What is The Mortality Mindset?

We’re all familiar with getting a solid start out of the gate–fueled by fresh inspiration and determination–but then fading along the way. Our willpower runs out. It’s discouraging, and it can be genuinely perplexing.

“I really wanted to make that change,” we reflect regretfully to ourselves. “What happened?!”

Say goodbye to the demoralizing cycle of abandoned objectives and replace it with a new capacity for focus, perseverance, and tenacity that gets you where you want to go.

Some of the prevailing wisdom out there tells us that we need to create better goals, manage our time more effectively, develop better morning routines, get more sleep, get up earlier, hit the cold plunge and a sauna every day, and keep a journal, to name a few. Those are all well and good and doubtless have their time and place. But they also depend upon our finite reserves of willpower–a resource that hasn’t been adequate so far. So, what leads us to believe our willpower will suddenly be up to the task this go-round?

We need something more primal, more compelling, and more reliable. Something that we can’t get around or ignore, even if we try.

A Hard Truth

Most of us pay little attention to the reality of our Mortality. Some of us aggressively avoid thinking about it. There’s something deep inside of us that recoils at the thought and actively resists it. And in the absence of a personal encounter with Mortality, the comforts and conveniences of modern life simply distract us from the reality of our Mortality.

But all of us will one day be forced to confront it.

Say this with me: “I am going to die. It’s not a matter of if; it’s just a matter of when and how.”

Avoiding the reality of our Mortality does us much more harm than good. Voluntarily confronting our Mortality, on the other hand, is a key to living the life we were made to live with guts, gusto, and abandon and dying with no regrets.

The Mortality Mindset

The Mortality Mindset is a way to transform your Mortality from an unpleasant reality you avoid like the plague into the most powerful motivator you’ve ever had to create a life you’re proud of.

Here are a few snapshots from my story to show how this mindset has changed my life.

Snapshot 1: A Descent into Hell

25 years ago, I was a recent college grad. After years of on-and-off, low-grade anxiety, my psychology had reached a perilous tipping point. I was a gold-star kid all the way through college, but I now found myself aimless–without a plan and an overarching purpose, and unable to find a way forward. Depression was beginning to sink its talons into me. Then, I began to experience some vague but persistent physical symptoms.

The doctor couldn’t provide a clear diagnosis, and I suddenly found myself in the grips of severe, debilitating, and all-consuming anxiety–specifically about catastrophic health events and Mortality. My psychology was pushed beyond its limits, and I was in a full-blown mental health crisis.

No more a young man with the world as my oyster, I was now a young man clinging to his sanity by the thinnest of threads.

At one point, it dawned upon me that I would rather die than go on living if relief from the psychological anguish didn’t arrive soon.

Snapshot 2: A New Lease on Life

Fast forward 14 years to 2012.

Over the years, I had slowly and painfully found a way forward. I’d even gotten married, and my wife and I now had two young boys. Unfortunately, though, I’d let myself go physically and had picked up some unhealthy ways of coping. I was 60 lbs. overweight, abusing alcohol, and smoking heavily.

Then my brother-in-law got a bleak cancer diagnosis and began a three-year cancer battle that, sadly, ended in his death in 2015. As I watched him undergo excruciating and ultimately unsuccessful surgeries and treatments, I literally and figuratively looked down at my gut and realized that even though I wasn’t completely in control of when I died, I certainly wasn’t doing what I could to stay alive.

I was gripped with a white-hot motivation to do whatever it took to get healthy again so I had a better chance of being around for my family as long as possible.

Staring death in the face through my brother-in-law’s experience instantly clarified what was most important to me and supplied the will to act on it.

It was the ultimate status quo-buster.

For the first time, awareness of my Mortality was an asset rather than just a neurotic and crippling liability.

Within a year, I was back to my fighting weight. I was on a completely new health and wellness path, and the depression that had lurked annoyingly in my mind for so long had vanished. Anxiety was still an unwelcome companion, but I was now a man in motion, not just a deer caught in the headlights.

The momentum created by that tragic involuntary encounter with Mortality ultimately led to a major life renovation, our move to Colorado in 2014, and the professional path I’m on today. Its effects are still unfolding.

Take a moment to reflect on this question: How has an experience with Mortality impacted you?

Snapshot 3: My Ally, Anxiety

About four years ago, I reached a new level of exasperation with the Anxiety. All my years of trying to make it go away had been unsuccessful. One day, in desperation, in my mind’s eye, I turned around to face the Anxiety–this unwelcome, uninvited, and tenacious hitchhiker in my psychology–and I said, “If you aren’t going to go away, what are you here for?”

That desperation-driven moment of surrender and acceptance transformed the Anxiety from a hated enemy into an unlikely ally.

I had begun my work as a coach by this point. Thanks to my newfound acceptance of Anxiety’s place in my life, I began to wonder how my particular fixation on catastrophic health events and Mortality might be useful in my coaching work. I was certainly susceptible to thinking about Mortality too much.

But I began to wonder: What if most other people thought about their Mortality too little and were twiddling their thumbs on the way to a regret-filled grave?

From seemingly out of nowhere, the words “The Graveyard Group” sprang to mind, and I immediately sensed that there was something to it. In January 2019, the first Graveyard Group was formed. Today, Graveyard Group members courageously and voluntarily tap into the power of their mortality each week to live with guts, gusto, and abandon and escape death-bed regrets. More on Graveyard Groups later.

In 2020, I launched my podcast, Andrew Petty is Dying, to share Mortality’s unmatched motivational power with a larger audience.

Snapshot 4: My Friend, Mortality

In the 3+ years that Mortality has had a central role in the way that I help people, it’s also become clear that it’s healing me. My once-bitter enemy, Mortality, has actually become a valued friend. Consistent voluntary consideration of my Mortality through The Graveyard Groups and the podcast has been a sort of exposure therapy. Through constant, voluntary exposure, I’ve gotten braver. Today, I’m the boss of the Anxiety more than it is of me.

Nothing has ever given me that much authority over the Anxiety before.

It’s more than just an antidote for Anxiety, though, as significant as that is; I’m more alive today than ever. I’m living more boldly than ever before. I’m more ME than I’ve ever been. The things that matter most get more of the attention they deserve than ever before.

If I died today, I would be proud of the life I lived. And I have Death to thank for it.

This is the Mortality Mindset in action.