5 Key Tenants Of Mental Toughness
While your brains, ability, and natural talent certainly play a role in your success or failure in life, there is another characteristic that is possibly even more important. While getting ahead in life is easier when you have intelligence and skill, it turns out that your mental toughness is actually more of a factor in whether or not you reach your goals.
Some refer to this trait as grit, and mental toughness can help you achieve your personal, professional, and health goals by ensuring you can stick to your chosen path, even in the face of adversity. And more importantly, mental toughness is something you can develop and cultivate over time, so you don’t have to worry if you were not born with this essential ability.
From sports to business to everything else in life, mental toughness plays a crucial role in making dreams come true. Here are the five key tenets of mental toughness, including why each is so important.
The 5 Tenants of Mental Toughness
#1. Resiliency
Resiliency is your ability to rebound from mistakes and disappointments while continuing to try again. Those who are resilient can endure the setbacks and missed opportunities of achieving a goal, make adaptations to their strategy when necessary, and learn from their errors. Having resiliency is essential to mental toughness because it’s what ensures you pick yourself up and dust yourself off after stumbles and falls. Without this tenet, you would have a hard time persevering in the face of adversity and setbacks.
#2. Flexibility
Flexibility allows you to be responsive to the changes in life and make adjustments when they are needed. Being flexible in your approach as well as your solutions means you can spend less time picking up the pieces after a mistake and more time implementing new solutions. A flexible person can see many different ways forward and is not afraid to make changes midstream to achieve the desired result.
Part of being flexible is keeping yourself informed and educated. Continuous, life-long learning creates the conditions for flexibility throughout your life and equips you with the latest knowledge to ensure you can remain as flexible as possible.
#3. Strength
Strength means you can withstand pressure and forces from the outside while still giving your very best to a situation. Whether it is achieving your own goals or helping someone else reach theirs, strength keeps your intensity high while pursuing your goals and helps you to keep trying your best until you get what you want. Strength forms the reserves that allow you to continue knowing you are tougher than whatever obstacles you may be facing at the moment.
#4. Responsiveness
Being responsive allows you to stay tuned into your situation, assess what is happening, and identify the possible opportunities, challenges, and obstacles that may lie ahead. Being responsive helps you take advantage of situations that may benefit you. It also means you think more openly about solutions and alternatives, keeping your options open and considering solutions that may be outside the box. Responding to changes in your environment, needs, or resources is essential for reaching a goal, and being responsive can help you get there more easily.
#5. Courage
Doing the right thing, following your moral compass, and resisting the urge to cut corners when it benefits you but could harm others is the final tenet of mental toughness. It’s easy to be ruthless about getting what you want, but it’s better to have the courage of your convictions, allowing you to make the hard decisions that are right for you. Courage means being honest, standing up for yourself and your beliefs, and accepting that your views are the foundation of who you are and what you achieve in life.
These five tenants of mental toughness are all skills you can practice and hone in your life. You can cultivate them just as you would any other ability, and when they combine, you will have the mental toughness to achieve your dreams and overcome any obstacle in life.