1029 – When things get tough: Tom talks Mental Toughness

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

🎙️ Episode Focus
Tom Antion discusses mental toughness—why it’s essential for entrepreneurs and how to develop it to succeed in both business and life.
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🔑 Key Points
1. What is Mental Toughness?
• The ability to stay focused and keep going when things go wrong.
• Critical for entrepreneurs since setbacks and stress are inevitable.
• Without it, people tend to quit too easily.
2. Traits of Mental Toughness
• Resilience – bouncing back from challenges.
• Self-confidence – often shaped by upbringing, but can be improved.
• Commitment to goals – success requires written goals and persistent effort.
• Emotional control – not letting emotions derail progress.
• Viewing challenges as opportunities – learning and gaining self-esteem from overcoming obstacles.
3. How to Build Mental Toughness
• Self-awareness – notice how you react to problems and adjust.
• Reframe challenges – look for solutions instead of dwelling on setbacks.
• Preparation – anticipate problems (e.g., backups for power, internet, finances).
• Focus on a mission – a bigger purpose makes small troubles easier to handle.
• Learn from the past – past difficulties shape your current toughness.
4. Parenting & Mental Toughness
• Parents should avoid making life too easy for kids.
• Giving kids challenges (e.g., work experience, responsibility) fosters resilience.
• Many young workers fail due to entitlement and lack of toughness.
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💡 Takeaway
Mental toughness isn’t fixed—you can develop it by practicing resilience, self-awareness, preparation, and commitment to a mission. Stressful experiences, while difficult, are what make you stronger.

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Episode 1029 – Mental Toughness
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1029 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today I'm going to talk to you about something that will help you in all areas of your life. And that's called mental toughness. And it's not a woo woo thing here. It's especially important for entrepreneurs because things happen and then you gotta get through them. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 1028. That was flash sale terminology. That's so you can bring in cash fast by creating urgency and scarcity and all that. All that stuff. All right. Pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is open. And hey, just one of the tips in this book has saved me. We we actually estimated it 9 million keystrokes, right? Saved me carpal tunnel system. So make sure you download that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program and my school greatinternetmarketingtraining.com for the mentor program. And if you're in it you get a scholarship that you can give to somebody or use yourself if you want to. My school, the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world, and it's certified to operate by the State Council and higher education in Virginia. But it's you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality, distance learning. That's it. IMTCVA.org.

[00:01:54] All right. Let's talk about mental toughness and the kind of the definition of this is how you can stay focused and keep going when things go wrong, when you're stressed out.

[00:02:10] When you run into the myriad of challenges you run into. In business and in life. Now, this is, uh, an important thing to have. And if you don't have it, life is going to be a lot tougher for you. And if you don't think business challenges come up and stress comes up and the bills are, uh, like Joan, stories to say the bills are eight feet tall and the income is one inch tall. You know, you're going you need the mental toughness to work through that because people that don't have it just go back and quit because it looks it's too easy to go back and quit because they don't have that mental toughness. And you may not have been encouraged to have mental toughness when you were young. You might have been given everything. And so now when if you're on your own, uh, it's, you know, it's too hard, you know, or I can't do it. You know, those kinds of things. I blame that on your parents, but they should have made you strive for things and accomplished things when you were young. And then you'd automatically have this. But don't despair. You can improve on this mental toughness and the ones that choose to improve on it and already have it, are the ones that are successful in business one way or the other.

[00:03:29] Even if they failed over and over and over, they keep going and they finally get success. All right, so there's some personal qualities associated with mental toughness. One is resilience. You're like, you know, things bounce off of you. Self-confidence. And I did a big study with stage fright years and years and years ago and found out that, you know, people that were told to, you know, sit down and shut up and wipe that stupid smile off your face and only talk when you're spoken to, and children should be seen and not heard. A lot of those people grew up with very poor self-confidence. Now, if you're a parent and you encourage your child to speak up to adults and act right, and that what they have to say is important, then you're helping to instill self-confidence. But if you don't have that, you can improve on it. And another quality associated with mental toughness is commitment to goals. And most people say you need to write down goals, and that people that write them down get an enormous amount of success. And the people that just put them in their head and keep quiet about them don't. Okay, I'll go along with that for most people. Now my crazy thoughts. Are that I've never reached a goal in my life. And and that sounds. Oh, man, you're pretty successful. Tom, how do you say. How do you say that? Well, because my particular deal is that I've never reached a goal because as soon as I get near it, another one appears past it.

[00:05:13] This is my mind game that I play on myself to keep improving and fighting and crawling and going forward. Even at my ancient age that I am now okay. So commitment to a goal. Figure out something you want to achieve and then take the steps to get there. Another problem people have is that they want to jump to the goal immediately. And that's what our entitlement society and everybody wants everything instantly without taking the steps to get there. So if you're willing to take the steps to get there, you're going to beat the pants off of these people that want the goal and want to have it immediately. But then it never happens because that's ridiculous. If they might get lucky once in a while, but you can't depend on jumping over all the steps to take the reach goals. Now, another personal quality associated with mental toughness is Ability, your ability to control your emotions. So when something goes bad. Instead of just freaking out and crying and I mean, yeah, I've cried over some stuff that's happened to me, I admit it, all right, but your emotions are not going to get you to your goals, are not going to help you with your mental toughness and achieve the success that you want.

[00:06:30] Your emotions frequently will sabotage you because it's woe is me and all. Everything's bad and I never, you know, I never have any success. I don't play the lottery because I never win anything. You know, that kind of attitude gets brought to the forefront when you're all emotional about something that has happened to you. Um, I'm not saying to be a robot at all, but I'm saying you got to control them to a certain extent and and get past them so that you can keep back on track of whatever tried to sidetrack you. And another trait is you look at challenges as opportunities so something goes wrong. It's an opportunity for you to learn. It's an opportunity for you to get some really great self-esteem. When you overcome that particular problem and you move towards your goals, where and it's how you beat the pants off your competitors who quit at those hard stages. See? So so it's all good there. And this applies to I mean, sports. You hear it all the time. Education, your workplace and especially with what we're all about here is entrepreneurship. All right. So how do you build mental toughness. Well you first of all you have to be self-aware. You got to practice self-awareness and say, how am I feeling when this problem has arose or has arisen in my business or in my life or whatever it is, all right if I got sick, if I got injured, you know how I have to look at.

[00:08:14] I have to kind of jump out of my body and look back and say, okay, how am I feeling about this? And what could I do to feel better or differently about it? That's going to help me rather than just keep me down? And I'm not saying any of this is easy, folks. I mean, I got lucky because I had I mean, if you ever saw a video version of this podcast, you see this this sign behind me with a baby crawling over pillows from the time I was could crawl, my dad would put obstacles in front of me to teach me how to, um, and then put my toys on the other side to teach me how to overcome obstacles. So I'm unstoppable. So taking advice from me on this, on how to improve it, uh, take it with a grain of salt. I had it from a young child. I got lucky, damn lucky. All right. But that's no excuse for you to quit or not to pay attention to this and how important it could be in your life. But anyway, self-awareness. And then you got to reframe any challenges. So yeah, bad things happen all the time. Almost every day in a business, something is wrong, doesn't work. Computer trouble, internet trouble, weather customers not paying. I mean all kinds of things. So what you have to do is attempt to reframe them into solutions.

[00:09:40] What can I do? Because the internet is down. What do I can I get a backup solution? I'm going to research that on my phone to get a backup solution. Can I get another computer? If I have a computer as a backup, can I get a mac and a PC so that whatever happens, I've got different operating systems I can work on? Customer isn't paying well, how far did I let it go? Do I have I taken my profits and made a reserve fund so that if somebody doesn't pay. I'm not paycheck to paycheck in my own darn business. I've got reserve and I can absorb any real bad instances like that. So reframe the challenge as to what you can do about it, and some of the things you need to do ahead of time to be ready for these challenges, there's no doubt. I mean, anybody with half a brain can see that there's things happen. And so if you ignore them until they happen, then they're a massive crisis putting fires out like crazy. And of course, that's happens sometimes, but it's your fault in many cases if you haven't prepared for things to go bad. You see, I got two perfectly good computers. Internet connection if I had to. If an internet was down, I can back up with my cell phone as a hotspot and keep my business going. Say so I can predict all that.

[00:11:13] That, you know, there's this hurricane that that's coming up. It missed us. But, uh, it's always potential for high winds. Even with even without rain, high winds will take down power lines. So electricity goes out. Well, I prepared I have three generators here. I mean, you don't need to be that fanatic, but, you know, I got a massive estate here, and we have the retreat center, and I can't, you know, have no electricity and lose all our food and no air conditioning for our guests and everything for a long period of time. Even though the generators won't power air conditioning that much. But we got fans all over the place. See, it's all this stuff that, from my experience, has happened over the years, so I prepare for it. And then the other thing is, another thing that you can do to build mental toughness is focus on your mission. You have a big mission in life bigger than just, you know, making money to pay the bills this week. So mine is to help small business people. I'm going to, you know, most of the people that know me or heard of me or worked with me know that I am a crazy fanatic about it. All right. I've taken calls at midnight to help an emergency situation with a student of mine. I mean, you know, Sundays, weekends, evenings, I mean holidays. See? So focus on your mission.

[00:12:35] And if you have that mission in mind, then the the little stuff doesn't bother you as much. It kind of reminds me of, uh, I read an article or somewhere in a book or something about how candy stripers, older candy stripers at hospitals. They're the people that volunteer to help run the gift shop, and things like that have way less medical woes. And they went on to say that, hey, when people have some other mission, in other words, help in that hospital and those people that are sick and their families. That mission is bigger than In their own woes, and so they don't have as many medical problems. At least they don't report them as. Their mission is to support that hospital and the families that have to go there. So focus on your mission and you'll be mentally tough automatically, because you won't be worrying about your own little problems and then learn from the past. See, you got to realize that the degree of toughness that you have right now, whatever degree that is, came from troubles that you had in the past that you overcame in some fashion. You might have had to get help. You might have done it yourself. You might have got lucky. Who knows? But you overcame them and got where you are now. So if you can project that into the future, the troubles you're having now are making you tough for the future, for bigger successes in the future and less troubles because you're tougher and tougher and tougher.

[00:14:20] Say a lot of troubles that I have. Guess what? I don't even notice them because I'm mentally tough. See, I don't. Not that I look for or want more of them. Okay, I'm not saying that, but I am saying that if you're a parent, you should cause trouble for your kids. Listen to me here. And. And this is the guy that's doesn't have any kids. You know, I did this success podcast and was ragging on parents because they make it too easy on their kids, and, and I didn't get a lot of backlash because I'm acting as a reporter, not as I can't imagine how tough it is because I've never actually done it to be a parent. All right. It's amazingly tough, but I'm a reporter that sees the fruits of your labor or your wife's labor Uh, the, uh, the the kids that come out, I don't want to hire them. And this actually came out on the radio about big companies. There was a big thing about a couple of weeks ago that the companies just do not want to hire. Gen Z, I think it was. They don't want them because they tried. And then six months later they fired them all. And so they don't want to waste all their resources hiring these kids that have been made entitled mostly by their parents.

[00:15:46] So if you're a parent, make the kid work fast food, make the kid work in some kind of service business and appreciate things, and then they'll be way better off and mentally tough when you turn them loose or when they fly the coop, say. So there you go. Remember that the stress from the past is make is making you what you are today. The easy things didn't do much of anything for you, right? But the ones that were tough helped make you whatever degree of mental toughness you have today. Okay, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. If you want to get in my school, I'll make you mentally tough. And I'll make you an internet marketing person that's got an income because it's a highly in-demand skill and it doesn't take long to learn. If you have good teaching, you know somebody that's actually done it. Not these people that make can't make their car payment trying to teach you how to get rich on the internet so they forget that that's that's BS. All right. So check them all out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. And pass this one on to to people that you think it would benefit. Mental toughness is going to help you in all phases of your life. And you can improve it from wherever you are. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.