How mentally strong are you?
Reaching your greatest potential is part striving for the positive goals in life, but more importantly it’s having the mental courage and fortitude to accurately manage the downsides.
Our ten top tips for honing mental agility and strength.
- Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself. It is futile to wallow in problems and often easy to exaggerate the tough stuff. Hardship and sorrow are inevitable but feeling sorry for yourself is a choice. Our advice – find three things to be grateful for every day. This is excellent dinner conversation for families with young kids – set your kids up to be mentally strong.
- Don’t squander energy on things you can’t control. Complaining, worrying, devoting energy to unproductive thinking is pointless. Our advice – learn to let go.
- Don’t let yourself slip into victim mode. Empower yourself to change the language you use. Our advice – change the way you look at a situation – own it!
- Don’t worry about pleasing everyone. Live authentically, live whole-heartedly, approach your world through your values. Our advice – Keep a list of your top five values in your wallet, and stay true to them. Get the list out regularly as a self-audit. You can’t please everyone. At least focus on pleasing yourself!
- Don’t shy away from change. Instead understand your behaviour – the way you react to change. Create positive change, adapt. Our advice – practice a healthy oversight to new activities, change yourself first as the most positive way to influence others.
- Don’t dumb down your actions by avoiding risks. Our advice – Face your fear and grow. Extraordinary just doesn’t happen – it takes work, so challenge yourself!
- Don’t dwell on the past. Make peace with your past. Our advice – learn from the past but leave the negatives in the past.
- Don’t resent the success of others. Know your own definition of success – and target your attention towards achieving that. Our advice – celebrate the success of others, recognize great feats and happiness. Grow as a person by expanding your horizons.
- Don’t give up. Learning wears many outfits! How common is the story that the most successful entrepreneurs have been bankrupt at some stage in their life? Did you know Richard Branson has had 14 Virgin companies that have failed…… has that stopped him? Our advice – Hone your skills on how to bounce back from failure.
- Don’t expect immediate results. The story of the hare and the tortoise rings true in so many of life’s elements. Back to those values and goals again……..stick with them to the end. Our advice – be your own mental strength coach or share the opportunity with a close friend, and mentor each other. A problem shared is a problem halved.