Last Sunday, Liberty University Field Hockey’s current vintage was fortunate to meet and hear from the program’s founding head coach, Jodi Murphy.

Murphy, a gifted public speaker, shared a tale of resilience that stood out to me.

She and Liberty wanted her to become the first field hockey coach at the university, but there was the small matter of a field needing to be built to get the sport going.

Murphy bided her time coaching elsewhere, languishing in uncertainty, wondering if the call to get started would ever come.

The way she tells it, October 29, 2010, was D-day in her mind.

Everyone close to her told her to move on, that it might never happen, and to wait around for it was insanity.

If Liberty wasn’t ready to start by then, eight months after she had agreed to do the job, she had decided she would walk away from the opportunity.

The call came on October 28.

2011 was the program’s first season in existence.

Remarkably, just two years later, Liberty won its first conference championship, defeating top 10-ranked Stanford to win the NORPAC.

It might never have happened, but for Murphy’s unwavering faith, and a strong mindset to stay the course when all around her suggested otherwise.

Murphy’s Liberty teams punched far above their weight, thanks in no small part to the head coach’s mindset and how she passed those themes of resilience on to her players.

Mindset can truly be everyone’s competitive advantage, in sport and life.

But only if we let it.

Most athletes spend nowhere near the amount of time training their mindset that they should.

And because of that, it is a massive competitive advantage right now to do so, while so few people are doing it.

Here are three concepts you can use to start training your mindset today:

1 - Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.

The average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day.

How often do we take the “easy” option, the path of least resistance?

Fast food instead of healthy food.

Doomscrolling on the couch instead of going for a walk.

Skipping the last few workout reps because nobody will know but you.

If we only make ‘easy’ decisions, our life gets harder.

We will generally be less healthy and less happy. And probably more full of self-loathing in the aftermath of those decisions, or possibly even denial. I’m not sure which is worse.

By contrast, if we choose the ‘hard’ decisions more often, our lives get easier.

Not only are you likelier to be fitter and healthier, but proving to yourself you can regularly do hard things has many mindset benefits.

In your sporting environment, start making a few hard decisions where you might normally make easy ones, for example:

• Verbally support a team-mate after a mistake, instead of ignoring them

• Jog to and from each rep/exercise instead of walking

• Give an opinion in group discussions instead of staying quiet

Building a habit of making the harder decisions in practice will build the mental toughness to help you be likelier to do so when things get difficult in games, and be less fearful of failure.

For the sake of balance in life, not every decision needs to be hard.

But discovering which ones move the needle for you and your goals will help hugely.

2 - Growth AND fixed mindsets

You’ve likely heard of the differences between fixed and growth mindsets:

As is the case above, they are usually presented as opposites, but for athletes, these two mindsets can be more both/and than either/or.

Athletes need a strong growth mindset to retain confidence - acknowledging that failures are opportunities to grow, and that challenge is good for them - as they strive to reach their goals.

But a dash of fixed mindset qualities can help instill belief and motivation.

For example, taking failure personally can be ruinous if you dwell on it without taking action, but it often provides fuel for some of the greatest athletes’ fire.

Basketball superstar Michael Jordan is known for this famous quote about failure:

But as anyone who watched The Last Dance knows, it’s not like he accepted failure lying down.

It burned deep inside him, and made him an obsessive, difficult, and stubborn team-mate.

But when added to his rock-solid belief in his ability and talent - another fixed mindset trait - this ultimately helped him propel his Chicago Bulls sides to NBA titles.

In summary: you mostly want a growth mindset, but a little fixed mindset will help more than it hurts if used in the right way.

3 - Make your easy days easy and your hard days hard

We’ve all gone too hard after something and felt like crap afterward.

We’ve all slacked off when we shouldn’t have and regretted it later.

It’s a tricky balance in life, and certainly one for athletes - knowing when to push through and when to pull back.

For years, the old-school “winners don’t quit and quitters never win” mentality reigned in sporting orthodoxy, followed by an overcorrection towards “everyone gets a trophy”.

As with most things, the optimum solution has more nuance.

“Make your easy days easy and your hard days hard” will be familiar to anyone who has trained for distance running.

It refers to the need not to train at or near max capacity all the time, because of the likelihood of it leading to injury or burnout.

Even the world’s best runners do most of their weekly miles at an easy or conversational pace.

But when it comes time to do the interval or tempo workouts, they go hard.

Pushing through a tough workout, acclimating your body not to quit under stress, is an investment in your future self.

But so is rest, recovery and self-care.

Just ask Steve Magness, whose book Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong And The Surprising Science Behind Real Toughness completely changed the way I think about this:

Again, it’s both/and, not either/or.

Mindsets are easy to talk about, but difficult to train on your own.

That’s why I created The Resilient Athlete: Mental Conditioning Exercises For Teenage Players, which includes practical ways to maximize the six inches between their ears, so you can allow your talent and athleticism to shine unhindered.

If you liked this newsletter, I promise you’ll love it!

Beginning with five quick lessons for $15, this collection will continue to grow over the coming months and years - and the price will rise accordingly.

But once you purchase it, you will get lifetime access to all past, present, and future lessons, without having to pay an extra cent.