Mental Resistance Lab

I founded the Mental Resistance Lab after spending more than fifteen years navigating the high-output, high-pressure environments of the international corporate sector. Working as an architect across the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, I experienced firsthand the intense demands of the modern professional arena. Throughout that career, I experienced the unnecessary suffering, mental fatigue and burnout that occur due to a lack of actionable tools and guides to manage energy levels and focus; as well as a sophisticated understanding of what performance is and its relation to grit.

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Self-help; the term itself implies getting help by no one but yourself, as if you had to do it all by yourself. I am helping myself, through a new book I bought, I am helping myself through a new conference I am planning to attend, etcetera. To me this is superficial and it will rarely deliver a satisfactory result. It is my view that one seeks true self-help or just help, when one realizes there was a certain absence in our formative years; it can be a lack of parents, mentors, guidance, or simply an environment that didn't favor our development. True self-development is then, identifying the aspect or aspects we lacked in our formative years and resetting our mental mold through a forceful commitment to change without blaming the actors of our earlier story. It is embracing with braveness an action-based, no-look-back policy to self-discovery and self-improvement.

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After learning and becoming interested in grit and mental strength through books and podcasts, the inception for the Mental Resistance Lab came with a simple question, if there are certain ideas that have changed my life for the better, are they universal enough so that they can work on everyone? What if someone else would follow the exact books and ideas I have learned and implemented? From there I set out on a course of developing a syllabus for what became Developmental Resilience, which can be explained as a universal blueprint which maps the behavioral adaptation needed to gain mental strength and resilience; a formula for trying your best in life and meaning it. 

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My initial take on Developmental Resilience was to find a path. Most of books and resources are investigating one topic, which it might prove inspirational to us but I couldn't find a book that would connect many of these dots in sequence; think about it for a second, your life no matter how simple you think it is, is in fact extremely complex, there are a thousand interconnected variables that cannot be possibly untangled and understood all at once; your personality, your background, your economical status, your current job, your friendships, your traumas, your past, your loved ones, your beliefs, etcetera. So I set on a path of bridging islands between diverse topics, all related to grit and resilience. That exploration led to the five chapters in the program: Mindset, because one cannot begin to change if your mind is stopping you from even beginning; systems, because it's easy to set goals but one needs to understand the underlying mechanism and pitfalls our own nature sets us up for; the engine, which is the main meat of the course in which we dive into what grit and resilience are; the breakthrough, where we analyze cases in which human effort ceases to be grit and becomes something beyond, something ultra human; and lastly, the afterburner because the human body is not made for grinding 24/7, we have to learn to push ourselves sustainably.​​​​​

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Beyond the scientifically based syllabus and compiled literature, a transformation would not work with just presenting people with straight cold facts. I believe that what is needed in addition to good information is someone that believes in you, even before you do; someone that tries to understand the mental blocks you might be facing. 

Let's remember that true personal development is tough and rarely happens in isolation. That is why I thought of having to meet a consultant live which becomes an accountability agent and trusted counselor of the transformation, aimed at helping navigating these shifts, reinventions and self-discovery journeys.

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Thus, the Developmental Resilience's reason of existence became a mission is to identify the structure of a successful radical personal transformation, and to learn about grit and its intersection with meaning. I am therefore hoping to help people through it; to help them find the grind and mental fortitude while I gain a rewarding life experience in return. I hope you can help building this vision.​​

 

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