level, you know, at in a in a sport, then it's limited. So really, perfection is the ability to expand infinitely, and when you understand that, you realize that you're always where you should be, because you're never going to get to a place where you feel like you've arrived. I mean, that's how all art works. And life is art. Our life is a form of art, and we live this art, and we make our decisions of when you can drop back once again. Once you release yourself from that, the instant gratification goes away. Once you realize that, how many things in your life growing up did you have to have? I just had to have that bike, I just had to have that smartphone. I just had to have this date, you know, and you've had most of all that stuff is, does anything change? As soon as you get it, you just make another I have to have like so once you release yourself on that man, life gets so much more, so much more pleasant, and your head is such a nicer place to spend your day, because you're not feeling like Ungratified. You're feeling like everything is perfect as it is, and this is an I, there is no limit to how I can change myself and how much I can transform there is no and you actually, you know, there's a difference between a belief and a knowing. You know, a belief is what's handed to you from the outside. Someone says, Yeah, you know, like you can do this, you know, well, it's a belief. It's not a conscious knowing. Once you do it, now, it's a conscious knowing, and when you can, when you can get that thing that I am an infinite being, and I can, I'm never going to run out of room to transform myself or expand, when you can know that the instant gratification drops away on its own, because you stop thinking like that, that is really, again, it's, it's part of scarcity consciousness. It's a part of marketing. And that's the, that's the the paradox, the people that are marketing to us, they're in scarcity consciousness, you know, they're trying to get more, so they need to sell us more, so the numbers, they're junk. Like, yeah, just keep going, and we all play the game, you know? Like, yes, so release yourself from it.

Tara Thurber: 39:41

It's wild. It's so wild Tom and and in today's day and age with social media and everything at our fingertips, I think it's even harder nowadays for individuals to to work on their mental performance unless, unless they are. Are acknowledging right, unless they are aware that it needs to be worked on. Because I feel, also, there's a lot of people that just, they don't, they don't.

Unknown: 40:13

You have to be willing to invest in yourself. And I think people are because they they think like what I'm doing isn't working. Yeah, I'm not happy. I never really feel happy, deeply happy. I don't feel that way. I, you know, I, I'm always worried about something, yeah? And I think that, you know, we have learned there's a way out of the matrix, yeah? So you, yeah, you have to, you know, you have to do it, you know. But what's the it's I said to you the other day, it's like, you know, many people say, Well, this is, this is kind of difficult. Difficult. It's a word to describe data, but, you know, like, it's just a word we've come up with. I don't want that it's difficult, you know, well, it's just data. It's just information. You know, like, the reason you feel what you describe as as difficult is because you haven't mastered it. As soon as you master it, it's not difficult anymore, and you don't define it that way. So, you know, look at that and you know, and set yourself free like and stop, stop judging everything as because you know, the truth is that when things are easy, we don't want to do them. It's like, if you look at like kids in video games. I've asked, you know, kids that I've been working with groups of kids, like, what do you do in a video game? When you master the level? I go to the next level. What if it doesn't have one? I get rid of the game. I go get another one. Like, right? Yeah, because you like it, you want it to be just at that point where you can, sometimes you can beat the computer, and sometimes you can't. Otherwise, it's just not fun. And that's life. Wow.

Tara Thurber: 41:41

So Tom to wrap us up today. I would love if you could share with our listeners your top five tips on improving mental performance.

Unknown: 41:53

Alright, so number one, I would say, let's you gotta start with thought awareness training, without that, if you don't have, if you don't get to a point where you recognize the difference of what it feels like when you're in your thoughts and when you're having a thought, you're you're not getting out of prison. You know that's number one. Number two is mantra, interpretation creates experience. How you interpret a situation is going to create your experience in that situation, and what you'll find, if you really think about it, is experiences you're in. Things are not absolute. You know, what one person thinks is difficult? Another person doesn't think is difficult. Well, one person thinks is funny, another person doesn't think is funny. We have the opportunity to interpret, and if you interpret things differently, you know, I had a woman who had a lot of was abused, you know, being raised emotionally, and she felt that she initially started to repeat that behavior, but then she she got out of that behavior, and she corrected herself, and was doing very well with her children. And she said, I have this tremendous guilt. And I said, Well, I said, there's two ways to I said, guilt is a feeling. That's all it is. It's data. I said, like, my interpretation of the guilt is the universe saying, Look how far you've come. I said, yours is, I'm a terrible person, as if the data is just the data, I said. And, you know, I said, but it really many people that are abused as children just repeat it. You're not. And so the reason you feel guilty is you recognize it was not helpful and it was not good for you. I said, so that is a positive. So there's an example of interpretation creative. Set your goals with accurate data. It's really, really important. You know, if I said, and I've given this analogy many, many times, if someone says, I'm going to lose 30 pounds, that should take five days. Five days. Well, that's a stupid idea, but that's only because we know it is. But we create these goals, and in general, we don't know how long it's going to take. We always put these ideas, yeah. Take me a couple of weeks, you know, like, I'm going to Yeah, and then we then we begin to judge our performance level based on where we fit in that time frame. And the time frame could be grossly off. It could really take maybe three times as much, and you're actually ahead of schedule, but your your interpretation of that is going to be, I'm you're going to lose your confidence, you know, I'm not good at this stuff. So set your goals with accurate data and understand that sometimes you can't have all the data you need. And that I went I, you know, I went through that, you know, I learned all this stuff. I learned by personal experience, I can assure you. The other is what we talked about earlier, premeditated procedures. Look at situations and don't do 100 of them. Pick one or two and say, You know what, this situation is difficult for me, and I need a plan. So I'm going to construct and write it down. You know, the reason I say write it down is because the number one, you have to have clarity on it and keep it simple. I'm going to do A, B, C, that's it. Now, I don't want a page like, you know, just write it down, because. Give yourself very clear instructions. When this happens, I'm going to do this and I'm not going to judge, and then I'm not going to judge myself for judging, because then I'm going to judge. So that's the other thing you like to come in. So you want, you know, you want a premeditated procedure for one or two things you just work on one or two at a time. And once you see that you can do this and get yourself out of it, then you get more comfortable. Your confidence goes up as your confidence goes up, then your frequency goes up, and then you start to become better at it. And then the last thing is, welcome the tough stuff. I mean, that's what I said. You know, if you want to get good at the tough stuff, you got to be in the tough stuff. You know, you can practice singing in front of a mirror in your bedroom, all you want. But if you want to be able to get out in front of 1000 people and sing, you're going to sooner or later, you got to walk out on the stage and out on the stage. And so when you feel that uncomfortable feeling, realize it's just data, just information that's coming to you saying, Oh, here's your chance. You know you can interpret it as, here's it's saying, hell, here's your chance to get good at singing in front of 1000 people. Or you can interpret as, I am scared to death and I can't open my mouth. Like the choice is yours. Like when you're separate for your through your thought awareness, you have that choice. So those are my five.

Tara Thurber: 46:07

I love it. And it's just, it's, it's being comfortable in the uncomfortable, right? And that, I think, is something that everybody struggles with. But, um Tom, you are amazing. I really appreciate you joining us today. This was such a beautiful talk, and I really hope that our listeners can get a lot out of this. I know I did, and I'm excited to take it, take it to work with myself. So I appreciate you so much. Thank

Unknown: 46:35

you so I appreciate you too. Thank you so much for what you're doing. Thank you so much. Have

Tara Thurber: 46:39

a great day. Okay, we are defined talent coming to you at top five, make it a great day. You.