“what is one (or some) practice to break the habit of mental weakness? If I lean into the largest thing that scares me I usually get discouraged and fall back into old, weak habits.”
A habit of mental weakness is what I would call a meta-habit. As in, it’s not something that you DO such as drink coffee, brush your teeth, or exercise, but something that interplays many different things that you do.
Meta-habits are tougher to change than single habits, simply because they are more rooted in their connection to multiple things.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. Just that a multi-prong, longer-term plan of attack is useful.
First of all, I would approach this from multiple angles.
Seek to bypass mental toughness both by making things easier and by connecting to stronger values that don’t need so much toughness. Those concepts were covered here and here.
Also important to this discussion regardless of whether you bypass toughness or utilize it is the idea of MOMENTUM.
Start small.
Yes, it is great to lean into the largest thing that scares you in general. However, if this leads to discouraging yourself over and over and over again, it is not a good approach. (In fact, I would call it a bad approach!)
Starting small can be done in two ways.
First, lean into something that doesn’t scare you as much but gives you practice in building up your mental toughness and/or changing habits.
Fasting is a good practice. Exercise is good too. Meditation is a third. No one thing is going to do it, and different people may benefit from different practices more so than others.
With that success under your belt you can move onto the next area that scares you a bit more, then the next one.
Eventually you will be READY to lean into the thing that scares you most.
Second, even if you do go for the big, hairy, scary thing, whatever it is, start small with it. Take a very tiny bite sized approach.
Either way you go, the aim is to make small changes sure. But the meta-aim is to become more mentally tough and better at changing habits.
The more you do that the easier ANY change becomes.
Think of this like battle strategy.
A full-frontal assault is only a good idea if you massively outnumber the enemy (aka you’re way tougher than what you aim to do). If you’re not, and this takes knowing yourself, then you’re going to want to flank them or delay with skirmishes until you can mobilize greater forces.
You might be surprised to learn that I still consider myself weak at times. I’m far from perfect. But working with this kind of strategy for years and years now has helped me immensely. Yet the war is not over.
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