Vonda Wright, M.D., Shares Her Guide To An Unbreakable Life

Start with a Vision

The first step in Mindset Mobilization is to create a vision. I’ll share mine:

I have my sights on living to at least 97 years old. That age seems kind of arbitrary, and of course it may be; however, envisioning a future me at 97 it gives me a chance to make the choices today that will get me there in the shape I want to be in. 

At 97, I want to be able to do what I want when I want, not be bound to other’s schedules to take care of me. This means walking without assistance, driving (if I still want to), independently living, eating what I want, taking trips, enjoying the company of my friends and family, raising a few exotic chickens, remembering what I want to remember, and spending as little time as possible in a doctor’s office (this is important: the average older adult spends 3 weeks a year in medical-related appointments). Maybe I’ll still be irreverently making video chronicles and preaching the gospel of living the life you envision.

What you do you value and what is your vision for an unbreakable future? We will come back to this in more depth in a bit but for now to get started, I invite you to write down three to five of your core values in a journal, in a digital notes app, or just a sheet of paper you have on hand. This is the WHY behind what brought you to this book and this quest to be unbreakable.

Now that you have reconnected with your values, anchor your goals to your values. This is often overlooked but is an essential step. Like so many of us, maybe you have already done this once, twice, or even multiple times. You write out your goals. Make plans. You probably put your plan in action and then without even noticing you find you have stopped. Rooting your goals in your values is step one to making them stick. The next is adopting a performance mindset. For me, this step looked like this:

I value health.

I value a clear brain.

I value relationships. 

I value being able to do what I want when I want to.

Think Like a Pro at Life

Defining your goals as they relate to your values is important. But I’ll be honest, it won’t totally protect you against the inevitable backslide—or even full retreat that many of us have repeated every new year or every birthday. We circle the sun one more time and arrive determined to make change, spend time on our health and feel better. Gyms, self-help retreats, and digital personal growth courses see a sharp spike in sales as people make resolutions, with the very best of intentions, stepping out of their comfortable habits resolved to change. But what happens after a few weeks when the newness of the plan wears off? What happens when you hit an obstacle? The cycle repeats over and over again. Years pass by, and we don't reach the full capacity that we want for ourselves. The passage of time continues and the timebombs of aging keep ticking away uninhibited. 

Why do we know what to do and yet still don’t do it again and again? As a sports surgeon working to improve the performance behaviors of elite athletes, I have spoken to a number of mindset coaches about this reality and what we keep returning to in our discussion is that even with the best of thoughts, when the new wears off or there is a distraction, we assign more importance to that distraction than to ourselves. When it gets hard, as it always does, our tendency is also to return to our last safe place—that set of behaviors that make us feel comfortable and unthreatened by the new and the hard. Often this means pivoting back to our old habits no matter how destructive they were and are. Is this ringing a bell? Let’s explore further.

One of my colleagues, Hubert Payne, who is not only a mindset coach for athletes, but also a world class musician, frames all behaviors as a performance. This framing allows him to step back from a behavior and observe objectively, gain knowledge about what happened during the performance, and adjust and improve next time. This approach is the norm in professional sports where teams watch hours of film capturing their performance on the field in order to gain awareness and improve. Sometimes when we set goals for ourselves and then do not follow through or meet our goals, it can feel like a subjective failure. I suggest we take cues from Hubert and my pros and view our daily goals as performances. This makes them more objective rather than as personal shortcomings, relieves us of the heavy burden of feeling like failures when our behaviors don’t match our intentions. 

So, the first step in adjusting your mindset is viewing your behaviors objectively. They are just performances in the moment. One poor performance does not a bad actor or athlete or human make. If we find ourselves with repeatedly poor performances, the next step is to examine a little more deeply where we are right now, where we want to go, and where is that safe, comfortable space that we keep reverting to when the going gets tough. When you’re stuck—and we all get stuck—you can only move forward by pulling these mindset elements together. You can’t realize your new intentions with the same back story. It’s very important to let that sink in, especially in our youth obsessed culture where we are always looking over our shoulder back at our “glory days” rather than pressing forward and reaching our fullest future capacity.

Part of building an unbreakable life and creating a vision for the future is understanding the narratives that drive our behavior. Again, I’ll share a personal example. I had a roll of belly fat I developed after giving birth at 40 that grew during menopause. Knowing what I know about the negative health implications of visceral fat, I wanted to change that. But first I had to set my mindset straight around it, because it was easy to fall into the negative story that I was a slouch, and to pinch it and avoid mirrors and berate myself that I did not work hard enough to get rid of it and castigate myself time and time again. That is one narrative, and I’ll admit, it was stuck in my head on repeat for a while. And guess what, nothing changed. My real progress happened when I changed the story. 

That belly roll had a story that was part of my story. My story is that I had a child. Bodies change when we have children. It is part of the miracle of being able to grow another human being inside ourselves. I have a mother’s body, and I love being a mother. When I hit menopause and gained weight, I was thankful to have lived long enough to reach menopause, as historically many women did not. The belly roll did not mean that I am bad or lazy or any emotional baggage at all. The new narrative I have assigned to it is that I am thankful to have had a child and to live old enough to reach midlife. In building the shield that will allow me to drive my unbreakable life, I take that narrative and recognize that my body has served me, and now going forward I need to pivot from the past to create a stronger, leaner, more metabolically healthy body to support my next 40 years. I have changed the narrative from what some people view as a negative failure to empowering me to build a body for longevity. 

 You can control your narrative, and the stories you craft provide a platform for setting and reaching your goals that are grounded in your values. That all starts with what you are saying to yourself! You can't change the content of your past. You can't change what happened to you, but you can take the message you received from it. That's how you start organizing your internal environment and move with power to an unbreakable future. You can change what your narrative is saying to you.