How do you develop mental toughness? How do you know if you have it? What do you do when nothing is going your way? When everything is going wrong and everything seems to be against you, how do you react? That’s when you figure out your real mental toughness.
As the environment around you gets tougher, you really have to recognize the impact of developing mental toughness and the positive influence that it can have in your future, in your career, in your family, in your income and the influence that you have on others.
Mental toughness is an investment of persistence and it’s only developed over time
Not days, not weeks and not even months. Mental toughness is developed over years of persistence. People that exercise mental toughness and persistence over time, ultimately succeed. Most people fail because they give up just before they succeed.
All you have to do is keep moving forward. Think of it like your are facing a fire hose and the water keeps coming out and it keeps getting stronger and stronger. You only have two options, either you are going to keep taking it and you are going to get mentally tough or you get knocked over. There’s really no other option.
Respond vs react
Your reaction influences people more than you think. Don’t react but respond intelligently. All great leaders stay unemotional, they keep an even keel and you can’t tell whether they are having a good or bad day because they always are emotionally happy and always stay in a great state of mind.
When you are in a leadership role you can never show that you are tired, hungry or frustrated because people will subconsciously lose respect for you.
How quickly can you adjust and adapt to challenges? You have to learn to respond with intelligence versus react with emotion. And you have to do it consistently. That’s the only way to develop mental toughness and great leadership abilities.
Welcome challenges
80% of success is emotional strength and mental toughness. And the only way to become mentally tough is to take on more and not less. You want to welcome more challenges. By taking on more you expand your capacity.
So, immerse yourself in books and personal growth. But don’t just live in books. You want to still get work done. If you really want success and mental toughness, almost every moment of your days has to be taken up with something productive that you really care about, while you are trying to become the best at it.
You have to be absorbed by what you do and you have to love what you do at the same time. You have to live, breath 24/7 and be about what you are doing. At the same time you have to harmonize everything together. Your passion, your family, your work and your hobby.
But in reality, most people lower their standards when they have a challenge and when they get disappointed. That’s a guaranteed way to fail. When you are disappointed you have to get more discipline and that only comes with persistence.
Good thoughts and actions never produce bad results. Bad thoughts and actions never produce good results. And your actions come from what is in your mind. If you understand that mental toughness is an investment of persistence and you welcome challenges because you are looking to build your future, then you will not react the wrong way. You will respond with intelligence and will produce good results.
If you don’t discipline your disappointment, you will have a rough life. If you can turn your disappointment into drive, there is no limit to what you can achieve.
Finally, you can be mentally tough and not connected deeply to a sense of purpose and, if this is the case, at the first sign of real pain you start looking for a way out.
The primary component of emotional resiliency is self-control. Self-control is both a mental and emotional component. You can have emotional responses that trigger unhealthy thought patterns, but you can also have unhealthy thought patterns that trigger the emotional responses. It’s very rare to have a pure thought that doesn’t have an emotion tied to it. And it’s also very rare to have an emotion that’s powerful without even thinking about it.
You ultimately need a high motivation and desire to win and succeed.
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