Ever heard any of these?

“Take one for the team.”

“There’s no “I” in team.”

“No pain, no gain.”

“You’ve got to be mentally tough and play through it (i.e. injury, sickness, personal problems).”

When you are injured, people are forgiving (at least for awhile). But if you step back for your mental health, you are branded a traitor, selfish, not a team player, mentally weak, a quitter—or worse.

Those labels are false—an illogical, incomplete Hollywood illusion of mental toughness.

And that messaging needs to change.

It is a myth that blindly pushing forward through adversity is always the better choice. It presumes pressing on always produces the better result.

There’s no question. Mental toughness and coachability are important traits for competitive athletes.

But resilience and adaptability and emotional intelligence are also elements of mental toughness—having the strength and courage and...

Impossible.

No chance.

Nothing is going right. Your confidence is shaken.

You feel like a salmon swimming upstream against the current.

Do you feel like you’re fighting a losing battle? Ready to give in?

I’ve been caught in that riptide too. But I want to share some hope with you.

Professional athletes use 3 simple mind hacks that you can use to turn things around.

These hacks also work in art, business and life.

Want to know what they are?

Have you overcome something like this before?

Wimbledon. 2016 quarter-finals. Centre Court.

Tennis great Roger Federer was down 2 sets to love against the powerful 6’6 Marin Cilic.

It was match point for Cilic, who was on a roll.

Do you think Federer was thinking back to their previous match in 2014 when Cilic crushed him?

Nope.

Federer focused on other times when he had come back from a two-set deficit to defeat other opponents.

“I thought of the Tommy Haas match after I saved those breakpoints, went up 4-3, I...