Want to be Mentally Tougher in the New Year?
As we make New Year’s resolutions, a common theme is to develop more mental toughness. But how do we do it?
Hint: It’s not the relentless grind, though sometimes you need to just suck it up and go again. But more than that, it’s about if you actually RECOVER, not how relentlessly you attack.
“Resilience is how you recharge, not how you endure”… — Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, as quoted in Harvard Business Review.
He goes on to challenge our very way of thinking about mental toughness as a society:
We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit. We imagine a Marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round, or a football player picking himself up off the turf for one more play. We believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate.
The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity.
He gives great, practical advice in the article that I recommend reading.
I first heard of this concept when reading The Power of Full Engagement* by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
There, they discussed how it’s the way a tennis player resets between plays by serving a certain way or how a free throw shooter uses rituals to relax at the free throw line, mentally making that clutch at-the-buzzer-game-winner feel emotionally just like any of the millions of free-throws practiced in an empty gym or on a concrete street ball court.
I haven’t always been great at following and recognizing my need for rituals in my life to help me reset, reboot and reconnect, but I can look back and trace the breakout times of ingenuity, creativity and raw gut-it-out massive production directly to the times that I worked hard and relaxed hard, too. Using an active recovery method of ritualizing things that are important to me — time with my wife or reading fiction, having dinner with my family or playing sports — into ingrained habits that pull me to my own spiritual and emotional center on a regular basis.
What about you?
I’m curious what methods you use to stay mentally tough but not get yourself mentally unbalanced either?
- This is a referral link. Search Amazon for “Power of Full Engagement” if you do not like using referral links.
