What’s Your Level of Hardiness?
After watching the British Open (or as most golf pundits call it “The Open”) last week, it was intriguing to watch many of the players that were in reach of the lead gain or lose momentum through the final day and at the same time hear the commentators and analysts at various points talk about mental toughness. In sports, this term gets thrown around a lot, and I find this interesting when talking about professional athletes as being a former athlete I can attest that to become a professional you certainly need to have a substantial level of mental toughness. But what does it really mean?
In short, Mental Toughness is “The ability to work hard and respond resiliently to failure and adversity; the inner quality that enables individuals to work hard and stick to their long-term passions and goals.”
For non-athletes, we often interchange the phrase “mental toughness” with the term “hardiness” which refers to the ability to endure difficult conditions. Sounds familiar right.
When you consider your current life and the many situations that you are going through or have gone through, where do you stand on the level of mental toughness or hardiness?
Are you “mentally tough?”
Do you possess a high level of “hardiness?”
I am sure as you are answering these questions you are probably giving yourself the age old answer of “it depends.”
And you’d be correct, however, there are still some common themes you can look for to adequately judge your level of mental toughness or hardiness.
How well do you handle the failure and adversity?
How quickly does it take you to overcome or rebound from the adversity?
Can you endure the adversity and continue to persist or do you let it overwhelm you and plague your abilities to grow and move forward?
To me, mental toughness is about showing up every day, even when you don’t want to, especially when you don’t want to.
It’s about riding the highs and accepting that there will always be lows … and being able to persevere through those low moments.
It’s about embracing the journey, not just focusing on the destination.
It’s about not allowing one moment or mistake to completely derail you.
It’s about allowing yourself to have a bad day, and showing up the next day ready to try to have a better one.
It’s about surrounding yourself with positive, supportive people … and avoiding the Negative Nancy’s and Bummer Barry’s who will delight in dragging you down if you let them.
It’s about making decisions with confidence and owning the outcomes of those decisions … as opposed to playing the victim and blaming other people or your circumstances.
But mostly, it’s about showing up … for your workout, for your daily preparation, for your friends and family.
And for yourself.
Be present today. Accept the highs and the lows. If you make a judgment that doesn’t align with your goals or just have a bad day, learn from it, leave it and move on. On that note, I heard a great quote the other day, “if you have regrets, you’ll continue to live in the past!”
The truth is, mental toughness and hardiness is not something we either have or don’t have. It’s something we always have but fluctuates at different levels. More importantly, it’s something we can grow and choose to have more of, and train our mind and body to progress to higher levels more quickly.
A perfect example of this is the difference between a Rookie and a seasoned Veteran. More often the not, the rookie hasn’t had enough exposure of that particular stressor to handle the pressure quick enough. Some rookies will diminish in the face of that level of adversity, whereas others will endure and train their mental state to understand and eventually flourish under the same conditions.
It has been highly publicized when Tiger Woods was learning to become a professional, his father would play loud music or throw things in front of him or around him during his backswing. This had nothing to do with improving his golf game from a technique standpoint, it was primarily to do with improving his ability to stay focused and ignore outside influences and still perform at the highest level. It strengthened his hardiness, his mental toughness to be resilient under pressure.
Maybe it’s the same for you, it’s not that you can’t handle or endure the stressor or lacking in mental toughness, it’s that you haven’t been exposed enough to it, or you haven’t attempted to learn and continue to persist when exposed to that stressor again. Why is it that many individuals fail in their weight loss journey? Not for lack of trying, but more from a lack of enduring AND possibly the ability to set up conditions to help them persist through the levels of adversity and come out on the other side.
It is the very reason why developing better habits and behaviors around the actual goal you are looking to achieve, will ultimately lead to your success because you are building the conditions to counter adversity and struggles and endure through them and still get the wins.
How can you become more hardy and mentally tough on a daily basis to move closer to your goals?
What do you need to develop to endure and overcome to strengthen your resolve?
Dr. Dan Dodd is an Exercise Science professional and Coach for BSL Nutrition. Dan is an avid writer on nutrition, exercise, metabolism and body composition. If you’d like to receive more stories, subscribe to his weekly emails.
