4 steps to develop mental toughness
Basically everything we deal with in life is all mental. Now of course, if a physical object weighs 5,000 lbs and you try to lift it, you cant just manifest super human strength to lift a 5,000 lb object just by “thinking” about it. However, you get where I am going with this!
In order for you to deal with the pain of defeat and failure in life (especially as an entrepreneur), you need to be able to develop high levels of mental toughness.
A good example is working out. If you are into physical fitness and you go to the gym, many of us (I’m guilty of this many times myself) will “push” our self or just go through the motions in our workout. While I don’t always recommend going to failure (going until you TRULY can not do another rep) in your workout, too often we stop at the first sign of struggle or a little pain, even when we have MANY reps still left in the tank.
Lets put it this way. If you have milk in the refrigerator, you have NO reason to go get milk, right? Right. Its the same with getting results in the gym or getting any results in life. If you are leaving the gym/your workout without giving your best effort by mentally and physically challenging yourself, your body has NO reason to change. For most of us, we give up mentally before we physically can go any more.
If this is the case, how to we mentally push ourselves?
Well I am not going to consider myself an expert on this but I did get some insight from a man named Mark Divine, the author of The Way Of The Seal. Mark is a former Navy Seal who completed Seal training as the Honor man of his class. There were 0ver 100 people who started Seal training (one of the most elite training in the military), only 19 graduated at the end of it all and Mark was #1 in his class. This guy has an unbeatable mind to say the least!
4 steps to mental toughness
A summary of the 4 steps Mark Divine talks about in his book to develop mental toughness is:
#1 – Control your breathing. Slowly breathe in through your nose, exhale out your month. Controlling your breathing shuts of many of the nerves and triggers that cause anxiety and suck your energy.
#2 – Positivity. Mark calls it “feeding the courage wolf”. You must have a keen awareness of negative energies and shift them to positive.
#3 – Imagery. If you are going through a very tough physical exercise, many people will think “Holy Sh*t this is really tough!”. You need to shift your mental images to reflect something that is powerful, such as a steel beam.
#4 – Micro goals. If you are trying to complete a large or difficult task, break the task into micro goals. An example Mark uses in his book is doing a 20 minutes plank. A plank is an exercise where you are in the pushup position and holding that position for 20mins. In order to effectively complete this task, not only do you want to focus on 1 minute at a time, but you want to mentally take yourself to another place. Think of your WHY for getting in shape or gaining muscle. pretty soon those individual minutes will pass by.
How to develop mental toughness (TailoredEtv)
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