A good mate of mine has this great analogy: whenever things are going a little sideways, we simply treat it as a training day. By training day, he simply means that pear-shaped days present us with an opportunity to sharpen our tools and do the work.

So, what do we do when the current narrative of the culture out there isn’t helping or supporting our inner world? How do we respond, when we look out into the world, and we hear a lot of shouting and experience a lot of agitation and those experiences draw more energy than we have available in that moment?

I wonder if someone will ever build a CrossFit gym for the brain, the type where you turn up and build strength and conditioning for the mind. The type where you intentionally practice and expose yourself to complex or challenging tasks

You can’t lie to yourself, or your body and mind. You can’t trick yourself into feeling something that you are simply not ready to feel. The moment you give yourself the complete permission to simply be where you are, a really interesting thing starts to happen.

I am not exactly 100% clear on the science that supports the practice of cold exposure therapy, but I do know one thing. If we can learn to lean in and stay calm under pressure, we are teaching our brains to build resilience.

‘Building resilience’ has become a buzz phrase over the past few years. The topic has attracted a range of thought leaders, psychologists, and scientists, each with their own unique approach and methods addressing what it takes to build mental toughness. It is a topic that I am incredibly passionate about. I have witnessed many people (myself included) battle the peaks and troughs of what life throws at us from one moment to the next. One particularly vivid time for me was when I was coming into senior school exams.

The central idea behind what I call the ‘Teflon Mind’ is the notion that thoughts and the emotions they create do not stick—they come and go.

After being exposed to a lot of start-ups and established businesses, I started to notice that pretty much every founder was making a ton of mistakes along the way before they got it right. They would literally have to repeat their pitch or story countless times before they got it right. They would flub their lines in meetings and get defensive when challenged by a potential client or investor.

So I started to ask myself a series of questions…