A Guide to Mental Toughness: Methods and How To’s
Overcoming challenges outside your control and finding meaning in everything you do.
Ok, that’s widely known: mental toughness is essential for success in life.
People who resist and insist are often the ones who dare to keep seeking bold goals — even when they seem impossible.
Many of the challenges we face are outside of our control, and frequently are these cases that discourage people. At this point, having mental toughness is crucial to keep pushing the limits.
In this article, I’ll talk about how to develop mental strength and how it can help you reach your goals while taking care of yourself.
What Is Mental Toughness?
Mental toughness is about overcoming the difficulties and challenges of life.
It’s the ability to persevere, stay motivated even when it gets tough, be resilient during hard times or failures, face fear to achieve your goals.
It comes from a combination of things, but there are some key points. After all, it is necessary to:
- Understand where you’re good and bad at.
- Try relentlessly to improve each day.
- Do not care about what’s out of your control.
- Make sure everything you’ll do will be meaningful in the end.
Practicing these habits will help us build resilience — the ability to bounce back after setbacks. And this can be translated in the following methods.
Seeking Feedback Systematically
We need to be able to assess our performance honestly and openly.
Seeking feedback systematically is essential for development. You can do this by looking at different areas in your life such as work, health or relationships.
When it comes to work, you could ask your boss how you’re doing, get feedback from colleagues or look at what goals are set and track if you’re hitting them.
Also, there are apps that can help you build your profile and seek improvements, like:
In terms of health, you might want to consider a fitness tracker to see physical progress over time or even keep a food diary so that you can be aware of the nutritional content of what you eat.
For relationships, think about getting feedback from friends or family on how well you’re doing things like compromising or setting boundaries.
Being Accountable To Others And Ourselves
We need to be accountable for our actions. Only really accountable people are mentally strong.
This means being able to answer the question of whether we’re doing what we said we would, and holding ourselves responsible when it comes to our goals or commitments.
This can take different forms in different areas of life.
It might mean signing up for a race and then training for it, setting deadlines and taking action towards meeting them or even making promises to others and following through with them.
The key is not just accountability but also ownership — feeling like we are the ones in charge of our lives and what happens next.
Accepting Mistakes As Part of The Learning Process
Making mistakes is a natural and necessary part of learning. We need to be able to accept them to improve.
This means not beating ourselves up over things we can’t control, but also taking responsibility for our own actions. When we mess up, we should learn from it and do better next time.
This goes hand-in-hand with being accountable — if we d our past mistakes, then there’s no real point in trying to be better in the future.
Setting Up Challenging (But Doable) Goals
To develop mental toughness, it’s important that we set challenging goals but make sure they’re still achievable.
This way, when we reach our goals, we don’t learn from just the experience of achieving them but also from the journey of getting there.
This could mean making a plan to achieve something and tracking our progress along the way or even breaking down larger goals into smaller steps that we can complete easily.
Finding Meaning In What We Do
When it comes to developing mental toughness, one of the most important things is finding meaning in what we do.
In his book Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl demonstrates how much meaning is related to giving oneself, to service.
We need to be able to see how what we’re doing ties into our bigger picture — why are we working so hard at this job, eating this food or training for this race?
Anything you want should — in a deeply sincere way — improve the lives of others, and that will give back to you.
When everything we do has purpose and significance, it becomes easier to push through tough times. And over time, as we continue adding more meaning to others' lives, mental toughness will develop naturally.
Caring For The Body
Mental toughness doesn’t just come from within — it’s also affected by our external environment. This means taking care of our bodies through exercise, good nutrition and hygiene.
When we’re physically healthy, it becomes easier to stay mentally strong as well. We’re better able to cope with stress, have more energy and be more positive overall.
All of these things work together to create a foundation for developing mental toughness. It’s not easy, but with time and practice, it’s achievable.
Mental toughness isn’t something you’re born with — it takes a lot of effort to make happen!
But once you start down this path, the rewards will be worth every ounce of energy put in. And by following these steps, you’ll soon become unstoppable.
