Top Tips to improve your mental toughness

By Ray Smith, Director of Insight Leadership Solutions Ltd

Understanding your mental toughness is a key trait to being successful. A lot of people talk about it, although many rarely grasp what it really means.

Many suggest it is about being resilient and coping with life, however, there is far more to it than that. It is more than just being able to stand the stress or pressure of life. Being mentally tough is more about self-awareness, understanding yourself and how to perform or execute tasks well whilst under pressure to succeed. With those occasions where you are not successful, understanding what went wrong and knowing or learning from them to succeed another time.

The other end of the scale is being mentally sensitive, and these people can succeed too. It is a scale of aptitude, understanding oneself and then application of strategies (or thinking) to ensure you achieve your desired outcomes. Self-awareness is the important thing here.

So how can you improve yourself? The absolute key attribute here is learning about yourself and how you think, together with how you cope or perform in the environment you live and work in. In the absence of getting an actual assessment, what could you do now, to improve your standing on this scale?

Determine what you are trying to achieve and commit

We need an element of purpose in our lives, we need outcomes to strive for, they are more meaningful than goals, these are merely targets.

We must consciously choose to commit to do something different to get our outcome. You also must consider what you are going to give up or change in your thinking or behaviours to get it. Many people talk about sacrificing things for success, being mentally tough is about taking control and making a choice & doing what it takes to get it.

Control

Having a good grip of yourself so you know what is in your control that you can do something about and what is not in control is important. For things outside your control, you need to either accept that and work with it or around it or try and influence the thing that is controlled that you cannot control. Being aware of this is quite important as countless people get stressed over this kind of thing – if you cannot control something, you have to learn to live with it in some way, as no amount of worrying will change it! This last point is important, as other important items here are how you control yourself emotionally, learning your triggers and how to manage them or prevent yourself from an emotional response.

Challenge

How you make decisions is significant too. What is your risk appetite? How do you determine what to do - how do you determine consequences against gains? How much stretch do you like in your life – how comfortable are you living in your uncomfortable zone? The more comfortable you become in stretching your comfort zone, the easier it will be to develop and grow. Developing a growth mindset is crucial for success and achieving change. During stretch periods how do you learn from the experiences; do you review life’s successes and failures? When you reflect on what you have been doing, how do you implement changes in your thinking so that next time you have a higher chance of success? Do you have a system, work with a coach, or journal to detail these experiences so you can objectively review what happened and when so you can improve for next time?

Confidence

This is an area many people talk about struggling with. It can take many forms; however, you may be surprised to hear as humans we often self-deprecate and quite often label other issues as confidence as it’s easier or more palatable to accept. Changing your opinion of yourself and improving your self-belief is crucial to success. This might mean developing new skills or attributes to develop yourself, or reframing how you think about yourself by objectively reviewing the information you are using to assess yourself currently. Finally, developing your social skills and assertiveness skills will also help develop your mental toughness, as possessing the ability to communicate effectively with others is vital to being able to manage staff and work with clients. Reviewing personal interactions that don’t go to plan will also enable you to improve your mental toughness as you seek to become a better communicator.

Learning more about yourself to increase your self-awareness, adopting a growth mindset and developing your mental toughness are strategic decisions that will pay dividends in improving your professional and personal effectiveness.