Mastering Mental Toughness

Read time: 4 minutes

You'll need a handful of things to achieve mental toughness.

As a business owner, family man, and former $1.2B executive, I’ve had to pull myself through some difficult times. But those difficult times are the obvious times when you need mental toughness.

A trap people fall into is getting complacent in the good times.

Good times and difficult times come and go.

I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t experienced both. The good times make life seem easy. The difficult times make life seem hard.

Yet, none of that is true. They’re just times.

We perceive these moments as good or difficult based on our thoughts. If you haven’t gone through anything challenging, most of your thoughts will be, “Life is so hard.”

To help, you need to build mental toughness.

That’s what I’m sharing today.

My hope is by sharing these strategies, that you’ll implement them in your life.

When you implement them, your life won’t be a rollercoaster like it is now.

It will just be life - something you can enjoy every day.

Embrace Challenges

View adversity as an opportunity to grow rather than something to avoid.

The more setbacks you can face, the faster you’ll get to where you want to go. The key is understanding struggle is part of the process. It’s through struggle that we gain strength and resilience.

Now, you can wait for life to send you challenges and hope you can handle them, or you can deliberately do challenging things. The more things you do that make you struggle, the better you’ll be at taking adversity life sends your way.

You can do things like:

• Do a difficult workout rather than an easy one

• Put down the food if your goal is to lose weight

• Have the difficult conversation you know needs to happen

By doing these things, they help you avoid the following:

• Your body isn’t able to do the things you want to do

• Your doctor telling you that you have diabetes

• Your employee disrupts the entire business

Take control and force yourself to do something challenging rather than life force it on you.

Upgrade Your Self Talk

How you talk to yourself matters.

If you tell yourself you’re not good enough, you won’t perform as well as you could. If you’re telling yourself you can’t do something, you won’t.

You need to talk to yourself better.

Deliberately create statements that you can repeat to yourself. Focus the statements on who you are becoming.

Your subconscious mind will pick up on them over time and create that new thinking pattern.

Here are a few examples:

• I am an effective leader

• I am a successful business owner

• I am a great _____ (i.e., husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, etc.)

Don’t go overboard and create 100 statements. It’s best to start with a handful you can repeat throughout the day.

Once you lock those in, you can add others if needed.

Regulate Your Emotions

Emotions can help or hinder your performance. Our goal is to use them to get to where we want to go.

Negative emotions pop up from time to time for everyone. There’s no escaping that. But it’s not something to avoid.

These negative emotions can help us figure out what we’re not doing. They guide us to the path we want to be on.

For example, let’s say you wake up angry. The world sucks, and you’re not sure why.

This is a great time to sit down and be with that emotion. Take a pen and pad and write out your feelings and why. If writing isn’t your thing, go for a walk or find a friend to talk with.

You’ll uncover the reason for your anger which is likely some version of: you are not being who you want to be.

Most of the time, the negative emotions involve us not doing our part.

We have a vision of who we want to be, and we’re not that person. We’re living out of integrity with the one person who means the most to us, ourselves.

Figure out what area you’re not keeping your word to yourself and fix it.

99% of the time, negative emotions are about us, not others.

Consistent Action

The mental game is long - you don’t win it after one day.

It’s won day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.

Most people start new habits or behaviors strong.

They keep to their diet, leadership style, and business for the first week.

After that first week, things get messy. They skip days. The meaning behind the habit/behavior begins to fade.

Next thing you know, they’ve negotiated with themselves that it’s not worth it anymore.

If you want something, you must commit to playing the long game.

Most people won’t think this way. They’re more focused on what they can get right now. This is why so few people reach big goals.

When things become inconvenient, they negotiate with themselves and stop.

We’ve all done it.

It’s why we’ve all failed to achieve something in the past.

To become mentally tough, you have to push through inconvenient times. You have to keep your word to yourself.

While the long game might seem daunting, it’s not as long as you think.

Taking it day by day, knowing who you need to be, and keeping your word to yourself will stack days upon days.

You will become the person you want to be before you know it.

Mental toughness is not something you do once, and you’re good at it. It’s something you do every day.

When the alarm goes off, what do you do?

What do you do when something comes up simultaneously with your workout?

It’s these choices that build or destroy our mental toughness.

I’ve found it’s easier to have someone in your corner holding you accountable for who you want to be.

If you need someone to hold you accountable, I’ll help.

Whenever you are ready, here's how I can help you:

1. Coaching - I will help you implement the exact same proven system I use to grow my career and businesses and perform at an elite level. Limited availability.  APPLY.

2. Advising - I advise tech leaders and business owners to accelerate their team’s performance. SUBMIT AN INQUIRY.