Hi, Dr. Paul Jenkins here with five surefire ways to enhance mental strength and resilience.
I'll be sharing with you five practical applicable strategies but you're already on it. Watching this
video all the way through is a great start. Number one, start with gratitude. I could share with you a
lot of research clinical experience that supports this idea you've probably even heard it before.
But let's power this up because we're not doing the light fluffy version of gratitude. We're going to
do the powerful effective version of gratitude. Are you with me? Here's what I'm talking about. Anybody
can be grateful for the good stuff, the pleasant things, the things that are already awesome.
I'm talking about health and sunshine and family and rainbows and puppies and indoor plumbing, easy,
light, fluffy. We're going hardcore here okay with our gratitude because this is what represents the
heavy lifting. Think about it, if you go to the gym and you pick up the lightest thing that you can
find and you do two reps with it and then you go home. How much is that going to help you? See, that's
the easy stuff that's, the light fluffy version. What if you pick up some weight okay and start
pumping that weight and getting some reps in and feel the burn? That's going to have a better effect
and it's the same with gratitude so here's what I want you to try, just try this. Find something
in your life that is difficult, painful, frustrating, annoying, hard, and find what you're grateful for
about that. Now, I'm not saying that you have to be grateful for that hard thing. An example is cancer
okay and I know some of you are dealing with that right now either in your own life or someone
that you love. It hit our family a few years ago my sister-in-law just a couple of months from
diagnosis to funeral stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It took her just like that. So, what if it's cancer?
Okay, I'm not saying be grateful for the cancer. I'm saying open it up, okay. Look inside of there,
rummage around a little bit until you find something that you're grateful for from that
thing or because of that thing. What I found from that cancer mess was a relationship with my niece.
20 years old special needs she got to live with us for a few months when her mother passed.
Now, am I grateful for the relationship? Yeah. Am I grateful for the cancer?
Se,e that's harder but that's where I found it. Let's power up with gratitude that's number one.
The second way to enhance mental strength and resilience is to pay attention to the input.
I did a training recently where I showed a set of words to a third of the audience
and these words were banana, yellow, red, apple, just think about those words and then I had them close
their eyes and I went to the second third of the audience. I showed them a whole new set of words
braided, pull, tug-of-war, climb, and then they closed their eyes and I went to the third section of the
audience I showed them a whole new set of words, abuse, sex, violence, crime. Don't you wish you
were in that part of the audience? Then I had everybody open their eyes and I showed them
a word that was missing a letter R blank P, E and I asked them, what is the missing letter? That first
group they jumped in and said it's an I and they knew it was an I because that went with the words
that I had already showed them and I asked the second group what's the letter and they said
it's an O. It's obvious that it's an O. Meanwhile, everybody in the rest of the room is like what are
you talking about? It's not that, it's what I think it is. The third set it's an A, of course, it's an A.
What is it? It depends on what the input was and this always works when I do it
with a large audience. We get very consistent results of what people
think that missing letter is and it's because of the input. It's not because this group was
more deranged or criminally minded than that group it had nothing to do with that. Had to do with
the input. Watch the input. Pay attention to what you're putting into your head. What are you reading?
What are you listening to? What are you watching? What is the input that I'm giving to my mind?
You know, I love to read books. I've been podcasting since 2007, which is before podcasting was even a
thing and I've interviewed some amazing authors and inspiring people who have shared their
inspiring stories with me. I'm a junkie for personal development input. In fact, you know
what, I've put together my top 10 list this is current it changes from time to time. But my top
10 list of personal development books I'd be happy to share it with you. Just go to drpauljenkins.com/bestbooks.
Just the URL that's right there on the screen dr pauljenkins.com/bestbooks
and I'll give you my top 10 list. I'll just send it to you. Input matters,
pay attention to what you're putting in. The third way to enhance mental strength and resilience
is what I call mental hygiene. You're familiar with the term dental hygiene, right? You brush your teeth
every day, I hope. Otherwise, we have another conversation to help. That's dental hygiene.
You're taking care of your teeth, your chops. What are you doing to take care of this? Your mind,
the most important part of you. Your mind is so much more important than your teeth.
Apologies to all of the dental professionals in the audience today but I think you'd probably
even agree with me. Your mind is even more important. What are we doing on a daily basis
to take care of our mind? Now, I'm talking about the inputs like we talked about in the last
point. But I'm also talking about who you hang out with? What you do on a daily basis to engage your
mind in a positive activity? Who is your coach or your mentor? Make sure that you are receiving that
kind of guidance and input from people who arequalified to give it. This is all part of your
mental hygiene and it makes a difference. I love coaching and that's what I spend my days doing
on our platform live on purpose central. I show up and do live coaching for all of our members
there at least twice a week and it's because I have benefited so much from coaching. I just
hired a new coach. I pay more to coaches than any of my clients pay me and it's an amazing
process. You know, one of my coaches explained it to me this way she said, "You cannot read the label
when you're inside of the bottle", and here we are locked inside of our own minds and our own life.
We need someone to read the label to us so that we can have the instructions. So that we know what
we're dealing with and that's why coaching is so valuable and to me that's part of our
mental hygiene take advantage of it. The fourth way to enhance mental strength and resilience
is positive output and we already talked about positive input what are you putting
into your mind. There's something really powerful about the creative process of positive output.
What is it that you're sharing? What is it that you're putting out there into the world that has
the potential to benefit the lives of other people? What are you saying? What are you posting?
What are you writing? What is the output that's coming from this creative being? In some of our coaching
programs I teach a concept called happynomics and I love that title because it has to do with the
interchange between happiness and economics and it has to do also with production versus consumption.
There are producers and there are consumers. When we receive something we're consuming. When we give
something we're producing and this has a direct correlation with our mental health. I'm convinced
at this point that depression and I'm not talking about the clinically diagnosable depression that
also has some chemical and biological components. I'm talking about the common human experience of
depression. I think is tied to consuming more than we produce and I've seen this throughout
my career that when people are in that position where they're receiving more than they're giving.
Where they're being served more than they're serving and we all have to receive. We all have
to consume. We all have to be served because we're fallible flawed human beings. But when we consume
more than we produce in the words of one of my friends, we suck. Meaning, we suck resources
that we're consuming more than we produce. Do you see that and it has a negative effect on
our mental health and on our emotional strength and resilience. This is important, produce more than
you consume, pay attention to your output. Let's get some positive things coming from you out to the
rest of the world and finally, the fifth way that we can enhance our mental strength our emotional
and mental resilience is service... Try this. just do a little experiment. What if you were to
in the next 24 hours just picture that time frame from right now in the next 24 hours.
Could you make a meaningful difference in the lives of three separate people?
Now, if you want to stretch make those people people who are outside of your home your
immediate environment. This causes you to get out of your comfort zone a little bit and to stretch.
It also gets you focused on production rather than consumption, this makes a big difference
and there's a lot of reasons why service is a powerful way to enhance our own mental
health and resilience. I would just give you that as a challenge go out and try it. See what happens?
I took this challenge on recently and I was surprised. I don't know why I'm always surprised
at this but I was surprised at the powerful impact that it had on me personally. I think you're going
to experience a similar thing. Thanks for being here and for being engaged in this process
you're going to make the world a better place as you start to improve your own mental health.
The next video for you is how to reprogram your mind and I think
you're going to get some good ideas from that, I'll see you over there.