The Importance of Mental Strength: Warrior Mind Podcast #383
Over four years and going strong! With over 500,000 downloads from over 9 countries and 5 continents’…. this is the Warrior Mind Podcast.
In this episode of the Warrior Mind Podcast I’m going to go over some unique benefits for developing your mental strength.
When many people think about mental strength, they imagine someone born with a near-magical ability to persevere, has focus and constant drive. The truth is that just like most other things in life, you can learn it if you put in the requisite effort.
You don’t need to be aloof, avoid your emotions, act tough or live in a Pollyanna-like reality. Learning how to be objective in the face of difficulty, keep your thoughts and feelings balanced are some of the choices that help develop mental fortitude. Why should you care about making an effort to become mentally strong?
The Importance of Mental Strength
- It Gives You An Accurate Perspective of Life
The reality of life is that you will come across situations that are easy and others that are hard. The secret to thriving in any of these extreme contexts is maintaining an objective perspective. Mental strength helps you see the situation as it is, which is essential to achieving success in such times.
Stressful situations can weigh on your heart and mind. If you allow them to, such circumstances can lead you to believe that things are much worse than they are. Being pessimistic about the situation can cause you to think it impossible to overcome. As you lose heart, it impairs your ability to achieve peak performance.
Situations that seem easy, on the other hand, can lead you to overestimate your abilities. Once you think something is easier than it is, you lose sight of the potential difficulties that might lie ahead and get blindsided as a result. The unrealistic exuberance impairs your ability to hit peak performance.
Mental fortitude helps you not to despair when times are hard. Through mental endurance, you can recognize problem spots and avoid overestimating yourself. It can also help you develop the ability to gain insight into tough situations so that you can keep an even keel, achieving success in either case.
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- It Enables You to Achieve Your Goals
Mental grit is more than just thinking positive thoughts or perhaps ignoring them all together. When you are mentally strong, you become highly perceptive of your thoughts and emotions. The difference comes in in that by being highly attuned you learn how to face them without letting them best the best of you.
If you come up against emotions or thoughts that induce fear, discouragement, etc. mental fortitude helps you to behave contrary to how you feel or think and achieve better outcomes. If as a business leader you are wary of meeting new people to socialize, for example, through being mentally strong you can make a deliberate decision to act in a more friendly manner.
You may feel great discomfort initially, but as you keep behaving like the person you want to be, you learn to tolerate that discomfort. In time you gain the ability to brave your anxiety at meeting new people, become more effective at networking and ultimately grow your business relationships, leading to success.
Through being mentally strong, you can learn how to overcome discomfort that impedes you achieving your goals in various areas. You can be able to set realistic targets and meet them even in the face of opposing emotions and thoughts.
- It Helps Builds Resilience
Mental fortitude can help you develop resilience which is crucial in overcoming many of life’s challenges. When you have a big project with an extremely short deadline, for example, it is easy to panic and lose sight of what needs to do. Another temptation would be to cut corners so that you can finish quickly and eliminate the hardship.
The ability to mentally focus on a positive outcome of the project will keep you focused on the mission. As you deliberately chose to remind yourself of the positive result that awaits you on the other side of the project, you can effectively handle the task at hand.
The next time you face a similar kind of situation, you will have trained your mental muscle to power through the challenge. In time you build up your resilience, making you more successful with every problematic hurdle you cross. Learning to produce results in the face of seeming hardship consistently will earn you the reputation of being a problem solver in your organization or industry. Success will be the ultimate result of such a track record.
- It Teaches You How to Win the Long Game
Another perk of mental toughness is its ability to help you win in the long term. Although short-term goals are necessary incentives, audacious long-term goals are what adds significant value to your life and business. Whether it is training for a marathon, losing that extra weight, building a business from the ground up or initiating a management turnaround that will take time, you need to learn how to play the long game.
Mental grit helps you realize that success over the long term doesn’t happen overnight. Therefore, when frustration at what seems like a snail’s pace of growth hits, you can look at the bit-by-bit achievements you have had so far and see that it will add up to one significant gain if you remain patient.
- It Improves Your Quality of Life
If you can sum all the benefits of being mentally strong at one point, it can be the improved quality of life. As you learn how to be resilient, you begin to gain peace of mind amidst a sea of constant stress. Knowing how to plan for the long-term as well as the short-term gives you satisfaction as you see your life and business not only succeed in brief bursts but also gradually blooms. Knowing how to assess life’s situations accurately helps you not get tossed about by volatile emotional highs and lows.
You can choose to grow your mental muscles and perform at your best level to achieve success. Embrace difficulty, learn to successfully navigate change and you will become mentally strong. Interested in learning how to begin your journey in mental fortitude? Talk to me today and be on your way to success.
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