Yesteday I shared the stories of crashing my car, my house burning down and more.
(You can read them here if you missed it.)
I want to dive more deeper into how my mental toughness has developed over time.
And with that, let’s answer this question…
“what is a realization that you had to help you become mentally tough?”
There is no one single realization.
I’ve already mentioned a couple that may be important to readers…
- Mental toughness is a skillset and can be developed
- Mental toughness can be bypassed in multiple ways like joy or ease (which often give the appearance of mental toughness on the outside when it actually isn’t)
And now let’s cover another helpful realization. Each time you utilize mental toughness, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, you can learn from the experience.
When that series of crashing my car, having lapsed insurance and my water heater blowing up occurred I got down on myself. My mental toughness failed.
But there is no failure, only feedback. (This is one of the NLP presuppositions, and in my opinion, one of the most powerful and useful ones there.)
I reflected on what happened. I thought and felt about my thoughts and my feelings. Specifically, I do a written journal that includes weekly and monthly reviewing of the previous week or month. This allowed me to notice that I did not have complete self-control here. It allowed me to ask what I could do better about it next time?
To be honest, I don’t recall specifics that came with that. But I know that something came out of it and faded into the background of my mind in how I processes external events.
Later on my house burned down plus other West Coast fires I had to deal with.
Here was a success! My mental toughness allowed me to move forward with these events really as if nothing much more than stubbing my toe.
Again, this is useful feedback. I reflected on this a whole lot because it surprised even me. (If you missed that you can read about it here and here.)
That second article mentions the phrase “this gives me perspective” over and over again looking at different events.
And that is a big part of mental toughness!
Changing your perspective let’s you think and feel differently about things.
One important part of perspective is time. And we talked about how important time is to mental toughness.
In summation, reflecting on both your wins and your losses when it comes to mental toughness helps you to expand your mental toughness. Either way its feedback. Figure out why you were successful and do more of that. Figure out why you failed and try other things next time.
I would argue mental toughness is largely a personal thing. While there are certainly best practices, and specific techniques (yes, I’ll be getting into those soon enough), you have to figure out what works best for YOU.
What I’ve explained here is the key to doing that.