Written by: Robert McAlister, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Mental toughness can be what separates the good from great. It gives you the confidence needed to keep pushing forward despite the situation, obstacle or challenges you are faced with. A key component of mental toughness is the ability to focus on the challenge right in front of you.
It is certainly not about being macho in any sense, it is entirely about our ability to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. It is a very well-evidenced psychological concept. Mental toughness is a personality trait that determines to a significant extent how we respond to life – its stressors, pressure, challenge, and opportunity.
Improved Resilience and Performance
Most people tend to associate mental toughness with athletes or people who must deal with life-threatening and stressful situations like the armed forces. But mental toughness now plays a vital role in business. For instance, professional coaches like myself use it as part of our coaching for clients looking to become more personally resilient and improve their overall performance, and competitive edge. The critical differentiator between professionals who consistently succeed and those who struggle is the ability to perform and deliver when times are difficult or under pressure.
As Dr. Hendrie Weisinger writes in his excellent book Performing Under Pressure – The Science of Doing Your Best When it Matters Most: Nobody performs better under pressure. Regardless of the task, pressure ruthlessly diminishes our judgment, decision-making, attention, dexterity, and performance in every professional and personal arena. So, it is about finding pressure management techniques and tools to help you remain at least consistent and able to perform that’s important. Developing mental toughness is one of those measures.
Over the course of my life and career, I have certainly developed mental toughness, and this has come from experiences, environments, challenges, and training both personal and professional. As you will see mental toughness whilst built on experiences, is more about what you do with those experiences, how you reflect and use them to add to your personal armour, both positively and negatively. I have also professionally coached clients to develop in these areas, including groups who operate in challenging and complex environments or have faced and overcome extreme adversity, and being able to draw on personal experience is an advantage.
What is Mental Toughness?
Mental toughness is the ability to manage and overcome stress, anxiety, worries, concerns, and circumstances that prevent you from succeeding or excelling at a task. It is also a measure of your resilience, confidence, and ability to see challenges as opportunities rather than threats. People achieve things partly because of their skill, talent, and ability, but also because of their mental toughness. Again, let me reinforce an earlier statement that mental toughness is not a macho or aggressive notion; some of the quietest and most passive people are exceptionally resilient.
I once ran a course that was attended by predominately military personnel who rather stereotypically came across as rather macho in behaviour. Until they found out that the 60-year-old civilian school- teacher who they looked at with complete contempt had spent the last 20 years working (unarmed) in some of the world’s most dangerous places and was kidnapped twice. To say that person demonstrated a high level of Mental Toughness was an understatement and the overall learning was richer for it.
Understanding and developing a team’s mental toughness delivers increased performance, more positive behaviours, and a greater capacity to cope with challenges and change. But perhaps the biggest benefit of mental toughness development, especially in the current climate, is greater well-being, both mentally and physically.
What does it add to what we can do?
“I really think a champion is defined not by their wins but how they can recover when they fail” – Serena Williams
Mental toughness differs from most widely used personality concepts in that it describes “how we think”. Most personality models and measures used in people and organisational development describe and predict behaviour – “what we do when confronted by events”. This is of course, useful but perhaps not as useful as understanding “why we behave the way we do”.
Understanding mental toughness provides the opportunity for that insight. This is fundamentally important if we are to change behaviour, where this is needed, and to understand why some events create an issue for some but not for others. Research shows that mental toughness correlates closely with performance, well-being, mental agility, and aspirations – all interrelated and all central to success for individuals and organisations.
A lack of mental toughness can create a few critical problems such as:
Frustration: Frustration over making mistakes, poor performance or trailing in a competition. Frustration keeps the mind stuck in the past, preventing you from seeing the opportunities in the present to turn the tide in your favour.
Fear of Failure: Fear over bad outcomes or choking in critical moments. Fear is future-based and, also, prevents you from focusing in, the now or the things you need to do in the present to be successful.
Dwelling on Mistakes: Dwelling on errors is the number one distraction today. You cannot be in the present moment or stay in the zone if your mind is stuck on a missed opportunity or poor performance. Once you begin to dwell on an error and beat yourself up, it is very hard to stop the cycle of negativity.
Proactive and Reactive Resilience
The importance of developing psychological resilience has been recognised across a range of pressurised performance domains from professional sports to elite military units or critical health care to name but a few, there are many more. Psychological resilience refers to the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure. The term ‘proactive resilience’ is used to refer to its proactive quality reflected in a person maintaining their well-being and performance when under pressure, and the term ‘reactive resilience’ is used to refer to its bounce-back quality reflected in minor or temporary disruptions to a person’s well-being and performance when under pressure and the quick return to normal functioning.
In line with the meanings of the word resilience, training in psychological resilience – should be both proactive in nature and target performers before, during, and after stressful or adverse encounters.
Because people’s mental characteristics and outlook change over time, so too does their psychological resilience. Psychologists and others can, therefore, seek to influence – and hopefully enhance – people’s mental strength resilience.
Mental Toughness Training
Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in evidence-based programs and interventions to develop resilience in the workplace for both performance and wellbeing. One such approach that has started to be used across a range of pressurised performance domains (some mentioned above) is a program of mental adversity training. Underpinned by resilience-related theory and research, mental adversity training focuses on three main areas – personal qualities, facilitative environment, and challenge mindset – to enhance performers’ ability to withstand pressure.
Personal Qualities
The cornerstone of any resilience training is, not surprisingly, an individual’s personal qualities, which can be described as the psychological factors that protect an individual from negative consequences. In resilience training within the area of personal qualities, we must differentiate between personality characteristics, psychological skills and processes, and desirable outcomes that protect an individual from negative consequences. In any moment of time, these personal qualities will likely be tested by stressors and adversities and/or supported by social and environmental resources.
Another point worth reinforcing is that personality characteristics are less amenable to change than psychological skills, both of which underpin desirable outcomes.
With these points in mind, the aim of mental fortitude training is to optimise an individual’s personal qualities so that he or she can withstand the stressors that they encounter at any given moment. This aim is, of course, aspirational because any individual, no matter what his or her psychological make-up is, will succumb at some point (his or her ‘breaking point’) to (extreme) adversity and hardship. It is, therefore, imperative to look beyond an individual’s personal qualities to the wider environment in which he or she operates.
Creating the Right Environment
Any psychological resilience training should, as much as practically possible, consider the broader environment within which individuals operate. A setting or context that fosters the development of psychological resilience is referred to as a facilitative environment. Since person-environment interactions are highly complex, it is helpful to identify cross-cutting properties that span environmental factors.
The challenge involves having high expectations of people and helps to instill accountability and responsibility. The provision of developmental feedback is important to inform about how to improve and, in the context of the present discussion, develop resilience. Support refers to enabling people to develop their personal qualities and helps to promote learning and build trust.
The provision of motivational feedback is important to encourage and inform about what has been and is effective in developing resilience. Based on the notions of challenge and support, the environment that leaders create can be differentiated between four categories:
Low-challenge-low-support
High challenge-low support
Low challenge-high support
High challenge-high support.
In mental toughness training, these areas are labeled as stagnant environment, unrelenting environment, comfortable environment, and facilitative environment respectively. Each environment is characterized by different features, but for resilience to be developed for sustained success, a facilitative environment needs to be created and maintained. If too much challenge and not enough support is imposed then the unrelenting environment will compromise well-being; conversely, if too much support and not enough challenge is provided then the comfortable environment will not enhance performance.
Challenge Mindset
Arguably the pivotal point of any resilience training program is for individuals to positively evaluate and interpret the pressure they encounter, together with their own resources, thoughts, and emotions. Largely predicted by (the combination of) an individual’s personal qualities and his or her immersion in a facilitative environment, the ability to evoke and maintain a challenging mindset is of crucial importance in developing resilience. The focus here is on how individuals react to stressors and adversity, rather than the environmental events themselves.
Mental toughness training therefore places emphasis on helping individuals to positively evaluate and interpret the pressure they encounter, together with their own resources, thoughts, and emotions. Key to this is changing negative appraisals into positive or constructive thinking. For those who due to their personalities, background, or surroundings tend to look on the dark side, this can be very difficult. Therefore, psychological skills and processes need to be practiced regularly, and why the environment needs to facilitate this development through an appropriate balance of challenge and support.
Fundamental to changing this mindset should be individuals having a good self-awareness of any negative thoughts that make them more vulnerable to the negative effects of stress and realising and accepting that they have a choice about how they react to and think about events.
Drawing in part on cognitive-behavioural therapies, the key to dealing with negative thinking is to regulate one’s thoughts. Although the aim is to engender and maintain a positive evaluation of pressure and a challenging mindset, it is important to recognise that we are all human and will at times engage in negative thinking. In these circumstances, individuals are at risk of becoming trapped in a state of distress characterised by prolonged worry and reflection. Individuals should be accepting and non-judgmental about any negative thoughts so that they can begin, when they are ready, to adapt how they respond to such thoughts and beliefs.
Getting Comfortable with the Uncomfortable
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit” – Aristotle
One practical example of mental conditioning I engage in myself, is that of taking regular cold showers as part of increasing mental toughness. Its simple and easy, and something most people have access to daily. It’s about mentally conditioning yourself to feel comfortable doing uncomfortable things, making these into a habit. By doing things as simple as this, things outside of your comfort zone even on this small level, you are eventually more comfortable doing this on a much higher level. Cold showers are a great way to do this, and surprisingly effective for building mental toughness. The same goes for overcoming other mental toughness related issues, be it insecurity, anxiety, or general feeling of weakness.
Taking cold showers is uncomfortable, so training yourself to face your fears and embrace discomfort is going to make you a stronger, tougher, and happier person. Not only that, but you get to take advantage of all the health benefits that come with embracing the cold.
Can We All Develop Mental Toughness?
The million-dollar question. The short answer is “yes we can”. Although there are important caveats to be noted. Although research shows that there is a genetic factor in our mental toughness it is also the case that our mental toughness also reflects our experiences and what we learn from them as I mentioned earlier. For many of us, we have learned to be mentally tough or mentally sensitive there is no right or wrong in this.
So, if we have learned to think in one way, we can re-learn to think if we reflect on what we experience and draw new lessons from that. The first caveat. There is no implicit imperative to develop our mental toughness. Rather the key is self-awareness and reflection on what this means for the way we go through life.
Some who are mentally sensitive will be happy to remain as they are and will benefit from learning and adopting techniques and approaches that the mentally tough will adopt. In that sense, they learn to cope and often will usefully learn about their strengths and use those to optimises performance well-being and so on. Others will identify the benefit of a change in some aspects of mental toughness and will purposefully seek to change in some way. They are learning to deal with their state.
The second caveat is that it is extremely difficult to target mental toughness for development. Rather it is more effective to target one or more of the factors that make up Mental Toughness -= such as Emotional Control, Self- Regulation or Risk Orientation.
By targeting and focusing on many of the elements and factors highlighted in this article you will have a major impact on the overall mental toughness of an individual or team.
Follow me on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or visit my website for more info! Read more from Robert!
Robert McAlister, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Robert’s mantra is ‘think differently’ and he certainly walks that talk in everything he does. Certainly not one for taking the easy path, he thrives on a challenge and the words ‘the most tenacious person we know’ are a major understatement. He is a recognized leader in the field of leadership and team coaching. and is the Director and driving force behind Glenbarr Coaching, who offers a very different coaching experience. For over 30 years he has worked globally with a diverse range of high-profile clients from Governments to NGO’s, Private Sector Corporates to Public Sector Agencies. Celebrities and Senior Executives who have all benefitted from his sought-after talents. Such a wide portfolio and body of work has provided him with very unique insights and approaches to training and coaching strategies that work and are sustainable. The central theme to Robert’s career has been people development and growth. Specialising in mindset, behaviours, and team dynamics to effect positive outcomes and increased performance. Equally, at home in the boardroom or challenging field environments getting his hands dirty, Robert’s real magic is bringing the best out of individuals or teams to achieve their goals. If you are looking for a truly transformational experience that is remembered and relived long after any official training or coaching session, then Robert is the guy to talk to!
.jpg)
