Give me 20 minutes to make you dangerously mentally strong (so you can achieve your goals) with Maya Raichoora | Future Self Series Ep.5
Working Hard with Grace Beverley
This episode of the Future Self Series explores mental fitness as an active, trainable discipline rather than a passive state of mental health or simple positive thinking. Host Grace Beverley
Key takeaways
- Maya Raichora defines mental fitness as the active maintenance of good mental health through deliberate brain training, similar to physical gym workouts.
- The 'best friend method' interrupts negative self-talk by replacing harsh internal criticism with the encouraging tone you would use for a close friend.
Main topics
- Mental fitness vs mental health
- Self-talk discipline and best friend method
Notable quotes
"Mental fitness isn't therapy or positive thinking... it's basically the ongoing active practice of training your mind in the same way you train your body."
Conclusion
Listeners are given actionable frameworks to treat their psychology as a trainable
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:11) What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast-shaped guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing. Because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice. Speaker 2 (0:24) What is up and welcome back to Working Hard. I hope you are all doing very well. So by this point, I hope you've gathered that I am running a series across my maternity leave called the Future Self series. But if you haven't, the TLDR is that it's a podcast series built almost like a course around one specific idea. And the idea is that the most reliable way to build the life you want is to reverse engineer it. So you start at the end, you get clear on where you're going and you work backwards and build in a practical, actionable way in order to be able to actually get there. So through this series, I'm passing the mic to my favorite experts and thinkers. It's all been specifically curated to make sure you are hearing from the experts in each different area of this to give you a kind of fully fledged plan to building your future self. So, so far we've covered the plan, the mindset, the habits, and the actual kind of health habits that you need to be able to actually look after yourself to get to the point you want to get to. So today we're getting into the thing that kind of sits underneath all of that. which is your mental fitness, which is maybe a phrase that you might not have heard of if you're new here. So I want to explain what I mean by that. Essentially, mental fitness isn't therapy or positive thinking, and it's definitely not kind of telling yourself that everything's fine when it isn't. It's basically the ongoing active practice of training your mind in the same way you train your body. So it's essentially building the psychological strength, the flexibility, the resilience that you need to achieve your goals and to get to where you want to get to in life, particularly when things get hard when things are uncertain, when things are uncomfortable. And just like physical fitness, it's not something that you either have or you don't. It's something you build deliberately over time. And so this is why I think this episode is one of the Speaker 1 (1:59) most important in the entire series. Speaker 2 (2:02) Everything we've talked about so far, the five-year plan, the mindset shifts, the habits, taking care of your body, all of it requires a mind that can actually follow through. And I've said this before, but I am a firm believer that you can have the most beautiful vision for your future self. You can even have the most detailed plan and the best intentions. But if your mental fitness isn't there, and if you are running on self-doubt, on anxiety, on fear of failure, or just sheer mental exhaustion, then none of the other stuff is going to stick. It's just not going to work. This is the foundation that everything else is built on when you're reverse engineering your life. And the expert I wanted to talk to on this episode is one of my favourite people to chat to. If you didn't listen to our episode back in 2025, I want to introduce you to Maya Raichura. Maya's a mental fitness expert. She's on a mission to make training your mind as common as training your body. And I didn't really understand this until I heard her talking about that. And since then... lots of the things she's talked about are literally things I think about every single day and have really, really helped me be able to get to where I am now and feel happy about it and to feel resilient and to feel like even when shit comes along and like shit hits the fan, I am still on that track, which enables me to get back on track every time I need to, rather than consistently feeling like I'm just treading water, moving in a certain direction and something could really hit me and derail this entire plan. So that is the heart of what today's episode is. is about. The idea that your mind is trainable and should be trained. The idea that it is essential to make sure you have the mental fitness to be able to actually get to where you want to get to. And as with all these episodes, before I hand over to Maya, she's put together a follow-up exercise and her personal recommendations in the Working Hard newsletter. So that's going to be sent out tomorrow if you are listening to this episode on the day it goes live. We're doing that with every single episode so that you basically have a course-like structure by the end of this. And you're not just listening to episodes and being like, oh, this sounds nice. And then not actually doing it. anything about it in your life. The entire purpose of this series is to be as actionable as possible. So I've left the link for that in the description, but I hope you really enjoyed this episode. Speaker 1 (4:01) Hi everyone, I'm Maya Raichora. Thank you so much, Grace, for passing over the mic. I'm so excited to be one of your cover teachers for this Future Self series. If you have followed Working Hard for a while, you might already know me from previous episodes with Grace or from my own work as a visualization and mental fitness expert. I've spent years studying how to train and rewire the mind so you can think, feel, and perform the best you ever have. Because isn't it crazy that more people are insecure about their body than their own character? We grew up placing so much importance on the physical body, learning how to train it and stay healthy. So what about building total self-confidence or building your emotional intelligence or finding peace and calm in your mind and heart? As we build out this future self roadmap Grace introduced at the start of the series and reverse engineer our lives, we need to make sure our mental fitness is in check. It's one of the key building blocks that everything else rests on. You can have the clearest goals in the world, but if your inner world isn't strong enough, they'll fall apart the second things get hard. So today I'm bringing mental tools that elite athletes, entrepreneurs, business owners, leaders are using so that you're getting access to secrets that are usually gatekept, but I'm giving it completely for free. So. Grab a pen and paper to follow along and save these tips for later and let's get into it. Okay, so what exactly is mental fitness? You're probably familiar with the term mental health. The mental fitness is actually quite different. If we think about physical health and physical fitness, everyone has a physical health, right? It can be bad, it can be good, but you're only physically fit if you're going to the gym, maybe you're doing yoga, maybe you are going on a walk or running, dancing. It's the active maintenance of good physical health. Now, in the same way, if you have a mind mind, then you have a mental health. It can be good, it can be bad. But being mentally fit is you actively training your brain so you can think better, feel better and perform better and therefore maintain a strong mental health. And so this is important to distinguish because the question is, whilst we