How to Take Control of Your Thoughts When Life Gets Heavy

Terry Tucker is a former NCAA athlete, high school basketball coach, motivational speaker, cancer warrior, and author of Sustainable Excellence. Diagnosed with a rare, aggressive melanoma, Terry’s mission is to teach others how mental discipline, faith, and intentional thought patterns can change the way we approach adversity, grief, and everyday challenges.

 In this practical and inspiring segment, Terry expands on one of his guiding "Four Truths"—control your mind or it will control you. Reflecting on his experiences as a college athlete and cancer survivor, Terry explains how negative thoughts creep in when you’re vulnerable—and why it’s critical to consciously choose what you allow to take root in your mind.

He offers a simple but profound exercise: write down every worry you have, cross out what’s out of your control, and focus only on what you can actively address. In a world overloaded with fear, doubt, and insecurity, Terry’s method turns emotional chaos into focused, actionable resilience.

Key Topics:

• How Terry’s knee injuries in high school taught him early mental toughness
• Why thoughts themselves are neutral—and why emotions attached to them cause problems
• The "thought assignment" trap: where fear and stress take root
• How to clear your mind with a simple paper exercise to separate worry from action
• Understanding that your brain holds only one thought at a time—make it a good one
• Using focus and clarity to navigate grief, illness, and life’s daily challenges

Guest Contact & Resources:
📘 Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles to Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life
🌐 MotivationalCheck.com

Find out more about Kali and the show HERE: https://humanityoffame.com/

Transcript

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You've developed the four truths as a guiding philosophy, one of which is about controlling your mind so it doesn't control you. How did you apply this mindset to navigate each stage of grief from denial to acceptance? Yeah, I mean, controlling your mind is something I learned early. I mentioned I played college basketball. I had three knee surgeries in high school. And I remember when I went back playing basketball after those knee surgeries, my brain was putting all kinds of negative thoughts into my mind. You know, things like, hey, you're probably a step slower since your operations and college coaches aren't going to be interested in recruiting you. And I remember thinking, wait a minute, I'm still playing at an elite level and coaches are still reaching out about the possibility of playing for their college or university. I've learned the importance of putting, just like putting good food into your body, you need to put good things into your brain. And the Cleveland Clinic estimates that on any given day, we have about 60 to 70,000 thoughts that pass through our mind. About 3,500 of those thoughts are new thoughts. So something we haven't thought about, you know, the day before or the week before. And our brain operates at a speed of about a thousand words a minute. Given all that, your mind can still only hold one thought at a time. Why would you want to make that a negative thought? The problem with most people, and I have done this in my life, is that we think with our fears and our insecurities instead of using our minds. And think about it this way. Thoughts in and of themselves are neutral and arbitrary. They just come in your mind and they go. They come, they go. They come, they go. Where we get into trouble is when we start thinking about those thoughts and we assign emotions or memories or something that's occurred to us, you know, at some point in time. Now it's, oh my gosh, that's stress. Or, oh, hey, that's really nice. I really enjoyed that. We start assigning all these different feelings and emotions to it. Now we get into trouble. Here's what I'm going to recommend to your audience. If you're dealing with a problem, take a piece of paper. Write down every single thing that's bothering you. Everything. Get it all out on a piece of paper. And then look at what you've got on that paper and cross out everything that you specifically don't have any control over. And whatever's left on that paper, that's what you can work on to deal with that problem.