50 Plays That Will Change the Way You Lead

This article is adapted from Ted's Smart Thinking podcast episode 379: A Conversation with a Mental Strength Expert and Author: Amy Morin.

I want to tell you about a book I picked up because a group of my colleagues would not stop talking about it. I walked into a conversation they were having, heard enough to be curious, grabbed the book out of someone's hands, and read the whole series. That is how I found Amy Morin.

Amy is a therapist, a bestselling author, and someone who has spent her career helping people understand what mental strength actually looks like in practice. Her newest book is called The Mental Strength Playbook, and it is exactly what the title promises. Fifty strategies. No fluff. No single silver bullet that fixes everything. Just a practical, honest, deeply human collection of plays you can run the moment you need them.

I had her on the Smart Thinking Podcast recently and I want to share some of what she taught me, because I think every leader reading this needs this playbook on their desk.

Your Inner Dialogue Is Running the Show

Amy opens the book with something that stopped me mid-paragraph. She writes that your inner dialogue influences your confidence, your performance, and your enjoyment at work, and that you have the power to reframe unconstructive scripts once you have the strategies to do so.

As a cognitive behavioral therapist, Amy has spent decades watching what happens when people learn to manage their thoughts rather than be managed by them. She is not talking about toxic positivity or pretending everything is fine. She is talking about recognizing that the voice in your head is not always telling you the truth, and that you get to push back.

Her recommendation is to name your inner critic. Give it a name, a face, a personality. Separate it from yourself so you can talk back to it.

I named mine Darth Vader. I learned this strategy on a Monday. By Wednesday night, my wife woke me up because I was face down in bed, smacking the mattress, apparently arguing with Darth Vader in my sleep. When she asked what I was dreaming about, I had to explain that I was having an inner dialogue with my inner critic.

That is how real this stuff is. Name the voice. Talk back to it. Do not let it run your leadership unchallenged.

Build Your Victory Vault

Here is something Amy said that I think every Midwesterner in particular needs to hear.

Most of us can instantly recall our failures, our rejections, and our most embarrassing moments. The brain activates those memories like a reflex. But ask someone to list their top twenty accomplishments and they will stare at you like you asked them to do something inappropriate.

Amy calls the solution a Victory Vault. It is a written list, kept on your phone or a piece of paper, of the moments when you rose to the occasion. The time you stayed up and passed the test you thought you would fail. The moment you advocated for someone who needed it. The small wins that never made it onto a plaque but mattered deeply.

When self-doubt hits, you open the vault. Not to brag. Not to posture. Just to remind yourself that you have done hard things before, and you will do them again.

I did this exercise and when I stepped back and looked at what I had written, it reframed the values I have lived my life by. Number one on my list was that I have been with my wife for over thirty years and she is still the love of my life. That is a victory. That counts.

Your vault is yours. Fill it honestly and visit it often.

Question Your Question

One of Amy's most powerful plays in the book is deceptively simple: before you try to solve a problem, make sure you are solving the right one.

She shared an example from her therapy practice. A couple would come in asking how to stop fighting so much. The natural instinct is to teach communication skills. But sometimes that is the wrong question entirely. Sometimes the fighting is just a symptom of built-up resentment that never got addressed. Solve the surface problem and you are back in the same chair six months later.

She applies this to business, too. You might spend months trying to attract new customers when the smarter question is how to make your existing customers more loyal. Both are valid goals. But if you never stop to question which question you are actually trying to answer, you can spend enormous energy headed in the wrong direction.

My advice: write it down. Get it out of your head. Ask yourself whether this is truly the root problem, or whether it is just what the root problem looks like on the surface.

Brainstorm the Bad Ideas First

This one is Amy's personal favorite, and after she explained it, I completely understood why.

When she was a shy kid who dreaded being called on in class, the fear of having a bad idea was paralyzing. So she developed a habit of flipping it. Instead of asking what will work, she asks: what definitely will not work?

Get all the bad ideas on the table. Make it safe to say the wrong thing. And suddenly the right things start to emerge, because you have cleared the path.

She used this in the therapy office with people who were stuck in depression and convinced nothing would help. She would ask them to describe what would make their depression worse. Stay in bed twenty-three hours a day. Do not eat. Avoid people. And from that list of what makes it worse, the list of what could make it better becomes obvious.

In continuous improvement circles, this is sometimes called farming for dissent. What are all the things that could go wrong? What would definitely fail? Name them. And then you know what to avoid, which means you also know where to go.

As Emotion Goes Up, Logic Goes Down

I told Amy that this line from our conversation should be on a t-shirt. I meant it.

When we are wound up, anxious, angry, or overwhelmed, we do not see clearly. We do not make our best decisions. We do not lead from our best selves. And in those moments, reaching for a phone or a screen or a numbing mechanism does not process the emotion. It just teaches us that feeling uncomfortable is something to escape rather than move through.

Amy's play here is called Name It to Tame It. Research shows that simply labeling an emotion moves it from the emotional processing center of your brain toward the logical center. When you say out loud, I feel anxious right now, your anxiety goes down slightly. When you name the frustration, it loses a little of its grip.

That is not magic. That is neuroscience. And it is available to you right now, for free, in any hallway, before any meeting.

Throw a Good Vibes Boomerang

Here is the counterintuitive one.

When you are having a hard day and you feel like you have nothing left to give, the instinct is to put your head down and focus inward. Take care of yourself. Power through. Do not ask anything extra of yourself right now.

Amy's research says that approach actually does not help much. What does help is getting out of your own head long enough to do something kind for someone else.

Send a genuine compliment to a colleague. Text a friend and tell them you appreciate them. Write a quick email to someone whose work made your week easier. Acts of kindness release oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and reduce cortisol, the stress hormone. The boomerang comes back.

This does not have to be a grand gesture. It just has to be real. And when you are stuck in a spiral, sometimes the fastest exit is a door that faces outward rather than inward.

Hum, Sing, Chant, or Gargle

I will be honest with you. I have a deep and well-documented relationship with music. So when I saw this chapter title, I felt personally understood.

Amy explains that humming, singing, chanting, and gargling all stimulate the vagus nerve, which signals to your nervous system that you are safe. When your body is humming, it is not running from a threat. Your brain gets that message and calms down accordingly.

She told me about leaders who hum in the hallway between meetings. People who sing in the car on the way to a difficult conversation. Someone who gargled between back-to-back high-stakes calls and found it genuinely lowered their stress level.

I once worked construction with a man who whistled constantly. He drove everyone crazy. And then one day someone said, has anyone ever seen Jim angry? And an older guy said, no one rage whistles. He was right. Nobody does. There is something to that.

When your nervous system is calm, you lead better. And sometimes the simplest path to calm is a song you already know by heart.

You Don't Have to Feel Strong to Be Strong

I saved the best for last, because I asked Amy for her greatest life lesson and this is what she said.

You do not have to feel strong to be strong. It is about the little choices you make every single day. Not waking up and declaring that you are mentally tough. Just knowing what you are going to do next.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

Amy wrote the list that became her first book on one of the worst days of her life. She had lost her mother at twenty-three and her first husband at twenty-six, and the anniversary of one fell on the day of the other. On that day, she did not feel strong. She just knew what not to do next. And she wrote it down.

That list became a book. That book became a movement. And now there is a playbook of fifty strategies that any one of us can open on any given day and find the play we need.

Pick it up. Read two strategies and put it down. Walk away and apply what you just read. Then come back.

That is how you build mental strength. One small choice at a time.