MAYHEM MINDSET MONDAY // Fighting The Fear In Your Life
Fear is a manufactured emotion based on something that might happen. Think about it; most of what we are afraid of never actually happens in our lives, but we suffer the mental and emotional consequences anyway. Fear lives in the future. There can be so much clutter in our minds, that it becomes hard to distinguish between danger and fear. The best mental tool I have to fight fear is BEing Present. For me, I must capture my emotions and only allow myself to think and react based on what is happening in the Present.
MAYHEM MINDSET MONDAY// Are you enough?
In the most significant moments of opportunity in your life or your darkest hour, will you be enough? Can you count on yourself, and can the people you are responsible for count on you? If everything you rely on was taken from you, and you had to stand alone in front of the world and define yourself, what would you say?
MAYHEM MINDSET MONDAY // Choose Your Response To The Storm
No one is underestimating the need for the proper mindset now. Today like no other point in recent history, it’s time to take ownership of your thoughts and emotions. Getting your mindset right starts with choosing how you will respond to the storms that have surrounded us. Make sure you have storm-proofed yourself before you turn to help your family and your community.
MAYHEM MINDSET MONDAY // KEEP NEGATIVE THOUGHTS FROM OVERWHELMING YOU
Our minds can be a chaotic place where negative thoughts sneak in and out and cause us to freeze up, stealing our ability to be present and handle our responsibilities.
Intentionally focusing on staying present, especially in tough times, creates the mental space to put our values into action, capture negative thoughts, and move forward with energy activated by our strongest beliefs.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by our emotions and then spend to much time lost in imagination about worst-case scenarios to a problem that hasn't materialized. So many times, we allow our mind to get stuck in worry or fear instead of being present and intentionally focusing on what we can control.
Here is mindset exercise you can try: Capture the negative thought and replace it with a positive value that you can put into action right now!
Acknowledge the negative thought, but don't allow yourself to dwell on it. Replace the negative thought with a positive value that you believe. For example, instead of locking up with worry or fear, immediately act in a hopeful way. Do something a hopeful person would do. Capture your worried thoughts then convert that worry into energy based on the value of hope to move forward and get something positive done.
Stop right now, and do some work to define yourself. Write down and identify five core values you can use to replace the negative emotions and thoughts that seem to get the best of you. We are human and we are hard-wired to feel first, but we also have total control of our thoughts. Be intentional and present as you approach the people and the circumstances of your life today. Capture the negative thoughts, focus on the present, and live out your values no matter what.
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
“Positive values anchor you through adversity and ground you in success.”
MAYHEM MINDSET MONDAY // Consistency Breeds Trust
Compete with emotion, not because of emotion. Emotion is a great fire starter, but it is not sustainable fuel. If you allow yourself to get out of control emotionally, then your coaches, teammates, and opponents will see your struggle and inconsistency as a weakness.
If you want to be trusted when the game is on the line, you must be able to capture negative emotions and use it to generate the energy you need to give maximum effort with a clear mind. The adverse physiological effects of out of control emotion include increased heart rate, erratic breathing, and loss of fine motor skills. Your performance will be negatively impacted!
Be honest with yourself. If your ego drives your emotional outbursts or it's immature attention-seeking, its time for you to grow and develop as a person. If your feelings are going to get the best of you, then don’t lose it on the field or court. Go to the locker room or someplace where you are alone and then let it go. Your coaches and teammates need to stay present, task conscious, not distracted. Buy the solution, not the emotion. When your anger or frustration get the best of you, it will bring out the worst in you.
The critical question here is who is in control, you or your emotions? Before you can control your performance, you must be in control and intentional with your emotions. Do the personal development work to develop a strategy and create some mindset tools so you can consistently compete with emotion, not because of emotion.
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
MONDAY MAYHEM MINDSET // ESTABLISHING YOUR PERSONAL IDENTITY
Let’s break it down. If your principal aim in life is setting and accomplishing goals, then how do you recalibrate and re-aim when you fail to achieve your goal? It is currently fashionable to focus on motivation, but I think motivation is overrated. Where do you turn when you don’t feel right, and your emotions betray you? Creating positive habits, following rules, and developing systems are all valuable tools that measure progress. However, if they become your principal aim, you will risk losing focus on the personal relationships in your life. So, where should you be aiming at first?
It’s easy to prove the importance of establishing your personal identity. It’s just true that all of us are making the most important choices and decisions in our lives, based on our strongest beliefs. So why is it that so few of us can quickly, clearly, and concisely articulate our personal identity and core values and use them strategically and intentionally?
Many of us have allowed the opinions of others to define us. Many of us have let the culture, momentum or emotion define our lives and are forced to face hardship or miss opportunity because we don’t know what to do next.
I believe your identity and values can become a platform of strength that will guide you as you set goals, develop habits, and work at staying motivated. Your identity and values should remind you to capture your emotions when they start to spin out of control. Your identity and values can enable you to create the energy necessary to accomplish your task or take care of those who are counting on you when you don’t feel motivated.
Understanding how you fit in your family, team, and community will require you to establish your personal identity and organize your core values in a manner that makes them force multipliers in your life.
Define yourself so you can aim true each day and live in a more valuable and purposeful way!
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
MAYHEM MINDSET MONDAY // MOVING THE TRUTH
I coined the phrase “Moving the Truth” to describe what I believed was a integrity problem in my life. I wasn’t an out and out liar, but I would move the truth if I got uncomfortable or felt like I wasn’t enough. I had a habit of moving the truth so that I did not have to deal with all the hurt inside me.
At my rock bottom, I remember being depressed, feeling alone and wondering if life was worth living. A good friend of mine tried to help me by pointing out some of the hard truths I needed to face, and I remember hating him because the truth hurt. Real growth in my life started when I quit blaming others for my problems, started to work at forgiveness, and fully accepted responsibility for my own life.
I believe that the amount of success, happiness and purpose I will experience in life will be largely determined by the amount of truth I can handle. I’m a work in progress for sure, but now I live my life by a clearly defined personal code that helps keep me anchored by my core values. Living by my code is now a habit, and it reminds me to re aim at my truth every day.
It is always challenging to pause and get reorganized when you realize you need to face the truth. Cleaning up your thinking process and developing the proper mindset is hard work. However, with the proper perspective, language and mindset tools in place, you can play offense in life, face adversity with confidence and become the person you were born to BE.
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
Mayhem Mindset Monday // EXCELLENCE vs PERFECTION
What’s the difference between Perfection and Excellence to you? For me I’ve always been my worst critic. The pressure I put on myself to be perfect eventually wore me down and left me frustrated. As I matured and gained perspective, I realized that what I learned from mistakes was really valuable for my life.
I adopted the pursuit of Excellence as a foundational truth in my life and personal code. In my code the pursuit of Excellence leaves room for mistakes but demands that I correct those mistakes and not make them again. Excellence is a foundational truth I aim at every day.
Striving for Excellence isn't flashy, it's actually mundane. Excellence is accomplished through deliberate actions ordinary in themselves. These actions must be performed consistently ,made into habits and goals then compounded together over time. Since achieving Excellence is mundane, it's within everyone’s reach.
With Strength and Honor
Jim
Mayhem Mindset Monday - Lost In The Fog
We have all experienced confusion and uncertainty while trying to decide what to do next with our lives. Each of us has struggled to keep our emotions under control so we didn’t do something we would regret later. Most of us could easily name a family member or friend who lives their life lost in this kind of chaos and fog on an ongoing basis.
I call this state of confusion the Matrix. My way out of the Matrix started by creating mindset tools to help me control my emotions. Next, I did the work to organize my core values so I could make the biggest choices in my life based on my strongest beliefs. Finally, I created a system to keep me on track by writing a code to keep my life aimed at my truth everyday. The way out of the fog in my life was to do the work to put what I believed into language, define myself and establish my personal identity.
It’ just true, every mature clear minded thinker attempts to make the most important choice and decisions in their life based on their strongest beliefs. So what are your core values?
Fill in the blanks: 10 Core Values
1. ____________
2. ____________
3. ____________
4. ____________
5. ____________
6. ____________
7. ____________
8. ____________
9. ____________
10. ____________
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
“Positive values anchor us through adversity and ground us in success”
LIVING IN THE WHEEZE
A friend of mine and football coach James Jones has a unique perspective on handling adversity. When challenging his players to face adversity head on, he demands that they learn to get comfortable “Living in the Wheeze!” He said, “The Wheeze” is that place where you feel like you can’t breathe, you think your body can’t do anymore, and the cowardly thought of quitting starts to creep into the back of your mind.
Author Napoleon Hill said “Every adversity carries with it the seed for an equivalent advantage”. The simple truth is that the adversity you face physically, mentally and spiritually will refine your life and increase your growth and vision or it will define your life and create deficits you can’t easily recover from.
No clear minded thinker is going to disagree that withdrawing from adversity is the wisest tendency. As individuals, we should clearly distinguish and define the adversity we are facing and then create a clear strategy for dealing with it.
If you haven’t done the work to define yourself and you don’t know how to live from a clear understanding of your personal identity and your core values, then you will face the adversity in your life at the mercy of your emotions, hoping to feel up to it, and trying to stay motivated.
Facing adversity starts with capturing your thoughts and getting you’re emotions under control, so your going to need to develop some mindset tools so you can stay properly motivated. More importantly, growing and creating an advantage from adversity means that the choices and decisions you make must come from a strong understanding of your personal identity and be filtered by your strongest beliefs and values.
I’M CHALLENGING YOU! In 60 seconds or less can you clearly articulate your purpose, 10 core values and recite a personal mission statement to hold yourself accountable through the adversity you face?
Do the work at mayhemmindset.com to get prepared for adversity and get comfortable “Living in the Wheeze!”
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
Face the Truth
Show me a person who won’t face the truth in their life and I will show you a person who is ruled by their emotions and the opinions of others.
Take a look at yourself, are you living and staying true to what you say you believe? Are you in control of your attitude and effort or are you easily swayed?
Making yourself accountable to your truth comes before living an authentic life filled with purpose, it’s never the other way around.
The important question becomes what’s your truth, what do you believe in?
With Strength and Honor,
Jim Hensel
2020 IS HERE AND TIME STOPS FOR NO ONE
People always want to talk about what they feel. I acknowledged that, but I want to know what you think, and that’s a different thing. Think careful about your life, what are you doing to personally develop and what actions have you taken to make that growth happen this year?
Are you making the most important choices of your life from your strongest beliefs or are the negative emotions in your life holding you back? You must have the answer to this question about yourself, in the end, other opinions just won’t matter.
If you are clear minded and you have arrived at a crossroad in your life, now is the time to start doing the work to establish your personal identity, organize your core values and get clear on what your doing with your life.
How can I help you? What are the positive values that anchor your life? What negative emotions seem to keep derailing your progress forward?
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
HOW MUCH TRUTH CAN YOU HANDLE?
The simple truth is that the success and happiness you will experience in your life is directly connected to the amount of truth you can handle as you grow and develop. If your confused about what to do next with your life, start by doing the work to define yourself. First, get clear about what you believe in. Your core values will anchor you as you face the unknown and help you filter your thoughts and emotions.
Understanding your personal identity and core values is vital to thinking clearly and the key to controlling your emotions, staying properly motivated, and reaching your goals.
THERE IS A CATCH! - Defining yourself is hard work, it requires critical thinking and doing something difficult. Doing something hard turns on all of your brain, it gets you off auto pilot and out of the negative loop that your in. Hard work mentally and physically clears space for you to create something new for your life.
What are you doing in 2020 to develop physically, mentally and spiritually?
With Strength and Honor
Jim Hensel
