Mentally Tough Me

By Justin Bower

The world's best have one thing in common.

From Wimbledon to the boardroom, the stage to the stadium, the world's best have one thing in common, they have learned to plan, prepare, and execute successfully. These elite performers know that winning is no accident.

Former professional tennis player and serial entrepreneur Justin Bower

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647731557

Book preview

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Mentally Tough Me

Justin Bower

Trilogy Christian Publishers

TUSTIN, CA

Trilogy Christian Publishers

A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

2442 Michelle Drive

Tustin, CA 92780

Copyright © 2020 by Justin Bower

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information, address Trilogy Christian Publishing

Rights Department, 2442 Michelle Drive, Tustin, Ca 92780.

Trilogy Christian Publishing/ TBN and colophon are trademarks of Trinity Broadcasting Network.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Trilogy Christian Publishing.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Trilogy Disclaimer: The views and content expressed in this book are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views and doctrine of Trilogy Christian Publishing or the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-64773-154-0

e-ISBN 978-1-64773-155-7 (ebook)

Contents

Dedication v

Introduction vii

The Nine Core Internals 1

Core 1: Your Overall State 9

Core 2: Action Internals 16

Core 3: Your Ego/Self Satisfaction Internals 24

Core 4: Thick Skin Internals 33

Core 5: Wisdom Internals 39

Core 6: People Internals 44

Core 7: Performer Internals 48

Core 8: Businessman/Professionalism

Internals 54

Core 9: Positive Coping 58

Goal Setting 71

Self-Awareness 91

Habits 103

The Process 131

The Roadblocks 149

Motivation 175

Discipline 201

Learning 213

The Dark Hour 227

Breakthrough 233

Failure 243

Turning the Lense Toward Humanity 259

Final Thoughts 269

For my family.

You taught me that no matter how crazy the dream is, life is better lived chasing what inspires you. I am eternally thankful for all the support and the unwavering belief that you can make yourself into exactly what you want to be.

For my tennis coach Leone Van der Linde.

Your skill, drive, wisdom and work ethic was the hand that put a vice-like grip on my dream, and pulled it from a world of maybe into the world or reality.

For my wife Alexandra.

You are the most talented and creative person I know. I love watching how you interpret the world into an explosion of color, creativity, and positivity.

For my babies Victor and Olympia.

I wrote this book especially for you. I think I speak for all parents when I say that nothing would give me greater pleasure than watching you spread your wings and fly. It is my dream that you will live a life that is both challenging and rewarding, but in the end allows you to fully express your values, your creativity, and ultimately yourself.

Introduction

Seven games all. Fifth set. Final round of qualifying at Wimbledon. Ever since I can remember, I have dreamed of this moment, dreamed of playing at the most prestigious tennis tournament.

It’s been a long journey at times. It’s been an improbable journey at times. Finally, it has been a miraculous journey.

Just two years before this moment, age eighteen, I got some bad news. It came in the form of a fairly nonchalant sentence. I had been having some knee pain and had been trying to sort it out with the Association of Tennis Professionals doctors, but I was not getting better. In fact, I was getting worse. A lot worse. Then, a loud Pop! changing direction left me feeling like I had glass shards hanging in my knee.

Mr. Bower, I don’t want to leave you without options, but we are going to need to take approximately one-third of your patella tendon out.

The patella is the big thick tendon right under your knee cap.

Okay cool. Let’s do this. How long is the recovery time?

Well. Here is the thing. We are going to cut out one-third of what is probably the most important tendon for human movement, with the exception of maybe the Achilles. This is going to leave you with one strand on the left side and one strand on the right side. And nothing in the middle.

Okay, Let’s roll this bad boy out! I am excited. The pain has been driving me nuts, and I can’t wait to get back on track!"

Mr. Bower. I guess what I am trying to say in a delicate way is this. If your body could not stand up to the rigors of being a professional athlete with all the body parts intact, once we partially remove the patella tendon, the risks will be just too great, and if you re-injure the area after this, then your next problem is not going to be about professional tennis, it’s going to be about walking. We do not believe you will be playing professional tennis again.

It’s seven all. Fifth set, final round of qualifying at Wimbledon. I am on the verge of realizing a dream I have had since I was four years old. It is two years after that diagnosis and surgery. I am a walking miracle at this point. I know that my chances of reaching really great heights are diminished, but here I am. In contention to play in the greatest tournament of them all.

What has happened in the past and what might happen in the future fades to black, as if time is being compressed by a divine piston, distilled to just this moment. Right here. Right now. I try to run around the second serve and hit my forehand, my weapon. My legs are jelly, I am tired, I am so nervous it’s hard to breathe. I hit the ball on the frame and it ends up somewhere in orbit next to the Hubble space telescope. Not good.

By some intervention of the gods of tennis, I get another break-point. I think the same thing—try to find the weapon—the forehand. Go for it. I am pretty sure that second attempt ended up as one of the first man-made objects to enter interstellar space, alongside NASA’s Voyager I. Attempt two. Chance to reach a dream. Gone.

A double fault sets up my third break point. I know I have to do something about myself. I am so nervous, so anxious, so tight and so stressed, that it is impossible to approach this opportunity with any degree of rational planning. Fly by the seat of your pants, reactive, hope it kinda-just-works-out has never been a successful planning tool for anyone, and I don’t want to have to remember my greatest tennis opportunity as one where I went tennis-blind, overcome by every emotion in the dictionary, my mind astral planning while my poor body was left to do the work, unaided.

I look over at the ball kid. Can I have that ball? I take the ball and roll it along the ground. The ball kid starts chasing it. I tell them no, let me get it. I need to get it. As I start walking to get the ball, I have about twenty seconds to have a conversation with myself. Twenty seconds to sort myself out. To solve a tangled web of emotional wires, malfunctioning to a spectacular degree. Inside my head looks like all the little scientists in their white lab coats running around panicked as the nuclear reactor enters meltdown, Defcon One! Defcon One!

I ask myself what I want: I want to play a point that’s reasonable and gives me a chance to win.

Based on how tired and nervous we both are, maybe just blocking the return back and making him play will create an opportunity. Okay, let’s do that.

The minute I formulated a plan, my mind shifted away from the panic state and focused on the plan instead. It was a much better feeling.

I blocked the return. He missed. I served out the match. I had just qualified for the greatest tournament in the world.

Wimbledon Baby!

I remember walking up Henman Hill the next morning. Those giant bronze gates. They seem foreboding. Like a bouncer at a nightclub and you mumbling something about being in town for two days and it would be really special if he let you in for a few minutes. The bouncer simply smiles and says, You are not on the list, sir.

A row of people four deep and a mile long trying to get in. I look down and felt my player’s badge. I showed it to the gatekeeper, and those huge bronze barriers simply gave way. I was in! (To be fair, I am relatively confident that I should be credited for inventing the selfie that day, and we won’t mention the official reprimand from the All England Club: Please don’t hang on the statue of Rod Laver, Sir.)

This book is designed as a step-by-step guide to exploring your potential. It’s designed as an opportunity to start dreaming again, and a chance to go after some of your bigger ambitions.

We all have the potential to achieve something incredible. We all have the power to make those things that are important to us come into reality. What we need to know is the how.

Mental toughness is your ultimate weapon. It will be there for you in your darkest times, and it will provide you with the energy and resources to keep going.

This book is dedicated to helping people build themselves from the inside out. It is designed to be a tool for introspection, discover strengths and weaknesses, formulate action plans, and start building forward momentum. It is about reimagining your values and tethering your ship to positivity and to growth. It is about self-mastery.

It is about your life as a work of art and you the artist digging in, getting inspired, and drawing on experiences to create a masterpiece. It is about redefining success and chasing improvement in all areas of your life.

It is about realizing that the world wants you at your best and it wants to see your unique perspective and brilliant ideas.

What can we do to make the idea of being mentally tough sexy? You know, Steve Jobs style. Steve Jobs not only saved Apple from the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, he launched the Think Different advertising campaign which gave birth to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Jobs made sizzling, drool-worthy products that worked beautifully. My vision is for you to reengineer your strategies, reimagine your future, remake your belief structures, and reignite your passion.

Personally, I don’t want to have to go to Dubai to see the most beautiful and modern buildings on earth. I want to see them here in America. You can’t tell me we shouldn’t have solved solar power by now. You can’t tell me we shouldn’t have solved hydroponic farming in the poor areas of the world. You can’t tell me we shouldn’t be nearing the end of oil usage and moving towards more abundant and less damaging fuel sources. You can’t tell me that 40 percent of the world should still be living in poverty! We have to get on that! The world has a million unanswered questions, and it’s up to us to find answers.

Perhaps, everything can be summed up by an old favorite poem:

Oh me! Oh life! Of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless,

of cities filled with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself,

(for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean,

of the struggle ever renewed,

Of the poor results of all,

of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest,

with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—

What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on,

and you may contribute a verse.

O Me! O Life!, Walt Whitman

Well Walt, I reckon it is time to add a verse.

The Nine Core Internals

Gun Powder.

Coca-Cola.

Cement.

Penicillin.

Wallpaper cleaner.

Recipes. Ingredients. Combinations and ratios.

Game Changers.

This is going to take a little explaining, isn’t it?

Allow me to elaborate. Way back in the day, people used to heat their homes predominantly by burning coal or wood in the fireplace. Way back in that same day, people used all kinds of fantastic derivatives of brown, yellow, and green kaleidoscope patterns to decorate their walls, in the form of wallpaper. Two problems sprung up. Burning things left a sooty residue all over the wallpaper, and paper by its very nature, could not be cleaned by water. Which leads us to the star of our little story, Kutol. Kutol was a company that made a white, doughy, wallpaper cleaner that was perfectly up to the task.

With the introduction of oil and gas fireplaces, the soot problem began to disappear, and with it, Kutol’s future and profits. Enter Kay Zufall. While searching for some cheap materials for the kids to play with for Christmas decorations, she stumbled upon a Martha Stewart-type article suggesting wallpaper cleaner was the perfect go-to for a cheap toy that kids could play with.

Knowing that her brother in law’s company was knee-deep in the red, she bought a sizeable amount of their product to see if it the article was right. The kids loved it and played for hours.

Joe McVicker (CEO of soon-to-be obsolete Kutol) agreed to take the soap out and add some coloring to his brand-new, kid-friendly product, and proposed naming it Kutol’s Rainbow Modeling Compound.

After a couple of slaps, some sarcasm, and a serious questioning of his branding acumen, Kay told Joe that this name simply wouldn’t do. She set about coming up with a better one, and the now legendary Play-Doh was born.

From wallpaper cleaner to children’s toy. Ingredients. Recipes. Removing one ingredient and adding another. Unlocking a purpose no one could have seen or imagined.

That’s what this chapter is all about.

We are all built from a similar emotional tool kit. We all have access to similar ingredients. Blending, adding, removing, and tinkering with how we put these ingredients together is our great puzzle, our great work of art, and the pathway to opening doors to expression of our talents that we don’t even know exist yet.

Of course, just like Kutol, we often plod along doing what we know how to do and blending the ingredients in the same way for years, only mixing up the recipe when we are absolutely forced to.

Had it not been for the pending bankruptcy, who knows if Play-Doh would ever have existed.

For however many things have a plurality of parts and are not merely a complete aggregate, but instead some kind of a whole beyond its parts.

—Aristotle

Did you know there is only a 1 percent difference in the chromosome between an ape and a man? That 1 percent sure counts for a lot. What if just a couple of small changes in your own decision making, habits and choices could unlock a 1 percent difference that made that same kind of difference for you as it did for that ape?

If you plan to get something meaningful out of your lifetime, you are going to need to direct yourself and your energy towards the ideas you want to manifest into reality. You will want to actively seek self-mastery, and you will want to update yourself consistently as you evolve and grow.

Your tools of trade here in this lifetime are this remarkably complex piece of biological machinery called the human body and an emotional center that can, when properly trained and directed, tame some of the most extravagant ideas in the universe.

There is now ample evidence that success and the internal characteristics that facilitate success are not innate characteristics. Enough people have pulled themselves up out of the gutter and risen to conquer overwhelming odds for us to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that internal