James E. Loehr

In rough times the safest thing to rely on is an established routine.

Work hard—rest equally hard. Make waves, powerful, symmetrical waves. Maximum health, happiness, and productivity are the payoffs.

While you can’t directly control your feelings, you can control your thoughts. Control the direction and content of your thoughts, and you will exert considerable control over how you feel.

From raising health, capable children to designing better educational systems, from conquering depression to breaking addiction, from raising personal performance to boosting company-wide productivity, Toughness Training for Life offers new and electrifying answers.

Life flows in ups and downs; it is not homeostatic. The healthy heart on an EKG machine shows rhythmic peaks and valleys; a flat line means death—the ultimate linearity. In vivid contrast, spikes mean energy, arousal action—life.

The sheer volume of stress in most people’s lives today cannot be sufficiently balanced by a casual, nonspecific approach to recovery. A sound recovery base is the first priority in Toughness Training.

The problem is that refined sugar is a recent invention; no human being ever tasted it until a few hundred years ago.

Stress won’t break you, but failing to create sufficient waves of recovery can. Higher linear stress is lethal, but high stress with relief is not only manageable but can actually be used to get tougher and stronger.

Toughness is not a destination; it’s a journey without end.

Research has confirmed that the physiological changes that occur in the acted-out (faked) emotion are the same as those that occur in spontaneous, genuine emotion.

Energy is everything, and attaining a high level of positive energy is the key to competitive success. Get more positive emotion flowing during battle by thinking more energetically.

Emotions respond much as muscles do. The ones you stimulate the most become the strongest and most accessible.

Stress is the stimulus for growth. Recovery is when you grow.

Without stress you simply cannot achieve your goals as an athlete. Finding the balance between too much and not enough stress is a constant, must-win battle if you are to reach your full potential.

Undisciplined, sloppy thinking, visualizing, and behavior completely undermine IPS control. Tough thinking and tough acting are prerequisites for being able to tough it out during competitive battle.

Love the process, the fight, the marshaling of your resources, the pushing, the falling back, the breakthroughs, the struggles. Loving to win is easy. Loving the process moves you to a whole new level of competitive skill. Loving the battle happens because you make it happen.

As long as a flicker of life exists, there’s hope—hope to fight back, to rebuild, to grow, to become more, to emerge victorious in the greatest, most important battle of all—the conquest of self.

Recovery is an important word and a vital concept. It means renewal of life and energy. Knowing how and when to recover may prove to be the most important skill in your life.