Amy Morin
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if anything good came out of COVID, I think it's that a lot more people are talking about mental health and people are more willing to reach out. So I hear from a lot of people who say, I resisted therapy for a long time, or I tried to pretend like I was okay for so many years, but now I'm feeling much more open to saying, yeah, I could use some help too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's okay to be sad. It's okay to grieve. It's okay to be in a dark place. But what's not healthy is when we stay stuck there. We have some control over our emotions, over our behavior, over the things we think about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Because when we feel sorry for ourselves, when life throws us those awful curveballs and it feels like everything's awful, if you sit around and think about how horrible it is and how you're helpless and hopeless, you won't do anything to change it. And then you become a victim and you start to treat yourself like, I can't change anything, so why bother? And then we stay stuck.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I would see a lot of people who would go through something in life and they just felt like life had wronged them. And because of that, they were deserving of either something good to suddenly come their way or they were hopeless that anything good was ever gonna come their way, but they didn't try. They'd kind of given up on life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and the ability to make life good for themselves or for somebody else, and they really felt like they didn't have any contribution. And because of that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I wake up every day saying, there's nothing I can do to make my life better, and I truly believe that, I guarantee life won't get any better.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Oh, so one is gratitude. Our brains are so hardwired to always look for the negative. But if you purposely say, I'm just going to come up with three things I'm grateful for today, you can start to train your brain to look on the bright side. We know that gratitude is associated with everything from better health to better sleep quality to better relationships.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
People who practice gratitude live longer. The list goes on and on. But it's simple, it's easy, and it doesn't cost you any money if you just wrote in a gratitude journal before you go to bed. Write down three things. Start to look for the more positive things in life that can go a long way. And another really easy strategy is to just ask yourself, what would I say to my friend right now?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're so much kinder to other people than we are ourselves. We beat ourselves up for mistakes or we put ourselves down for something that happened five years ago. We think I'm not good enough. But if you said, you know, what would I say to my friend right now? You probably have some really kind words for your friend.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if you just practice giving yourself those same kind words, self-compassion is key to helping you feel and do better.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, certainly the words that we use when we say something like, oh, so-and-so ruined my day today, or my neighbor makes me feel bad about myself, or my boss makes me work late, we're implying that other people are in control of our lives. Truth is, you're in control of how you think, how you feel, and how you behave.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And of course, if your boss says you have to work late, you might choose to do it, mostly to avoid the consequence of not getting in trouble at work, but it's a choice. And when we just change our language and say, you know, this is a choice and I'm in control of how I feel. Even if somebody was rude to me today, they didn't necessarily ruin my day unless I let them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And when we switch our language, it just empowers us to say, I have control over so many things in my life. I can't control everything, but I can at least control myself, my thoughts, my feelings, and my behavior. And when we take back that power, somehow that just really helps us to say, and I want to live to reach my greatest potential.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I want to go out there and do these things and really gives us, I think, the power to go out there and start to create some positive change.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It is. And it might be those simple little things that we say in a meeting, like, excuse me, please, would you mind if I... said something or I hate to interrupt, but when we apologize way too much, those little things certainly send a signal about how I expect you to treat me. If I don't act like what I'm saying has any value, I guarantee nobody else is going to either.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So often when something is changing, we think about all the bad things that could happen. And it might be something small. You're changing your software program. We think, oh, it's going to be too hard. We underestimate ourselves. We overestimate how challenging it's going to be. So just step back for a minute and think, what are the chances this might work out better than I'm imagining?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And just arguing the opposite when you're predicting horrible things, just argue the opposite that something amazing might happen. And your brain will kind of say that, all right, even though there is a one in a hundred chance things will go poorly, maybe there's also a chance things will go well and it can help you give a more balanced perspective. so that you don't just believe the negative.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Otherwise, we convince ourselves, this is 100% true that this thing is going to happen. So you just want to expand your mind to say, or maybe something amazing will happen too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yes, just opening our minds to that idea of maybe it will go well. And here's some evidence that perhaps it's going to turn out better than I would expect. It's like if somebody said, there's a one in a hundred chance you're going to get a deadly disease, you might think, oh, I'm going to be that one in a hundred.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But if somebody said to you, there's a one in a hundred chance you're going to win a million dollars, we're much more likely to think, well, that won't happen to me. So just recognizing that we tend to underestimate ourselves and our chances of Our emotions get mixed in there. When we're nervous about something, we are convinced it's gonna happen to us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When it's something exciting, we can be easily convinced it's not gonna happen to us. So we wanna mix some of the emotional reactions in with some logic sometimes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There's a misconception that venting is good for us. People tend to think, if I don't get all of this out, then I'm going to blow up like a pressure cooker. And we know you don't definitely want to suppress your feelings. It's okay to feel them. You don't want to pretend I'm not sad, but at the same time, you don't have to entertain whatever it is that's annoying you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The more that you talk about those things that annoy you, the more real estate you're giving them in your life. So if we took the example of a traffic jam, talking about it, complaining about it, spending a lot of time thinking about how this shouldn't be happening to me, means I give that way more power in my life than I need to.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But it also reinforces that idea that if I go home and I complain about this, then somehow I'm getting all of that out. So I'm not bottling it up. You're much more better to walk in the door and talk about the best thing that happened to you today to improve your mood and help you feel better rather than just dwelling on the negative. Yet again, our brains are hardwired to go for the negative.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I knew I wanted to go in the health field and do something, but originally I thought I was going to be a doctor. And it was my first day of college. We had to dissect cats. And everybody in the room was super excited to dissect a cat except for me. And I realized maybe it's not actually the medical part that I'm excited about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So it's easy to just think about, yeah, the one bad thing that happened today and overlook the nine good things that happened. So you have to go after the good sometimes and say, all right, so there was a traffic jam, but I don't have to dwell on it. And another strategy is to just practice acceptance. So much suffering in life comes because we think this shouldn't be happening.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So if you're in a traffic jam and you think, oh, this isn't fair. Somebody up there got in an accident or some people are going too slow and they're in my way. The more that you keep thinking all of those thoughts, the worse you feel. On the flip side, if you just reminded yourself there are millions of cars on the road every day, traffic jams are bound to happen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And how am I going to spend my time while I'm stuck in traffic? Maybe you listen to a podcast. Maybe you listen to music, talk on the phone to somebody that you enjoy talking to. There's so many options about how you respond to those obstacles in life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm not dying. And that's the thing I think about difficulties in life. Sometimes it does help us put things in a different perspective. I used to be terrified of public speaking. Well, then I gave the eulogy at my husband's funeral. Suddenly, I didn't mind public speaking anymore. It was really not a big deal.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think when we go through those difficult things in life, when we're experiencing difficult times, it helps us put those little tiny things into a completely different perspective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
A lot of people will say, well, you shouldn't be anxious. And I I think the reason anxiety gets so much bad rap is because we talk about anxiety disorders and then there's anxiety, but they're not the same thing. We don't really talk about other disorders the same way. A clinical diagnosis of depression is different than feeling sad, but the language is the same for anxiety.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Most of us have faulty alarm systems. You're supposed to have anxiety. Anxiety alerts you to danger. Back in the day, if a hungry lion were chasing you in the woods, you'd want your anxiety to kick in so that you would spring into action. In today's world, we don't really face those exact same life or death situations. So we have a lot of false alarms.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Anxiety goes off when you get an email from somebody that you don't want to read or your anxiety goes off because you're thinking about that thing you have to do later today. Might just be going to the grocery store that's going to be crowded. Those aren't life or death things, even public speaking. It's not going to kill you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I wanted to help people, but perhaps being a physician was not my thing. So I called my sister. who was a psychology major. And I said, quick, I need a new major. I think psychology, what do you think? And she said, go into social work, because at least then you get a degree in social work where you get a license, a bachelor's in psychology is kind of broad.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But because we feel anxious, we tend to think, I shouldn't do that, or it's really risky, or we start to dread it. So sometimes one of the best things we can do is to just take a step back and say, what am I feeling right now? Maybe your palms are sweaty, your stomach feels kind of sick. Those are some of your anxiety alarm bells. But then you ask yourself, is this a real alarm or a false alarm?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Again, your anxiety should be kicking in sometimes. You wouldn't look both ways before you cross the street if you didn't have any anxiety. But it's important to recognize those times when your anxiety is a false alarm. Maybe you have to speak in front of five people today and you hate public speaking. That's a false alarm. You'll live through it. You'll be okay.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Or maybe you're anxious about meeting somebody new next week and you're thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What if they don't like me? It's okay, you'll live through it. And just recognizing is this a false alarm or a true alarm can help put things again into that different perspective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So if we're talking about a true alarm, so if somebody says, gosh, I have this incredible anxiety about, and maybe it's something like my grandmother just had a health test and we don't know what the results are. Your anxiety is up because you're thinking it might be life or death for her.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you're going to stop and ask yourself, is this a problem I need to solve or do I need to solve how I feel about the problem? You can't fix a loved one's health issue, but maybe there's something you could do, like you bring her her favorite meal or you take her to her appointment. So like what action can you take to manage that problem that you can't solve?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And sometimes it's our anxiety about something that's telling us, don't do that. If you have a gut feeling and a lot of anxiety about someone, a certain circumstance, you might say, actually, I'm not going to go do that because perhaps it's not safe.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But when you know it's just a false alarm, all right, I'm giving a speech on Friday in front of 10 of my peers and I have a lot of anxiety, then it's like, I'm still going to give the speech. So how do I cope with the feeling of anxiety? Maybe I'm going to read a book. Maybe I need to practice the speech more.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Maybe I'm going to just go for a walk and channel my energy into something that's more productive. But again, it comes down to, I think, knowing the answer to that question. Is this a problem I need to solve or do I need to solve how I feel about this problem that I'm facing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Ooh, that's a great question because you're right. Our memories are strange. All of our emotional memories get stored into different parts of our brain. And so when we look back, yeah, we sometimes romanticize a relationship with an ex. Maybe it wasn't that good. Or we think about our childhoods and maybe we only remember the three bad things that happened.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I switched my major on day two of college. But I always thought maybe I'll switch it to something else down the road, but absolutely fell in love with it, decided to get my master's and knew at that point that I really wanted to become a therapist.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I've worked with siblings before who have completely different versions of events when it comes to their childhoods. And it's not that they're lying. It's just the events that stand out to one person don't really stand out to the other. So it's important to think about that in terms of what am I remembering? Is this factual? What's the rest of the story? What's a different way to look at this?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And even if we're talking about something traumatic, there's several versions of the same story. You might say, gosh, I had a really rough childhood. And that's why I now am a really hard worker and why I put all my effort into it. you know Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, I am so grateful that I became a therapist not knowing what was going to happen next. But early on in my career, in the first year of being a therapist, my mom passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. She had a brain aneurysm. And it was really this first huge loss in my life where I thought, how am I going to deal with this?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I had all the skills and tools I'd learned in college, but now to put them into practice and figure out how do you go through grief was a completely different experience. And then on the three year anniversary, it was three years to the day that my mom died, my 26 year old husband died, and he had a heart attack. I didn't even know you could have a heart attack at 26.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It was nothing I would have ever imagined in a million years, but it felt like such an extra cruel thing that it happened on the anniversary of my mom's death. So I wake up and I'm a widow and I don't have my mom. And I thought, ooh, how do you get through this one? And I'm supposed to be a therapist who goes to work every day and helps other people with their problems. But
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Swam with sharks one year. So we always look for something to say, let's honor his life and make it the best that we can. And even though he's not here, let's work on saying, how do we want to remember him moving forward? And friends and family and lots of people have joined us some years and gone on these adventures with us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's really turned into a day that we look forward to rather than one we would dread. If we hadn't have done that, I think it would be one of those days on the calendar where you just kind of wished it wasn't there or we'd be really sad and thinking it's too bad that we aren't here to honor his birthday. So we decided let's go ahead and honor it anyway.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. And I've had people who've read my book and then said, you know, the anniversary of my divorce was always a really tough day. So I decided here's how I'm going to take it back. Or whenever there's a difficult day on the calendar, plan ahead. How do I want to spend this?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it might be about honoring what happened in the past without feeling like you're stuck there saying, you know, what do I want this year to look like when that date comes around? Or how do I want to honor something that maybe no longer serves me, but I'm changed. I'm different. How am I going to make this different moving forward?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I wasn't even sure I could do it, but I felt like I also didn't have too much of an option. I wanted to keep my house. I didn't want to move. I thought the last thing I want to do is to have to give up everything else. So I had to go back to work pretty quickly.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Social comparisons are incredibly detrimental, but it's so hard not to do, especially in the age of social media. Everybody looks like they're happy and healthy and wealthy and super successful when you scroll through social media. So it's important to remember that you're not in competition with anybody else.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
In fact, there's research that will show if you just look at other people as an opinion holder as opposed to your competitor, it changes everything in terms of your psychological well-being. If I look at other people and I think, oh, that person's so much smarter than I am, or they have so much more amazing things going on in their life than I do, then I feel bad.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's like I'm creating a hierarchy in my brain of who's better. But if I just look at this person and I think, oh, I could learn from them. What strategies are they using to grow their business? How might I learn from that? They're different from me. It's not that they're better or worse than I am. They're just different. And it's so important to do that because then it doesn't harm us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It helps us. And so, so many of us spend so much time on social media and scrolling through and just looking at other people's lives. That alone could make a huge difference in how it affects our mental health. And just knowing that I can create my own definition of success. And then I don't care if you're working toward your definition of success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It doesn't feel threatening to me if I'm working toward my definition of success. And it goes back to that abundance mindset and knowing that just because you're working on your goals, that doesn't take away from me reaching my goals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I was grateful I was able to take a couple months off from work, but spent years trying to figure out like which way is up and which way is down. When you lose somebody and you're only 26, it wasn't just that I missed my husband, but I missed the entire life that we had planned together. And I thought all of these things we were going to do that I can't do now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Absolutely. I love James Altucher, but I also love that idea because so often we want to hoard our good ideas as if people are going to steal them or we think, I don't want anybody to know what I'm out there doing. And we run into things like imposter syndrome where people think, oh, other people assume I'm better than I am. I'm not doing good enough.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think that's where that teaching thing comes in. When you can mentor somebody else, it really reminds you how far you've come, how much you've learned and that you have learned. accumulated a lot of knowledge and skills and tools that are easy to forget. Over time, we think, no, I've always known this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But then when you have somebody asking you questions, it reminds you, oh yeah, there was a time in my life where I didn't know that either. And for a lot of people, that really helps them to feel a lot better when they start to reach down and mentor people who are struggling and saying, you're new at this. I have some stuff. And to be open and willing to share those things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think there's a big notion that what you put into the world, you get back out. And so I run into a lot of people who will think, well, if I work really hard, then I deserve success. We know in the business world, plenty of people have worked incredibly hard. And for one reason or another, it doesn't work out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And there are people on the other side of the planet who are outworking us all day, every day. If life were fair and we were given the amount of money that we earn, I stare at a computer most of the day. I'm not carrying jugs of water 17 miles for my family. It wouldn't even out. So I don't think it's fair of ourselves to then say, well, I work really hard, so I deserve success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Or sometimes people will say to me, like, it's so amazing all these great things happen to you because you deserved it because you went through something hard. No, and it doesn't even out, trust me, but there are plenty of people who've gone through incredibly tough things and they didn't have something amazing happen. Life isn't fair.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that's really tough to come to that conclusion of, yeah, life isn't fair. But on the other side of that, I think it helps us to know, like, I don't have to keep score. I could be nice to somebody and karma doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to be super nice to me tomorrow, but that's okay. And I'm okay with it. For some people, that's really tough.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we talk about this in therapy often, people's expectations. And I ran into this problem where a lot of people had these vision boards where they would post a photo of something and they just really expected it to happen if they sat on the couch and waited for the universe to gift it to them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We had been foster parents and had all of these huge plans. And I thought, now what? It took years to sort that out. Which plans am I still going to follow through with? What do I want to abandon and give up? I decided to become a single foster parent for many years. And then I was fortunate. I found love again. And I thought, whew, like the second chapter in life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it might be somebody who said, you know, I have a Lamborghini on my vision board and I don't know how I'm going to get it, but someday it's going to happen. And they really weren't going to put in the work to make any of it happen, but they thought that they deserved it because they were a good person. So I think it's important to recognize that we all have times where we feel like,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
oh, you know, I'm kind of special. I'm kind of deserving. For honest, we have those moments. But to recognize that, again, just because you're nice to somebody doesn't mean something great is going to happen to you tomorrow. Or if you go through something bad, it doesn't guarantee something great's going to happen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think the more that we come to those conclusions and the more that we accept, yep, bad things do happen. Sometimes good things happen to people that we don't think deserve it too. And that's life and figuring out how do I cope with the emotions that get stirred up when those things happen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It boils down to just recognizing what can I control today? I can control how much good I put out into the universe. And even if it doesn't come back to me tenfold, I can wake up tomorrow and do it again. And when we just recognize that I have the power to impact somebody's day, it might be smiling at the cashier at the store or complimenting a stranger on their shoes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But those little things can certainly put out tons of positive vibes, but I don't need to do those things just because I then think I'm going to win the lottery next week because I was a good person today. So I think just recognizing every day, what do I have control over? How do I want to be in the world today? No matter what kind of curveballs life throws me, what are my core values?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Who I want to be? We can also just choose to say, I'm going to act like the person I want to become. If I want to be a mentally strong person, I'm going to act like a mentally strong person today. If I want to be a kind and confident person, I can choose to act like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Even if I don't feel like it, I might be grumpy because I woke up on the wrong side of the bed or because something else happened yesterday that I wasn't thrilled about, but I still have choices every day. When we start to recognize that, that I have choices, I think it also frees us up to recognize that, all right, no matter how many bad things happen to me, I have choices in that too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There are so many benefits of solitude. Solitude gets a bad rap. People tend to think it's about being lonely. And they think, oh, you know, I just, I don't want to be lonely. But it's so important to be by ourselves sometimes. It's really how you get to know yourself. It's how you get to figure out decisions in life and who you are and to get to know your emotions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We know that even kids who can play by themselves have fewer behavior problems. They have better psychological well-being in life. Today, though, you don't really have to spend any time alone. Even when you are alone, you can always be listening to podcasts. Clearly, I'm not against listening to podcasts, but there are times when you need to say, I'm not going to have any noise in my ears.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But almost as soon as I got married, my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I just remember thinking, like, this isn't fair. I already lost the closest people to me. I don't want to lose somebody else. But it wasn't like I had a choice. And he passed away, too. So I had a solid decade that just felt like it was one loss after the next. I had lost a former foster child as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
For a lot of people, the only time that they really spend any time alone is when they go to sleep at night. And we find that so many people are listening to podcasts even to fall asleep because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts. So sometimes it's just about letting yourself be alone with your thoughts because how else do you plan your life?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
How else do you reflect on things and think, what did I do today that was a great job? What do I want to do better tomorrow? Where am I growing in life? What do I want my life to look like? We spend so much time planning little things or planning a vacation or planning our wedding, but we don't plan for the long haul. How do you want your life to be different?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's really tough to do that because when you're around other people, they influence your decisions from what you're going to eat to where you're going to go to how you're going to spend your time. And it's really the alone time that helps us better figure out who we are and what we want to be like in this world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's all about a balance because there are people who say, you know, on the weekends, I don't leave the house. I come home and I just read books and I stay at home. We all need that balance. We're social creatures. And we know from the research that social media is not giving us what we need when it comes to connecting with people. We need to be face to face and in person.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
as much as we can and it becomes the default though sometimes I think especially since COVID that people say you know I'm just more comfortable staying home but it's so important for us to have connections and not just superficial connections because the cure for loneliness isn't to just be around people it's to really connect with people that means being vulnerable finding people that you can talk to being able to ask somebody questions or somebody that you can ask for help or
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Who would you call if you have a problem at two in the morning? A lot of people would say, I don't have anybody I could call or anybody I'd feel comfortable calling when I have a crisis. We need that in our lives.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then it becomes much easier to then appreciate alone time because it becomes that balance of saying, I do have time alone with my thoughts, but I also have plenty of human connections who can help me balance things out and help me feel good too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You know, I think I'm an ambivert. I say I fall. I think a lot of people fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I think that's me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I just remember just thinking, what next? I spent a long time in a pretty dark place.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
For anybody who's not comfortable, then you figure out, like, what are the workarounds? So if you don't want to put your face on a video, you might have an animated video. You might come up with an article that you feel comfortable writing about, but you're not going to speak about. So always start small and you take small steps.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if something feels, this is so far out of my comfort zone, you might decide, all right, I'm going to back up. Something a lot of people do is they take a giant leap first. And we know that that can backfire.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So if you're terrified of public speaking, don't try to get up on a stage and give a TEDx talk for your very first speech ever, because it might feel like it's so overwhelming that you then never want to give another speech. You might start by giving a talk to just four people or Maybe you start with yourself in the mirror and then you invite one friend and you say, can you listen to this for me?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So those really small steps are important. And then again, figuring out what kind of accommodations do you want to make? You might never launch a podcast or you might never decide that you're going to put your face on social media all the time. But what are you comfortable with? And experimenting with that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Sometimes you figure out, well, this felt uncomfortable last year, but I've been doing it for a while and suddenly it feels like second nature. Or I've practiced this for a while so I can still take one more small step. And the therapy office will often talk about finding things that are a four on the scale of one to 10. So if one is super comfortable, 10 is terrifying.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You want to do something that's about a four. Four is tolerable. And then after you've been doing that for a little while, maybe it's making really quick Instagram reels. After a while, that doesn't feel so scary and it becomes more like a three. So then you say, well, what would now be a four? And always just keep challenging yourself just a little bit at a time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the more we do that, the more we realize that we have skills and tools that perhaps we didn't even know existed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Oh, that's a good question. And thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. I think to not be afraid to put stuff out there. I've written so many articles that never went viral and probably a lot of people didn't read, but nobody judges you on those things. They judge you on the bigger things. That's really what works. So it's okay to throw a lot of stuff out there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if nobody reads it, it's not the end of the world because nobody read it. So there's not a million people out there thinking that you wrote something terrible. 10 people read it. You only have 10 potential readers anyway.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I'd say to not be afraid and to just keep creating content in a way that feels comfortable for you, whether it's a podcast or you create articles or you're creating stuff for social media and knowing that there are tons of different ways to get your message out there. And a lot of it has to do with experimenting and figuring out what's going to work for you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Oh, that's a good question, too. It's changed over the years. I guess before it was writing articles. And now that I have a podcast, podcasting is really cool and Absolutely love to be able to churn out podcast episodes and speaking, which I never thought I would say either. I get invited to speak at corporations and conventions and speak to live audiences so I could get feedback.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Speaking into the microphone or putting books out there, I don't get to have interactive live questions, but I get that when I speak to live audiences, which is a treat.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, it was really one of the worst days of my life. It was shortly after my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. And we figured out it was terminal that I wrote myself a letter of what mentally strong people don't do. And it was a combination of things that I had learned through my own journey, things that I had learned as a therapist, and some of the things I learned in college too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I would say do something every day to challenge yourself. Just to prove to your brain that you're stronger than you think you are. It might be that you set out to do as many pushups as you can. And then you notice when your brain says, oh, you're too tired. You can't do another one. Do at least one more. You can probably do five more.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But doing that just teaches your brain that you're not going to listen to it. I run a timed mile every day. So when my brain tells me, you're too tired, you can't keep going, I actually start to run faster. Just as a way to train my brain and to recognize I'm more capable and competent than I think I am. So always tell people, just challenge yourself.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The more that you challenge yourself to do more than you think you can, it just becomes second nature. And in business, you certainly need to be able to challenge yourself and do more than you think you can sometimes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think it's knowing what my values are and then feeling confident that I can stay true to those values. Decisions in life become so much easier when you know what your core values are and what's important. So you can say no to the things that don't serve you well. What are your core values?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Friends and family and the people in my life are super important and also giving back to the community and knowing that I have some skills and talents and resources that I can freely give to people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So my website's the best place, which is amymorinlcsw.com. And on there, we have my TEDx talk and links to all six of my books on mental strength and information about my podcast, which is Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But all combined, figured out if you just don't do these certain things in life, you can get through almost anything. So wrote myself that letter. And by then I had become a freelance writer. And that became out of necessity because my husband had been the primary breadwinner.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So back in the day when I needed more money, I was freelance writing in the evenings and on the weekends again so I could keep my house. So once I had this letter to myself, I thought, ooh, this is helpful. Maybe it will help somebody else. So I published it online, got paid $15 for publishing it online. But 50 million people read the article. It was 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that just opened everything up for me. From that article, I got a book deal and the opportunity to do lots of things that I probably wouldn't have been able to do or ever thought I could do. And it turned into something amazing. And I'm so glad that I now get to share what I learned about from my own personal journey, from my work as a therapist.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I get to talk about mental strength on a completely different level than when I was in a therapy office in rural Maine back in the day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It did. It was wild. So the day that I published the article, I put it on a website called Lifehack. Their website broke. I didn't know it was because of my article. I just thought, well, that's interesting. Their website's down. And a few days after it was up, Forbes picked it up and it ended up on Forbes.com. And then 10 million people saw it on Forbes alone.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And before I knew it, the phone was ringing off the hook with MTV in Finland called and CNN in Mexico called and all these people asking me all these questions like, how did you come up with all this stuff? But nobody knew it was because I'd struggled with it. Like I was in a dark place. And so at first I didn't tell anybody.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But one of the people that read the article was a literary agent who said, you should write a book. And it really wasn't until the book came out, which was the following year, that I shared the rest of the story. And I'm glad that I did because I think it gave me more credibility when people realized, now I'm just not just saying these things because I learned about it in college.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm saying these things because I went through it and I struggled with these things. But I believe all of that just gave me such a different platform. As you said, my TEDx talk was seen by 23 million people and my books are in 40-something languages now. So I get to reach all of these different people
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I talk about a lot of the exact same things I was talking about in my therapy office, but I get to do it differently now. And it's just amazing that I had the opportunity. I wished I hadn't gone through all of that difficult stuff, but I'm grateful that we were able to turn it into something.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I feel like because of my pain, I'm able to do some things that I wouldn't have normally been able to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Exactly. And so to be able to take it and say, here's what I learned and to get emails from people on the other side of the globe who will say, you know, read your book and I found it really helpful. Nothing I would have ever dreamed possible had this not happened.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think there's a lot of truth to that because if you've struggled with it and you know, I wish this had been available, I wish I could have been able to have this opportunity then, you're going to be able to reach back and help a lot of people who are in that place you used to be. Totally.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think it's about adding something of value that doesn't already exist. So I hear a lot of people say, well, with AI now, there's no sense in even writing things because there's too much content out there or there's going to be so much out there that you just can't compete. But the truth is, your story is going to be different than everybody else's. You always have your story.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can use your life experiences to put a different spin on something that is already existing. Clearly, the topic of mental health is not new, but I was able to add to it and change it in a way that was interesting to people. I talked about what not to do rather than what to do. I talk about mental strength as opposed to just mental health. Those slight changes make a huge difference.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think for somebody who feels like, I don't know what to put out there, And know that it can be kind of controversial too, that you don't have to say things to just stay in the middle of the road because most people will say it has to evoke some kind of emotion. And you don't want to put content out there just to be provocative and try to irritate people, but it's okay to have an opinion.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And when my article first came out, there was actually another article that first landed on Psychology Today, and it was about all the things wrong with my article. And I remember thinking, I think I've just ruined my therapy career. Psychology Today is a really reputable website. And now I have this person saying that my article has problems and that perhaps I wasn't right.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But it actually led to Psychology Today reaching out to me and saying, do you want to write for us? And a good thing became of it. And yeah, definitely not everybody agreed with the things that I said. But for the people that you repel, you also attract other people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think to have that faith that not everybody's going to be your audience and that's okay, but you can still create amazing content and you'll attract the people that you're meant to attract.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So if you look at Google Trends and the back end of Google, it was Googled a few times before I said it. So I certainly wasn't the first human being to say it. But you can see that once my article came out, huge spike in traffic. And since then, it stayed up there that people use that more like an everyday phrase.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It becomes easier to understand if we talk about it in terms of physical strength and physical health. So nobody doubts the fact that you could go to the gym and you can lift weights and you can become physically strong. But on the flip side of that, it doesn't guarantee you won't ever get any physical health problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Physical strength, yeah, it's cool to be physically strong and it does prevent a lot of health problems, but it doesn't guarantee you won't still get arthritis in your knees or you might still develop high blood pressure. Mental strength and mental health is the same. Becoming mentally strong can improve your mental health. It can prevent a lot of problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But if you do develop something like anxiety or depression, it's not a sign that you're weak. And you can still keep building mental strength too. It's a complicating factor. It makes it a little more difficult perhaps, but mental strength is all about the choices you make every day. There's tons of opportunities to keep growing mentally stronger.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And no matter how strong we think we are, there's always room for improvement and life will show you that over and over again.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I just got a message yesterday from a woman who said, I lost my mom a few years ago, but it really didn't all click with me about what I was going through and how to heal from it until I read your book. And I'll hear from people who will say things like that, like they felt a lot less alone or they finally felt like they had tools.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Like I have hope that now that I know these tools exist and that these strategies are out there, I feel so much better. Or I'll also hear from people who say, you know, I think I got it wrong. I think all these years that I was pretending like nothing bothered me, I thought I was acting tough, but really, I wasn't dealing with the things that were.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So they realized that building mental strength looks different than they thought, that it's about sometimes asking for help and about being vulnerable. And about acknowledging pain and saying, oh yeah, actually, I struggle with this and I'm going to work on managing it too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if anything good came out of COVID, I think it's that a lot more people are talking about mental health and people are more willing to reach out. So I hear from a lot of people who say, I resisted therapy for a long time, or I tried to pretend like I was okay for so many years, but now I'm feeling much more open to saying, yeah, I could use some help too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's okay to be sad. It's okay to grieve. It's okay to be in a dark place. But what's not healthy is when we stay stuck there. We have some control over our emotions, over our behavior, over the things we think about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Because when we feel sorry for ourselves, when life throws us those awful curveballs and it feels like everything's awful, if you sit around and think about how horrible it is and how you're helpless and hopeless, you won't do anything to change it. And then you become a victim and you start to treat yourself like, I can't change anything, so why bother? And then we stay stuck.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I would see a lot of people who would go through something in life and they just felt like life had wronged them. And because of that, they were deserving of either something good to suddenly come their way or they were hopeless that anything good was ever gonna come their way, but they didn't try. They'd kind of given up on life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and the ability to make life good for themselves or for somebody else, and they really felt like they didn't have any contribution. And because of that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I wake up every day saying, there's nothing I can do to make my life better, and I truly believe that, I guarantee life won't get any better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Oh, so one is gratitude. Our brains are so hardwired to always look for the negative. But if you purposely say, I'm just going to come up with three things I'm grateful for today, you can start to train your brain to look on the bright side. We know that gratitude is associated with everything from better health to better sleep quality to better relationships.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
People who practice gratitude live longer. The list goes on and on. But it's simple, it's easy, and it doesn't cost you any money if you just wrote in a gratitude journal before you go to bed. Write down three things. Start to look for the more positive things in life that can go a long way. And another really easy strategy is to just ask yourself, what would I say to my friend right now?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're so much kinder to other people than we are ourselves. We beat ourselves up for mistakes or we put ourselves down for something that happened five years ago. We think I'm not good enough. But if you said, you know, what would I say to my friend right now? You probably have some really kind words for your friend.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if you just practice giving yourself those same kind words, self-compassion is key to helping you feel and do better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, certainly the words that we use when we say something like, oh, so-and-so ruined my day today, or my neighbor makes me feel bad about myself, or my boss makes me work late, we're implying that other people are in control of our lives. Truth is, you're in control of how you think, how you feel, and how you behave.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And of course, if your boss says you have to work late, you might choose to do it, mostly to avoid the consequence of not getting in trouble at work, but it's a choice. And when we just change our language and say, you know, this is a choice and I'm in control of how I feel. Even if somebody was rude to me today, they didn't necessarily ruin my day unless I let them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And when we switch our language, it just empowers us to say, I have control over so many things in my life. I can't control everything, but I can at least control myself, my thoughts, my feelings, and my behavior. And when we take back that power, somehow that just really helps us to say, and I want to live to reach my greatest potential.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I want to go out there and do these things and really gives us, I think, the power to go out there and start to create some positive change.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It is. And it might be those simple little things that we say in a meeting, like, excuse me, please, would you mind if I... said something or I hate to interrupt, but when we apologize way too much, those little things certainly send a signal about how I expect you to treat me. If I don't act like what I'm saying has any value, I guarantee nobody else is going to either.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So often when something is changing, we think about all the bad things that could happen. And it might be something small. You're changing your software program. We think, oh, it's going to be too hard. We underestimate ourselves. We overestimate how challenging it's going to be. So just step back for a minute and think, what are the chances this might work out better than I'm imagining?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And just arguing the opposite when you're predicting horrible things, just argue the opposite that something amazing might happen. And your brain will kind of say that, all right, even though there is a one in a hundred chance things will go poorly, maybe there's also a chance things will go well and it can help you give a more balanced perspective. so that you don't just believe the negative.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Otherwise, we convince ourselves, this is 100% true that this thing is going to happen. So you just want to expand your mind to say, or maybe something amazing will happen too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yes, just opening our minds to that idea of maybe it will go well. And here's some evidence that perhaps it's going to turn out better than I would expect. It's like if somebody said, there's a one in a hundred chance you're going to get a deadly disease, you might think, oh, I'm going to be that one in a hundred.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But if somebody said to you, there's a one in a hundred chance you're going to win a million dollars, we're much more likely to think, well, that won't happen to me. So just recognizing that we tend to underestimate ourselves and our chances of Our emotions get mixed in there. When we're nervous about something, we are convinced it's gonna happen to us.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When it's something exciting, we can be easily convinced it's not gonna happen to us. So we wanna mix some of the emotional reactions in with some logic sometimes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There's a misconception that venting is good for us. People tend to think, if I don't get all of this out, then I'm going to blow up like a pressure cooker. And we know you don't definitely want to suppress your feelings. It's okay to feel them. You don't want to pretend I'm not sad, but at the same time, you don't have to entertain whatever it is that's annoying you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The more that you talk about those things that annoy you, the more real estate you're giving them in your life. So if we took the example of a traffic jam, talking about it, complaining about it, spending a lot of time thinking about how this shouldn't be happening to me, means I give that way more power in my life than I need to.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But it also reinforces that idea that if I go home and I complain about this, then somehow I'm getting all of that out. So I'm not bottling it up. You're much more better to walk in the door and talk about the best thing that happened to you today to improve your mood and help you feel better rather than just dwelling on the negative. Yet again, our brains are hardwired to go for the negative.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I knew I wanted to go in the health field and do something, but originally I thought I was going to be a doctor. And it was my first day of college. We had to dissect cats. And everybody in the room was super excited to dissect a cat except for me. And I realized maybe it's not actually the medical part that I'm excited about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So it's easy to just think about, yeah, the one bad thing that happened today and overlook the nine good things that happened. So you have to go after the good sometimes and say, all right, so there was a traffic jam, but I don't have to dwell on it. And another strategy is to just practice acceptance. So much suffering in life comes because we think this shouldn't be happening.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So if you're in a traffic jam and you think, oh, this isn't fair. Somebody up there got in an accident or some people are going too slow and they're in my way. The more that you keep thinking all of those thoughts, the worse you feel. On the flip side, if you just reminded yourself there are millions of cars on the road every day, traffic jams are bound to happen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And how am I going to spend my time while I'm stuck in traffic? Maybe you listen to a podcast. Maybe you listen to music, talk on the phone to somebody that you enjoy talking to. There's so many options about how you respond to those obstacles in life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm not dying. And that's the thing I think about difficulties in life. Sometimes it does help us put things in a different perspective. I used to be terrified of public speaking. Well, then I gave the eulogy at my husband's funeral. Suddenly, I didn't mind public speaking anymore. It was really not a big deal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think when we go through those difficult things in life, when we're experiencing difficult times, it helps us put those little tiny things into a completely different perspective.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
A lot of people will say, well, you shouldn't be anxious. And I I think the reason anxiety gets so much bad rap is because we talk about anxiety disorders and then there's anxiety, but they're not the same thing. We don't really talk about other disorders the same way. A clinical diagnosis of depression is different than feeling sad, but the language is the same for anxiety.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Most of us have faulty alarm systems. You're supposed to have anxiety. Anxiety alerts you to danger. Back in the day, if a hungry lion were chasing you in the woods, you'd want your anxiety to kick in so that you would spring into action. In today's world, we don't really face those exact same life or death situations. So we have a lot of false alarms.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Anxiety goes off when you get an email from somebody that you don't want to read or your anxiety goes off because you're thinking about that thing you have to do later today. Might just be going to the grocery store that's going to be crowded. Those aren't life or death things, even public speaking. It's not going to kill you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I wanted to help people, but perhaps being a physician was not my thing. So I called my sister. who was a psychology major. And I said, quick, I need a new major. I think psychology, what do you think? And she said, go into social work, because at least then you get a degree in social work where you get a license, a bachelor's in psychology is kind of broad.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But because we feel anxious, we tend to think, I shouldn't do that, or it's really risky, or we start to dread it. So sometimes one of the best things we can do is to just take a step back and say, what am I feeling right now? Maybe your palms are sweaty, your stomach feels kind of sick. Those are some of your anxiety alarm bells. But then you ask yourself, is this a real alarm or a false alarm?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Again, your anxiety should be kicking in sometimes. You wouldn't look both ways before you cross the street if you didn't have any anxiety. But it's important to recognize those times when your anxiety is a false alarm. Maybe you have to speak in front of five people today and you hate public speaking. That's a false alarm. You'll live through it. You'll be okay.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Or maybe you're anxious about meeting somebody new next week and you're thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What if they don't like me? It's okay, you'll live through it. And just recognizing is this a false alarm or a true alarm can help put things again into that different perspective.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So if we're talking about a true alarm, so if somebody says, gosh, I have this incredible anxiety about, and maybe it's something like my grandmother just had a health test and we don't know what the results are. Your anxiety is up because you're thinking it might be life or death for her.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you're going to stop and ask yourself, is this a problem I need to solve or do I need to solve how I feel about the problem? You can't fix a loved one's health issue, but maybe there's something you could do, like you bring her her favorite meal or you take her to her appointment. So like what action can you take to manage that problem that you can't solve?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And sometimes it's our anxiety about something that's telling us, don't do that. If you have a gut feeling and a lot of anxiety about someone, a certain circumstance, you might say, actually, I'm not going to go do that because perhaps it's not safe.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But when you know it's just a false alarm, all right, I'm giving a speech on Friday in front of 10 of my peers and I have a lot of anxiety, then it's like, I'm still going to give the speech. So how do I cope with the feeling of anxiety? Maybe I'm going to read a book. Maybe I need to practice the speech more.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Maybe I'm going to just go for a walk and channel my energy into something that's more productive. But again, it comes down to, I think, knowing the answer to that question. Is this a problem I need to solve or do I need to solve how I feel about this problem that I'm facing?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Ooh, that's a great question because you're right. Our memories are strange. All of our emotional memories get stored into different parts of our brain. And so when we look back, yeah, we sometimes romanticize a relationship with an ex. Maybe it wasn't that good. Or we think about our childhoods and maybe we only remember the three bad things that happened.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I switched my major on day two of college. But I always thought maybe I'll switch it to something else down the road, but absolutely fell in love with it, decided to get my master's and knew at that point that I really wanted to become a therapist.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I've worked with siblings before who have completely different versions of events when it comes to their childhoods. And it's not that they're lying. It's just the events that stand out to one person don't really stand out to the other. So it's important to think about that in terms of what am I remembering? Is this factual? What's the rest of the story? What's a different way to look at this?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And even if we're talking about something traumatic, there's several versions of the same story. You might say, gosh, I had a really rough childhood. And that's why I now am a really hard worker and why I put all my effort into it. you know Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, I am so grateful that I became a therapist not knowing what was going to happen next. But early on in my career, in the first year of being a therapist, my mom passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. She had a brain aneurysm. And it was really this first huge loss in my life where I thought, how am I going to deal with this?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I had all the skills and tools I'd learned in college, but now to put them into practice and figure out how do you go through grief was a completely different experience. And then on the three year anniversary, it was three years to the day that my mom died, my 26 year old husband died, and he had a heart attack. I didn't even know you could have a heart attack at 26.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It was nothing I would have ever imagined in a million years, but it felt like such an extra cruel thing that it happened on the anniversary of my mom's death. So I wake up and I'm a widow and I don't have my mom. And I thought, ooh, how do you get through this one? And I'm supposed to be a therapist who goes to work every day and helps other people with their problems. But
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Swam with sharks one year. So we always look for something to say, let's honor his life and make it the best that we can. And even though he's not here, let's work on saying, how do we want to remember him moving forward? And friends and family and lots of people have joined us some years and gone on these adventures with us.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's really turned into a day that we look forward to rather than one we would dread. If we hadn't have done that, I think it would be one of those days on the calendar where you just kind of wished it wasn't there or we'd be really sad and thinking it's too bad that we aren't here to honor his birthday. So we decided let's go ahead and honor it anyway.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. And I've had people who've read my book and then said, you know, the anniversary of my divorce was always a really tough day. So I decided here's how I'm going to take it back. Or whenever there's a difficult day on the calendar, plan ahead. How do I want to spend this?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it might be about honoring what happened in the past without feeling like you're stuck there saying, you know, what do I want this year to look like when that date comes around? Or how do I want to honor something that maybe no longer serves me, but I'm changed. I'm different. How am I going to make this different moving forward?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I wasn't even sure I could do it, but I felt like I also didn't have too much of an option. I wanted to keep my house. I didn't want to move. I thought the last thing I want to do is to have to give up everything else. So I had to go back to work pretty quickly.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Social comparisons are incredibly detrimental, but it's so hard not to do, especially in the age of social media. Everybody looks like they're happy and healthy and wealthy and super successful when you scroll through social media. So it's important to remember that you're not in competition with anybody else.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
In fact, there's research that will show if you just look at other people as an opinion holder as opposed to your competitor, it changes everything in terms of your psychological well-being. If I look at other people and I think, oh, that person's so much smarter than I am, or they have so much more amazing things going on in their life than I do, then I feel bad.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's like I'm creating a hierarchy in my brain of who's better. But if I just look at this person and I think, oh, I could learn from them. What strategies are they using to grow their business? How might I learn from that? They're different from me. It's not that they're better or worse than I am. They're just different. And it's so important to do that because then it doesn't harm us.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It helps us. And so, so many of us spend so much time on social media and scrolling through and just looking at other people's lives. That alone could make a huge difference in how it affects our mental health. And just knowing that I can create my own definition of success. And then I don't care if you're working toward your definition of success.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It doesn't feel threatening to me if I'm working toward my definition of success. And it goes back to that abundance mindset and knowing that just because you're working on your goals, that doesn't take away from me reaching my goals.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I was grateful I was able to take a couple months off from work, but spent years trying to figure out like which way is up and which way is down. When you lose somebody and you're only 26, it wasn't just that I missed my husband, but I missed the entire life that we had planned together. And I thought all of these things we were going to do that I can't do now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Absolutely. I love James Altucher, but I also love that idea because so often we want to hoard our good ideas as if people are going to steal them or we think, I don't want anybody to know what I'm out there doing. And we run into things like imposter syndrome where people think, oh, other people assume I'm better than I am. I'm not doing good enough.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think that's where that teaching thing comes in. When you can mentor somebody else, it really reminds you how far you've come, how much you've learned and that you have learned. accumulated a lot of knowledge and skills and tools that are easy to forget. Over time, we think, no, I've always known this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But then when you have somebody asking you questions, it reminds you, oh yeah, there was a time in my life where I didn't know that either. And for a lot of people, that really helps them to feel a lot better when they start to reach down and mentor people who are struggling and saying, you're new at this. I have some stuff. And to be open and willing to share those things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think there's a big notion that what you put into the world, you get back out. And so I run into a lot of people who will think, well, if I work really hard, then I deserve success. We know in the business world, plenty of people have worked incredibly hard. And for one reason or another, it doesn't work out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And there are people on the other side of the planet who are outworking us all day, every day. If life were fair and we were given the amount of money that we earn, I stare at a computer most of the day. I'm not carrying jugs of water 17 miles for my family. It wouldn't even out. So I don't think it's fair of ourselves to then say, well, I work really hard, so I deserve success.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Or sometimes people will say to me, like, it's so amazing all these great things happen to you because you deserved it because you went through something hard. No, and it doesn't even out, trust me, but there are plenty of people who've gone through incredibly tough things and they didn't have something amazing happen. Life isn't fair.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that's really tough to come to that conclusion of, yeah, life isn't fair. But on the other side of that, I think it helps us to know, like, I don't have to keep score. I could be nice to somebody and karma doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to be super nice to me tomorrow, but that's okay. And I'm okay with it. For some people, that's really tough.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we talk about this in therapy often, people's expectations. And I ran into this problem where a lot of people had these vision boards where they would post a photo of something and they just really expected it to happen if they sat on the couch and waited for the universe to gift it to them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We had been foster parents and had all of these huge plans. And I thought, now what? It took years to sort that out. Which plans am I still going to follow through with? What do I want to abandon and give up? I decided to become a single foster parent for many years. And then I was fortunate. I found love again. And I thought, whew, like the second chapter in life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it might be somebody who said, you know, I have a Lamborghini on my vision board and I don't know how I'm going to get it, but someday it's going to happen. And they really weren't going to put in the work to make any of it happen, but they thought that they deserved it because they were a good person. So I think it's important to recognize that we all have times where we feel like,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
oh, you know, I'm kind of special. I'm kind of deserving. For honest, we have those moments. But to recognize that, again, just because you're nice to somebody doesn't mean something great is going to happen to you tomorrow. Or if you go through something bad, it doesn't guarantee something great's going to happen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think the more that we come to those conclusions and the more that we accept, yep, bad things do happen. Sometimes good things happen to people that we don't think deserve it too. And that's life and figuring out how do I cope with the emotions that get stirred up when those things happen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It boils down to just recognizing what can I control today? I can control how much good I put out into the universe. And even if it doesn't come back to me tenfold, I can wake up tomorrow and do it again. And when we just recognize that I have the power to impact somebody's day, it might be smiling at the cashier at the store or complimenting a stranger on their shoes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But those little things can certainly put out tons of positive vibes, but I don't need to do those things just because I then think I'm going to win the lottery next week because I was a good person today. So I think just recognizing every day, what do I have control over? How do I want to be in the world today? No matter what kind of curveballs life throws me, what are my core values?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Who I want to be? We can also just choose to say, I'm going to act like the person I want to become. If I want to be a mentally strong person, I'm going to act like a mentally strong person today. If I want to be a kind and confident person, I can choose to act like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Even if I don't feel like it, I might be grumpy because I woke up on the wrong side of the bed or because something else happened yesterday that I wasn't thrilled about, but I still have choices every day. When we start to recognize that, that I have choices, I think it also frees us up to recognize that, all right, no matter how many bad things happen to me, I have choices in that too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There are so many benefits of solitude. Solitude gets a bad rap. People tend to think it's about being lonely. And they think, oh, you know, I just, I don't want to be lonely. But it's so important to be by ourselves sometimes. It's really how you get to know yourself. It's how you get to figure out decisions in life and who you are and to get to know your emotions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We know that even kids who can play by themselves have fewer behavior problems. They have better psychological well-being in life. Today, though, you don't really have to spend any time alone. Even when you are alone, you can always be listening to podcasts. Clearly, I'm not against listening to podcasts, but there are times when you need to say, I'm not going to have any noise in my ears.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But almost as soon as I got married, my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I just remember thinking, like, this isn't fair. I already lost the closest people to me. I don't want to lose somebody else. But it wasn't like I had a choice. And he passed away, too. So I had a solid decade that just felt like it was one loss after the next. I had lost a former foster child as well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
For a lot of people, the only time that they really spend any time alone is when they go to sleep at night. And we find that so many people are listening to podcasts even to fall asleep because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts. So sometimes it's just about letting yourself be alone with your thoughts because how else do you plan your life?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
How else do you reflect on things and think, what did I do today that was a great job? What do I want to do better tomorrow? Where am I growing in life? What do I want my life to look like? We spend so much time planning little things or planning a vacation or planning our wedding, but we don't plan for the long haul. How do you want your life to be different?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's really tough to do that because when you're around other people, they influence your decisions from what you're going to eat to where you're going to go to how you're going to spend your time. And it's really the alone time that helps us better figure out who we are and what we want to be like in this world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's all about a balance because there are people who say, you know, on the weekends, I don't leave the house. I come home and I just read books and I stay at home. We all need that balance. We're social creatures. And we know from the research that social media is not giving us what we need when it comes to connecting with people. We need to be face to face and in person.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
as much as we can and it becomes the default though sometimes I think especially since COVID that people say you know I'm just more comfortable staying home but it's so important for us to have connections and not just superficial connections because the cure for loneliness isn't to just be around people it's to really connect with people that means being vulnerable finding people that you can talk to being able to ask somebody questions or somebody that you can ask for help or
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Who would you call if you have a problem at two in the morning? A lot of people would say, I don't have anybody I could call or anybody I'd feel comfortable calling when I have a crisis. We need that in our lives.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then it becomes much easier to then appreciate alone time because it becomes that balance of saying, I do have time alone with my thoughts, but I also have plenty of human connections who can help me balance things out and help me feel good too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You know, I think I'm an ambivert. I say I fall. I think a lot of people fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I think that's me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I just remember just thinking, what next? I spent a long time in a pretty dark place.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
For anybody who's not comfortable, then you figure out, like, what are the workarounds? So if you don't want to put your face on a video, you might have an animated video. You might come up with an article that you feel comfortable writing about, but you're not going to speak about. So always start small and you take small steps.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if something feels, this is so far out of my comfort zone, you might decide, all right, I'm going to back up. Something a lot of people do is they take a giant leap first. And we know that that can backfire.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So if you're terrified of public speaking, don't try to get up on a stage and give a TEDx talk for your very first speech ever, because it might feel like it's so overwhelming that you then never want to give another speech. You might start by giving a talk to just four people or Maybe you start with yourself in the mirror and then you invite one friend and you say, can you listen to this for me?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So those really small steps are important. And then again, figuring out what kind of accommodations do you want to make? You might never launch a podcast or you might never decide that you're going to put your face on social media all the time. But what are you comfortable with? And experimenting with that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Sometimes you figure out, well, this felt uncomfortable last year, but I've been doing it for a while and suddenly it feels like second nature. Or I've practiced this for a while so I can still take one more small step. And the therapy office will often talk about finding things that are a four on the scale of one to 10. So if one is super comfortable, 10 is terrifying.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You want to do something that's about a four. Four is tolerable. And then after you've been doing that for a little while, maybe it's making really quick Instagram reels. After a while, that doesn't feel so scary and it becomes more like a three. So then you say, well, what would now be a four? And always just keep challenging yourself just a little bit at a time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the more we do that, the more we realize that we have skills and tools that perhaps we didn't even know existed.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Oh, that's a good question. And thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. I think to not be afraid to put stuff out there. I've written so many articles that never went viral and probably a lot of people didn't read, but nobody judges you on those things. They judge you on the bigger things. That's really what works. So it's okay to throw a lot of stuff out there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if nobody reads it, it's not the end of the world because nobody read it. So there's not a million people out there thinking that you wrote something terrible. 10 people read it. You only have 10 potential readers anyway.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I'd say to not be afraid and to just keep creating content in a way that feels comfortable for you, whether it's a podcast or you create articles or you're creating stuff for social media and knowing that there are tons of different ways to get your message out there. And a lot of it has to do with experimenting and figuring out what's going to work for you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Oh, that's a good question, too. It's changed over the years. I guess before it was writing articles. And now that I have a podcast, podcasting is really cool and Absolutely love to be able to churn out podcast episodes and speaking, which I never thought I would say either. I get invited to speak at corporations and conventions and speak to live audiences so I could get feedback.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Speaking into the microphone or putting books out there, I don't get to have interactive live questions, but I get that when I speak to live audiences, which is a treat.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, it was really one of the worst days of my life. It was shortly after my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. And we figured out it was terminal that I wrote myself a letter of what mentally strong people don't do. And it was a combination of things that I had learned through my own journey, things that I had learned as a therapist, and some of the things I learned in college too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I would say do something every day to challenge yourself. Just to prove to your brain that you're stronger than you think you are. It might be that you set out to do as many pushups as you can. And then you notice when your brain says, oh, you're too tired. You can't do another one. Do at least one more. You can probably do five more.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But doing that just teaches your brain that you're not going to listen to it. I run a timed mile every day. So when my brain tells me, you're too tired, you can't keep going, I actually start to run faster. Just as a way to train my brain and to recognize I'm more capable and competent than I think I am. So always tell people, just challenge yourself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The more that you challenge yourself to do more than you think you can, it just becomes second nature. And in business, you certainly need to be able to challenge yourself and do more than you think you can sometimes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think it's knowing what my values are and then feeling confident that I can stay true to those values. Decisions in life become so much easier when you know what your core values are and what's important. So you can say no to the things that don't serve you well. What are your core values?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Friends and family and the people in my life are super important and also giving back to the community and knowing that I have some skills and talents and resources that I can freely give to people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So my website's the best place, which is amymorinlcsw.com. And on there, we have my TEDx talk and links to all six of my books on mental strength and information about my podcast, which is Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But all combined, figured out if you just don't do these certain things in life, you can get through almost anything. So wrote myself that letter. And by then I had become a freelance writer. And that became out of necessity because my husband had been the primary breadwinner.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So back in the day when I needed more money, I was freelance writing in the evenings and on the weekends again so I could keep my house. So once I had this letter to myself, I thought, ooh, this is helpful. Maybe it will help somebody else. So I published it online, got paid $15 for publishing it online. But 50 million people read the article. It was 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that just opened everything up for me. From that article, I got a book deal and the opportunity to do lots of things that I probably wouldn't have been able to do or ever thought I could do. And it turned into something amazing. And I'm so glad that I now get to share what I learned about from my own personal journey, from my work as a therapist.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I get to talk about mental strength on a completely different level than when I was in a therapy office in rural Maine back in the day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It did. It was wild. So the day that I published the article, I put it on a website called Lifehack. Their website broke. I didn't know it was because of my article. I just thought, well, that's interesting. Their website's down. And a few days after it was up, Forbes picked it up and it ended up on Forbes.com. And then 10 million people saw it on Forbes alone.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And before I knew it, the phone was ringing off the hook with MTV in Finland called and CNN in Mexico called and all these people asking me all these questions like, how did you come up with all this stuff? But nobody knew it was because I'd struggled with it. Like I was in a dark place. And so at first I didn't tell anybody.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But one of the people that read the article was a literary agent who said, you should write a book. And it really wasn't until the book came out, which was the following year, that I shared the rest of the story. And I'm glad that I did because I think it gave me more credibility when people realized, now I'm just not just saying these things because I learned about it in college.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm saying these things because I went through it and I struggled with these things. But I believe all of that just gave me such a different platform. As you said, my TEDx talk was seen by 23 million people and my books are in 40-something languages now. So I get to reach all of these different people
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I talk about a lot of the exact same things I was talking about in my therapy office, but I get to do it differently now. And it's just amazing that I had the opportunity. I wished I hadn't gone through all of that difficult stuff, but I'm grateful that we were able to turn it into something.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I feel like because of my pain, I'm able to do some things that I wouldn't have normally been able to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Exactly. And so to be able to take it and say, here's what I learned and to get emails from people on the other side of the globe who will say, you know, read your book and I found it really helpful. Nothing I would have ever dreamed possible had this not happened.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think there's a lot of truth to that because if you've struggled with it and you know, I wish this had been available, I wish I could have been able to have this opportunity then, you're going to be able to reach back and help a lot of people who are in that place you used to be. Totally.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think it's about adding something of value that doesn't already exist. So I hear a lot of people say, well, with AI now, there's no sense in even writing things because there's too much content out there or there's going to be so much out there that you just can't compete. But the truth is, your story is going to be different than everybody else's. You always have your story.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can use your life experiences to put a different spin on something that is already existing. Clearly, the topic of mental health is not new, but I was able to add to it and change it in a way that was interesting to people. I talked about what not to do rather than what to do. I talk about mental strength as opposed to just mental health. Those slight changes make a huge difference.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think for somebody who feels like, I don't know what to put out there, And know that it can be kind of controversial too, that you don't have to say things to just stay in the middle of the road because most people will say it has to evoke some kind of emotion. And you don't want to put content out there just to be provocative and try to irritate people, but it's okay to have an opinion.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And when my article first came out, there was actually another article that first landed on Psychology Today, and it was about all the things wrong with my article. And I remember thinking, I think I've just ruined my therapy career. Psychology Today is a really reputable website. And now I have this person saying that my article has problems and that perhaps I wasn't right.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But it actually led to Psychology Today reaching out to me and saying, do you want to write for us? And a good thing became of it. And yeah, definitely not everybody agreed with the things that I said. But for the people that you repel, you also attract other people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think to have that faith that not everybody's going to be your audience and that's okay, but you can still create amazing content and you'll attract the people that you're meant to attract.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So if you look at Google Trends and the back end of Google, it was Googled a few times before I said it. So I certainly wasn't the first human being to say it. But you can see that once my article came out, huge spike in traffic. And since then, it stayed up there that people use that more like an everyday phrase.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It becomes easier to understand if we talk about it in terms of physical strength and physical health. So nobody doubts the fact that you could go to the gym and you can lift weights and you can become physically strong. But on the flip side of that, it doesn't guarantee you won't ever get any physical health problems.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Physical strength, yeah, it's cool to be physically strong and it does prevent a lot of health problems, but it doesn't guarantee you won't still get arthritis in your knees or you might still develop high blood pressure. Mental strength and mental health is the same. Becoming mentally strong can improve your mental health. It can prevent a lot of problems.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But if you do develop something like anxiety or depression, it's not a sign that you're weak. And you can still keep building mental strength too. It's a complicating factor. It makes it a little more difficult perhaps, but mental strength is all about the choices you make every day. There's tons of opportunities to keep growing mentally stronger.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And no matter how strong we think we are, there's always room for improvement and life will show you that over and over again.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I just got a message yesterday from a woman who said, I lost my mom a few years ago, but it really didn't all click with me about what I was going through and how to heal from it until I read your book. And I'll hear from people who will say things like that, like they felt a lot less alone or they finally felt like they had tools.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Like I have hope that now that I know these tools exist and that these strategies are out there, I feel so much better. Or I'll also hear from people who say, you know, I think I got it wrong. I think all these years that I was pretending like nothing bothered me, I thought I was acting tough, but really, I wasn't dealing with the things that were.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So they realized that building mental strength looks different than they thought, that it's about sometimes asking for help and about being vulnerable. And about acknowledging pain and saying, oh yeah, actually, I struggle with this and I'm going to work on managing it too.