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While we do not have to start working with the mind day one, everything starts with the mind. While exercise is the best thing we know of for depression and long-term mental health you have to decide to go to the gym. You cannot work out without choosing too first. Building mental fortitude or strength comes from the same place building physical strength comes from, consistent practice and work. Just like you have to make the muscle uncomfortable to grow, you must make the mind uncomfortable as well. Doing hard things, things you dont want to do, doing those things while uncomfortable physically grows your ability to do other hard things. The more comfortable you get with being physically uncomfortable the more you can tolerate and thus the stronger your will or your mind gets. Which leads to the saying “its mind over matter, if you dont mind it doesnt matter.”

The first place we start is with going over how to set goals in a way that leads to the highest possible success in achieving those goals. Very often people are told to set goals but given no instruction on how best to set a goal, or even what qualifies as a goal. There are multiple variations of setting goals, but the process can be streamlined, and protocols are taught to greatly enhance your ability to hit those goals. Just systematizing how you set and work through a goal is often enough of a tool for people to make significant change. Since the goal of this process is to grow as a person learning how to set and work through a goal process is extremely helpful. Once goals are properly set all you have to do is have the mental fortitude, or strength, to walk the path you have set in front of yourself.
The best way to grow your mental strength is with small steps that grow larger over time. Taking control over your environment, and thus your life, little by little until you can choose to do anything you want. This is what Dr. Jordan Peterson is talking about when he says clean your room, or others talk about when they say make your bed everyday. Taking control over small actions allows us to start small and add onto that small growing strength as it comes.
One of Dr. Chalmers favorite places to start is with the practice of gratitude's. This is done in 5-minute increments twice a day, morning and night. You have to come up with 2 things you are truly grateful for both morning and night, and these cannot repeat for 48 hours. The goal is to come up with as many things as you can, not just recycle the same thoughts over and over. This practice takes a bit of commitment from a time perspective, but you also must think about what youre grateful for and why. This gives you a new twice daily task to do that has to be scheduled and maintained but cannot be done without active mental engagement.
While you are working on consistency, scheduling, and forcing yourself to do something you normally do not do you are also changing the focus of your thoughts. When you make an effort to think about the things you have that make you happy you often realize you have enough. As your focus shifts to how the things in your life make you happy people often times feel more fulfilled and recognize that life is a lot better than they thought it was. With proper guidance you can start to apply this to more aspects of your life. You can use this to give praise to yourself for doing the things that you need to do and you become your own cheerleader. As you start to recognize that the effort youre putting in is taking you where you want to go, you start seeing the ROI for your efforts, those efforts become easier to do. This can create cycles where you can build a new life by acknowledging what you are doing is good and beneficial to your goals.

Of course this is one of many tools we have to start working on our minds. The use of techniques like Neuro-Lingustic Programing or NLP offers a large assortment of tools to further help you take control of your environment. These tools can help you with understanding and communicating with yourself, as well as others. It can show you how you best learn and integrate information, if you are a visual or auditory style learner. NLP can help give you the tools to better manage and understand your emotions, and the emotions of others. Tools like NLP do help people with emotional and mental issues, however, it is important to understand that it is not a substitute for psychotherapy and should not be confused with counseling. NLP can be a fantastic adjunct to talk therapy, however, it will never replace it and should not be considered for the same use.

Which brings us to psychotherapy or talk therapy. A good therapist will not intentionally give you an answer to a problem but help you better understand how to work through the issue yourself. Again, the more often you work at something the better you get at it. Every human being needs to find someone to help them organize their thoughts and their mind. Psychotherapy is not for people with weak minds, it is for people committed to building their mental and emotional states up. It is often associated with psychological trauma because most people are not educated on how to deal with a psychological problem. Then when something psychologically traumatic happens they then have to go seek out how to deal with their mind. It would be a much better idea to start training your mind now for the hardships that life will inevitably hand us. The idea that if you consistently do level 4-5 hard things you can better handle the level 6 hard things life throws at you. If you allow yourself the easy life path and do level 2-3 hard things when life throws that 6 at you it can crush you.

At the end of the day you get to choose the person you become. If you take the time to sit down and design out who you want that person to be you can create a path to becoming anything you want to be. The concept of self-creation or self-recreation is not only real, it is around you every day. This pillar is designed to help you choose who that person is going to be, why you choose those attributes and to help you to achieve those goals.