Self Realized, Shatter Your Limits

Don't Give Up On Yourself: How to Build Mental Toughness & Resilience

• Linton Bergsen • Episode 102

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Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt like you just wanted to pull the covers over your head and give up? That feeling of surrender to life's difficulties affects us all, but how you respond to it makes all the difference in your life. Ready to discover how to access your inner strength when life feels overwhelming? Listen now to transform your approach to life's challenges and unlock the power that's always been within you.

Mental toughness isn't what most people think. It's not about gritting your teeth and powering through by sheer force of will. In this profound exploration of inner resilience, join me, Linton Bergsen, as I reveal the counterintuitive truth that real mental toughness often begins with surrender—not to defeat, but to something greater working within you.

This episode takes a fascinating dive into how your nervous system affects your ability to persevere. When faced with challenges, you have two potential responses: feed your sympathetic nervous system (creating anxiety, fear, and worry) or engage your parasympathetic nervous system (promoting calm, clarity, and intuitive solutions). The choice between these two paths represents the foundation of mental toughness.

What makes this approach revolutionary is the understanding that solutions to your most pressing problems often come not from frantic problem-solving, but from slowing down, breathing deeply, and creating space for intuitive guidance. Through concrete examples and practical advice, I demonstrate how this shift in perspective can transform your response to everything from relationship breakups to health concerns.

The most powerful message resonates beyond mere motivation: you have unlimited resources within yourself to overcome any challenge. By developing the resilience to resist negative self-talk and the wisdom to trust your inner guidance, you open doors to possibilities you might never have imagined. Mental toughness becomes a daily practice of mindfulness—a conscious choice to invest in yourself rather than giving up when things get difficult.

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Linton Bergsen:

We lcome to the Self-Realized Podcast with Linton Bergsen, where you will shatter your limits. I am not much into the self-help industry as much as I'm into the self-realized individual, which is you, what matters most to you, how you get there and the obstacles that may be in your way. If you would like to be part of this podcast and part of that discussion, I welcome you here with an open heart, open mind and open arms. So, without further ado, let's get on with the podcast. Welcome to episode number 102 of the Self-Realized Shatter Your Limits Podcast.

Linton Bergsen:

Don't Give Up On Yourself: How to Build Mental Toughness and R esilience. Life sometimes can be difficult. It's difficult at times to keep going, to get up, motivated and wanting to continue on. Ask yourself this question have you ever just felt like turning over in bed in the morning when you wake up? Pull the covers back over your head and stay exactly where you are. I know I have. I know that is something we all experience. One of the questions that we would have to ask ourselves is this how do we build mental toughness and resilience? How do we not give up on ourselves when we feel that is exactly what we would like to do? Answering that question is going to give you some keys to opening the doors to manifesting what you want on an ongoing basis, when the going gets tough. As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and the only way that you can do that is to build up mental toughness and resilience to external circumstances. It is something that is required as a tool for you to have on an ongoing basis for your everyday existence. One of the mantras that you may want to have and keep in your mind is I am not going to give up on myself, now or ever, because your life literally depends on it.

Linton Bergsen:

The reason this episode is named Don't Give Up On Yourself: How to Build Mental Toughness and Resilience is because the first and the most important thought that you need to have as a self-realized individual moving forward in this life, especially when adversity hits, is never, never give up on yourself. It doesn't matter what anyone says about you, your past or what difficult situations may be presenting themselves to you now. Because it's easier, obviously, to keep going when everything is going well, when you want to give up, when you don't want to continue on. It's when things are particularly tough. Maybe you are going through, or have gone through the breakup of a relationship, you've lost a job, you have financial situations, a health concern has presented itself to you. These are the times in all of our lives that we feel we want to give up on ourselves and moving forward.

Linton Bergsen:

Don't give up on yourself, because the only person that can keep you going is you. It is fine to have friends, it is fine to have motivating people around you. Ultimately, it is your inner voice, and it is you that is going to be the major force that is going to ignite the spark within you to keep that fire burning no matter what. So how do you build mental toughness? How do you keep that fire going? How do you keep moving forward when everything in you says I want to stop. I just want to scream, I want to give up, I want to let go, I am done here. We've been there, I've been there, you've been there, everybody has been there.

Linton Bergsen:

But there is a key. There's a key to unlock the door within yourself of unlimited internal energy that allows you to find the answers that you're looking for, for any situation that you may find yourself in, and that energy is ignited and is built by the inner conviction and I mean conviction, I don't mean a light, maybe I can, perhaps I will, no an inner conviction that you always have within you everything that you will ever need to overcome anything that is presented to you. It is the faith within yourself and the faith within the energy that is working within you as a self-realized individual that you are going to call upon to take you through the difficult times in your life and create momentum and motivation to sustain you. The way you do that is not relying necessarily on your own human energy. There is a place that resides within us all resides within you that, if you access it, defies any explanation as to how it works, but it does work. Let me explain that to you.

Linton Bergsen:

You may be at a time right now where you don't have an answer to anything that is going on in your life, so you may feel like giving up on yourself. That is not the answer, or mental toughness. That is not how you build resilience to situations that are going to continue to occur in your life that you can do nothing about. Today's episode is called Don't Give Up On Yourself: How to Build Mental Toughness and Resilience. The how-to is what you want to know, so I'm going to give you some pointers right now on how I have maintained mental toughness and resilience and how it has worked in my life and how it can work for you.

Linton Bergsen:

When I have reached points in my life that I don't have an answer to anything and I'm beginning to have these negative thoughts that we all have as a situation or situations evolve that are not working out for us in the way we would like and we really don't feel that we have the ability to cope. So we may turn, unfortunately, to different methods of coping, which can be another spiral down in our life which we really don't want, to go down, roads of dependency or roads of negativity that don't lead to any real solutions, because what you and I really want is a solution to what is going on now, a positive, impactful solution that will positively impact our lives, ongoing how we can begin to feel better now about situations that we may want to give up on, now this sounds counterintuitive, but I'm going to give you a solution. Stop trying so hard to find the answer to your situation, your problem, your current adversity, whatever you may be going through, that's making you feel that you want to give up on yourself. Begin to let go, begin to relax, begin to stop looking for the answers to your situation yourself, relying totally on your own human thinking and abilities to resolve anything. Relax and let go.

Linton Bergsen:

Allow forces bigger than you to come in and guide you. This sounds counterintuitive, but it is, in fact, the key to building mental toughness and resilience, allowing yourself to have faith in what will come as you move yourself out the way. That is tough. That is a tough mental attitude to take because it removes you out of the way and allows something that is working within you. Call it God, call it spirit, call it consciousness, call it cosmic consciousness. However you would like to term what is working within you. Call whatever is working in you to guide you in the right direction.

Linton Bergsen:

Now contemplate on that for a moment. Would you agree that that is mental toughness at its highest understanding? That you have decided to mentally allow yourself to give up control of the current situation and allow that which created you through faith and surrender, calmness and some solitude and stillness to reveal to you the pathway that you need to go down. And I will suggest to you that, if you do this, the pathway that is revealed to you and the solution that is given to you is much better and more profound than you could have ever come up with yourself. Once you allow this to begin to occur and you remain mentally tough to stay there, your solutions will begin to arrive. Not the way that you expect them, not the way that you may even like them, not even the way that you may want to will them, so to speak, into manifestation, but the way you allow them to manifest because of your own surrender, faith in yourself and faith in something bigger than you to work through and in you to bring about the solutions that you want. That is mental toughness, because your mind is going to fight that. Your mental mind is going to want to revert to oh, my goodness, what am I going to do? I have to do this. I have to do that.

Linton Bergsen:

Anxiety, depression, fear, because when you feel you don't have an answer, all you can come up with within yourself is anxiety, fear and depression, which leads into that downward spiral of you believing that you are the source and have to come up with everything for the solution that you are seeking. It is not possible for you mentally to come up with everything that you would need to to solve what it is that you need to get an answer to. There has to be a commitment to something bigger than yourself, on an intuitive level, that will allow you to have an answer that you don't have right now, in a calm, collected, quiet way, which, again, is not really what we are designed to do. Part of the answer to today's episode how to build mental toughness means that you are going to have to rework what it is that you have been told, how you need to solve things, or how you have had habits and behaviors in the past to solve problems and issues that you find yourself in now. My suggestion is you would have to go from wanting to maintain control and perpetuating, as I've mentioned before, that cycle of fear, anxiety and worry. It is human nature to go down that road when we are left to our own devices. Or just become mentally tough in a new way of thinking. Use more of our spiritual nature and open the door to building your life in a new pathway that you can then begin to build as a tool, which is surrender, faith, calm, quiet, which are very important and necessary for you to cultivate so you can have the receptivity to the inner guidance and answers that will come to you if you allow them. So this is the back and forth, isn't it? This is the mental toughness that I am suggesting that you begin to use today. Which one are you going to choose? The anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty, the what if all those mental self-talk, negative conversations that you can have? Or are you going to decide which I strongly suggest just to get quiet for a moment, take a walk, sit down, control your breath, slow down.

Linton Bergsen:

Your central nervous system cannot take the amount of abuse that you or I or anybody wants to continually give it, bombarded with the stress and the noise that we put onto it. And when we do continually, there's a term for that, called a nervous breakdown. Your central nervous system has two responses, essentially fight or flight, which is a sympathetic response, or the parasympathetic response, which is more relaxing. Your breath is slower and so is your heart rate. When you think about how you're going to respond in life and you work on your mental toughness, you can simply decide am I going to feed my sympathetic nervous system or am I going to feed my parasympathetic nervous system? Sympathetic, fight or flight, anxiety, fear, worry, parasympathetic relax, meditate, breathe. This is how you begin to develop mental toughness and how you don't give up on yourself. You begin to consciously be aware of which part of your central nervous system you want to constantly feed.

Linton Bergsen:

You cannot get information that is useful to you and intuitive information if you are constantly in the sympathetic, fight or flight, fear and worry mindset, because your mind is going to drive your central nervous system. If you calm your mind with the right type of thoughts and you build mental toughness on an ongoing basis to do so, then you go into the parasympathetic nervous system, which allows you to be in a more calm, meditative state, slowing your heart rate, and you do make better decisions and come up with better solutions when you are in that state, not only do you come up with better decisions and better suggestions as how you move forward, there is a deep spiritual component to this. In the parasympathetic mode, you're also allowing a greater spiritual awareness to occur within you, to communicate with you. That's why, in meditation, you wouldn't be in a sympathetic state in your nervous system. You'd be more in a slow down, parasympathetic state.

Linton Bergsen:

Your mental toughness is going to drive those two states of being. Your thoughts, the minute you have them are going to drive that fork in the road. You can decide this. Oh my goodness, what am I going to do? My life is falling apart. I don't want to get out of bed. This is terrible. Just think of the pace. Just think of how that pace of thought, that pace of inner dialogue, is already amping up your central nervous system and your breathing. Or you could do this. I'm going to slow my speech down in my mind and think at this rate, with these words, this self-talk. You know, I don't have the answers right now, but I'm going to take some time to take a walk. Let things be, slow my heart rate down and allow my mind to be still and my central nervous system to relax. That is mental toughness.

Linton Bergsen:

You are consciously choosing to take a different mental approach to the situation. You are seeking out a place within yourself that is more beneficial to your well-being, your health, and solutions that you're trying to seek at points where you may want to give up on yourself. Giving up on yourself is not an option. It's just desperation. It's anxiety, fear and worry taking over your mind. When you begin to slow things down, you won't want to give up on yourself. You will begin to feel so much better and there will be a spiritual intervention, so to speak, an intuitive intervention, a surrender, a feeling within you that simply says this to you on a mental level, without explanation.

Linton Bergsen:

If you persist with doing this, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I do know that something is going to turn up, it's going to work out for me. Now, why would you say this to yourself? Let me suggest to you why. Because you can feel it. You can feel it. You don't know why you feel something's coming up, something is going to work out for you. I know we've all had those unexplainable feelings, but it will come up and you'll walk and you'll talk and you'll present yourself differently from this place of centered calmness, as opposed to hyper fear and worry. And therefore, when you present yourself differently, the universe responds differently and things begin to appear for you. They cannot appear for you in an intuitive sense or manifest into reality as an unforeseen offer, or someone coming up to you and saying have you ever thought about this? Or I have this going on. Maybe you want to be a part of it, or a health problem that you have, that someone had before, and you met someone and they can help you with. There's a myriad of things that happen when you are in a calmer state.

Linton Bergsen:

So how do you not give up on yourself? That is the title of today's episode. Simply choose to be in a calmer state of mind. You will feel physically, mentally and emotionally better, and it will allow you to receive answers from so many different parts of yourself that there is no other way that you can. Answers, inwardly and outwardly, for you to act upon, from forces that you may not entirely understand. That is how intuition works, giving you answers that are not always logical. That is mental toughness, because your old habits and this world, the way it is set up, will want you to remain in a sympathetic state.

Linton Bergsen:

Me, me, me, I, I, I. I have to come up with, I have to get crazy, I have to get myself in a worried, fearful state in order for me to find solutions. That is not true. You can only create more detriment to yourself by living in that space. The truth, the real mental toughness, the real decision within you is this. Surrender, calm, faith, develop that, or worry, fear and anxiety. Develop that sympathetic, parasympathetic. Your body is designed to act upon whatever you decide to feed it mentally.

Linton Bergsen:

Now, of course, there is a part of resilience that comes up in this, which I've mentioned in today's title Don't Give Up on Yourself: How to Build Mental Toughness and Resilience. You have to build resilience in anything you do, because when you first start, what happens is, is that it is too hard sometimes and you want to give up. Now I talk about in episode number 96, how to discover the power of resilience in more detail. If you would like to listen to that episode. What resilience basically is is this when you feel that you want to give up, you resist it. You have the resilience to say I'm going to keep moving forward. You keep going. You resist the temptation. You resist that voice within your head that says this is too hard, I don't want to do this anymore. That is what resilience is.

Linton Bergsen:

Anybody who has done anything has mastered resilience. When they reach a point that they can break through and get to victory, it's because they're at that point where they are resilient enough and have a combination of mental toughness and resilience to push forward. Look at an athlete, for example. When an athlete is at that point of breaking through, match point. Whatever is going on, we can all relate at that moment of truth. You see them going to a state mental toughness it's concentration. Everything has come to this point of. Can I push through at this point and get my mental toughness in place where it needs to be and resist the negative self-talk that might come up at this moment and say, oh, match point, I am going to fail, I can't do this. No, because they've taught themselves to be mentally tough and resist negative talk coming in at the most important moments of their life and their performance, and that is what you can do and are going to do . You are going to have mental toughness by choosing to remain calm, going to faith and surrender and work with the parasympathetic part of your nervous system. You're going to have enough resilience within yourself to keep moving forward, even when the going gets tough, and you start on this new pathway of not giving up on yourself, building mental toughness and being resilient enough to keep going.

Linton Bergsen:

One of the things about resilience is this when you start to try something new, which this could be for you in different areas of your mind, not allowing yourself to get into that fear and anxiety and be more calm. As I've mentioned, you're going to have to resist the old behavior. That's it in a nutshell. So when you listen to this episode and you think about giving up on yourself, just remember this you have a choice. Either the way you're set up as a human being, you can get into the sympathetic nervous system fear, worry and anxiety or the parasympathetic nervous system, which is surrender, faith, letting go, watch your breathing, walk in nature, remain calm, surrender, work with faith and intuition to help you come up with solutions and have the resilience and resistance to stay in that place so you can get the results that you want and you can begin to make this type of thinking a behavior change, a mental behavior change, a mental toughness that you are now beginning to develop, so you can use it, ongoing every day in your life, to shape your life in any way that you would like.

Linton Bergsen:

When you contemplate mental toughness and resilience, it is an everyday, practical application that you are consciously using, whether you recognize it as such or not. For example, if you decided you wanted to go on a diet, there is a mental toughness that goes along with that. There's a choice between what you choose to eat and what you choose not to, if you want to go to the gym or you don't go to the gym. That mental toughness is going to determine the results that you receive. Your resilience to fight off any negative thoughts and distractions that may come up. People want you to do certain things, go certain places, perhaps even get you off your diet and exercise regimen. You have to resist that. You have to be resilient.

Linton Bergsen:

Mental toughness is a fabric of your everyday life and if you use the example of the diet that I'm giving you now, are you going to choose to give up on yourself and go back to your old way of eating, your old way of thinking. Maybe I'll just have this one piece of pizza or will you continue to invest in yourself, not give up on yourself and say no to that piece of pizza? Go the extra mile in the gym, because if you do, you will understand that your life is dependent on you never giving up on yourself, building that mental toughness and being resilient in everything you do. It's simply a way of life. It's simply the way you choose to live your life, because giving up on yourself means you're giving up on your goals. Not being mentally tough means you don't have the ability to choose your own self-talk and what it is that you're telling yourself you're capable of. And not being resilient means that with every distraction that comes up, you are going to fall prey to it.

Linton Bergsen:

So, looking at the title of today's episode Don't Give Up On Yourself: How to Build Mental Toughness and Resilience really means to you by investing in yourself and the state of your mind, which is really mindfulness. Mental toughness is truthfully mindfulness. Being mindful about how you feel and think about yourself, and then going forward with conviction and resilience to achieve whatever it is that you set out to accomplish in your life is a cornerstone, a very important foundation for you to own and have for you to have a successful life. Go forward with strength, go forward with resilience. Never give up on yourself. Never give up on your dreams, because the only person ultimately, that can bring anything about is you. And when you understand that, you have to ask yourself this question. Why would you ever give up on you? Never get to the point where you feel defeated. Always understand that you have unlimited resources within yourself that you can access and use to manifest into reality any dream, any goal that you wish to accomplish in your life. Through the power of mental toughness and resilience. Anything and everything is available to you because you, ultimately, are your own major resource. Understand that and the key to every door is open to you. To walk through and live the life that you truly want and deserve.

Linton Bergsen:

I sincerely appreciate you listening to the podcast. Please subscribe so you do not miss any upcoming episodes. Whatever platform you're on, please leave a rating and review. I would greatly appreciate it. Any additional information on me, Linton Bergsen and my five-star reviewed book, Purposeful Vision, is available at selfrealized. com, which is all one word. You can also leave any comments or suggestions on the website. I look forward to connecting with you very soon and take good care of yourself.