Mental toughness, your TLB… and desire traps

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TLB is your Twitchy Little Bastard score. Mental toughness, AND high TLB is the difference between a reactive, undisciplined, five year old who cannot see past the next five minutes, and a person (whatever age) who can actually see and act conscious of the consequences of their action or inaction.

Tai Lopez calls these according to names of the Greek philosophies that reigned around the time of Seneca the Elder: the Stoics, and the Epicurians.

If you gobble up a cheese burger, you are an Epicurian who can’t see where eating that toxic stuff will leads you… fat, poor, sick, and wanting more.

If money burns a hole in your pocket… you are probably living the Epicurian lifestyle. You can’t stand not having your phone with you, ditto.

You dream of instant success, instant weight loss, instant love… you are an Epicurian… and a TLB 1.

Stoics savor the lasting, the constant, the unchanging, the eternal. Epicurians gobble up the moment to moment, the exciting, the titillating, the ‘it gives you chills’ type of stuff.

I have a post on Pinterest, 31 quotes that give you chills… It gets all these titillation seekers on my site… I wish I could have them not come…

This Hungarian burlesque song pops up in my head about the lady, Fanny Schneider, who doesn’t want love, doesn’t want anything of substance, instead wants a gigolo to titillate her… Untranslatable.

Life, Organized Life (rhyming with Organized Crime!) hijacks your attention, hijacks your energies and make you an Epicurian. An Epicurian will never do well. Will never even have a fulfilling moment. Who has time for that?!!! It’s gobble-gobble-gobble. Going nowhere really fast.

The Stoic philosophy is the one my teaching is aligned with, because Life, the Nature of Reality and Stoicism are of the same vein.

Now, Mental Toughness.

I have been watching this guy, Steve Siebold, get rich coaching mental toughness, and now training wannabe weight loss consultants to teach mental toughness.

You can’t really teach mental toughness: you can only get there through re-valuating all your life, your priorities, your life philosophy.

Mental toughness is a construct. In fact there is no such a thing. There is only process.

Life, when you look at it with sober eyes, is a series of opportunities.

• And each of these moments is an opportunity to choose whether you are going to look at all of life, or only the next moment.
• Whether you are going to look at the big picture, or the tiny picture.
• Whether you are going to consider other people, your partner, your family, your client, your coach, your business, your country, humanity, or only what you want to feel the next moment.

That is how Life is… moment to moment to moment.

Now, mind, imagination, whether it is done with words or with pictures, is different. It jumps. It jumps into whatever it jumps to: no process.

The saying: it is too late to dig a well when you are thirsty… is of no relevance to the jumper… they never intended to dig a well… instead they imagined a bottle of beer, chilled to perfection. Who needs water!

Two men walk in the desert. They are both thirsty. One imagines a cold pint… and lies down… and dies. The other continues walking.

When you use your imagining tools to jump, you cut the blood supply to process, to doing, to actually accomplishing anything. You can enjoy the thing, in your imagination to your heart’s desire.

Except you have to live in your imagination

…because in reality you don’t only not have the thing, you cannot have the thing. Because now the process feels like a betrayal, like trudging through life, like a chain gang life sentence.

I am working with some clients on removing the Desire Trap… but it is like yeast infection: you can’t get rid of it. The least amount of imagining you add (sugar in the case of yeast infection) and the disease flares up.

I am pondering if it is even possible. I am trying to remember what it is that I did that I stopped falling into the desire trap.

One thing is my ability to conjure up castles in the sky are limited. And they don’t excite me either.

I, somehow, fell in love with process… although with some of the processes I still need disregard my distaste, discomfort, disgust to begin the process.

But I can. I can include the bad feelings, and once I start the process, they fall away.

One thing that always triggers these feelings is having to muscletest for a client.

Why? I don’t even ask. I just know it is coming as surely as morning follows night. And it will go away, or at least become bearable after I start.

Maybe it’s the intimacy that my body rebels against… Connecting to you is too intimate for me. I used to say: I only want to do business with people who I at least would enjoy having a brief lunch with. Lunch. But connecting to you is like having sex… even though you don’t know about it… lol…

Ridiculous, isn’t it? But who is to argue with the body. The body knows, and this is what I do for a living. Connect to you. Whether I like you or not…

One other thing: It would be an intelligent question to ask… yet no one has asked it, even though many people have claimed to have read the Feelings book by Margoczi… The intelligent question would be:

would it be enough to read Margoczi’s book, and then I could live a life worth living?

Margoczi’s book is a breakthrough in seeing the inside workings of a human from the point of view of the actions. It is brilliant. As brilliant as all the discoveries about the brain, the heart, the organs, the blood all put together.

All psychology amounts to is guessing… which in the domain of body would be the same as saying: the brain is in the heart… as they KNEW in the times of Aristotle… and yes, I read it myself!

But… knowing the biology of the body doesn’t keep anyone healthy… and knowing the inner motivators, levers and dials of human action won’t make you successful either.

But reading the psychology, real or pop won’t help you either…

You need to know how things work if you want yourself to work and to become a human being, and to live a life worth living.

Bad news, I know. But somebody had to deliver it… Might as well it be me. lol

OK, and here is one more thing: I used to have a desire trap created by fiction books. Books that described life as it could be, or books that had characters I’d love to live with… So for years I wasn’t strong enough to read fiction.

The problem of reality is that it’s pale in comparison to the stories. Netflix series, TV series are a real danger… you need to moderate your reading and binging if you want to stay out of this trap.

I didn’t say anything about the gaming trap, gaming as in computer game. Game as in games people play. That one is a big trap… and a lot of people hate life because life doesn’t give them the same level of pleasure and excitement.

And here is the Hungarian song about titillation… lol

Any time you look to see what end result you want, you just set yourself up for the desire trap to start germinating in you.

This is why I am against the mind movies, the vision boards, or goal setting.

They all use this disease, Desire Trap, to make money for their originators.

When someone buys a $500-$1000 dollar course, mostly what they buy is to see what they aren’t going to do to attain their desired outcome. There is something sickly satisfying to know that you didn’t have to do it… But you know, as the Jewish saying goes, the morning comes and you wake up with your hand in the potty…

With a handful of that…

And just so you know, The ITCH is also a desire trap…

What is your ITCH?

Author: Sophie Benshitta Maven

True empath, award winning architect, magazine publisher, transformational and spiritual coach and teacher, self declared Avatar View all posts by Sophie Benshitta Maven