Building Mental Resilience For Improved Success

leadership mindset and goals personal development Feb 09, 2023
Mental Resilience

Building mental resilience is essential in navigating life's inevitable challenges and is fundamental to living your best life. Our mental strength gets tested all the time, whether as a leader who has to lead her team through a crisis or an individual who has to deal with the adversities that so often beset us in life. Consequently, to beat the odds during hard times, you not only need the proper education, ability, intelligence, focus, perseverance, skill, and talent to get to where you want to be; but you also need mental resilience - a primary key to achieving success in life or business. 

What is Mental Resilience

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines resilience as "the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress." A similar concept to resilience, as defined by the APA, is mental resilience or mental toughness, which refers to the ability to stay strong in the face of adversity.

As stated by Dr. Peter Clough, Co-author of the book Developing Mental Toughness, "mental toughness describes the capacity of an individual to deal effectively with stressors, pressures, and challenges, and perform to the best of their ability, irrespective of the circumstances in which they find themselves." Mentally resilient people and leaders possess the ability and life skills to adapt to hardships, stress, emotional difficulties, and adversities. They can perform consistently and progressively under pressure in pursuit of their goals. 

How to build mental resilience

At some point in our personal or professional life, we will experience difficulties. These difficulties come in various forms. For example, it may come from relationship problems, heartbreaks, job loss, work-related crises, leadership challenges, financial worries, health problems, traumatic events, or stress. Consequently, when such inevitable eventualities occur, you must be emotionally and mentally prepared to face them. The best way to do so is to start building mental resilience.

Build your mental resilience by staying in control of your life. You can't control what happens to you, but managing how you respond is under your control. Hence following a daily routine consisting of sleep time, work time, meal time, and relaxation time can help you take control of your life and improve your mental resilience. Another way to build mental resilience is by accepting challenges as opportunities for growth. See them as "something that's happening for you and not as something that's happening to you." In other words, see these adversities as opportunities to become mentally resilient and not as a threat. Finally, build your mental resilience by practicing positive self-talk to program your subconscious mind and dismantle limiting beliefs. The idea of positive self-talk is to have an inner dialogue with yourself through positive reminders, a strategy that will help inoculate you against buckling under pressure.

Benefits of being mentally resilient

Being mentally resilient can positively affect your motivation, relationship, performance, and productivity. Furthermore, the desire to become a high performer - being your best, is simply a call to build your mental resilience. Hence, the better our mental resilience, the more likely we are to handle the challenge rather than give up. 

Our level of mental resilience also exerts a significant influence over the extent to which we can perform to the best of our abilities. Also, it creates a link between high performance and stress management because you can't perform or function to the best of your abilities unless you deal effectively with the pressures and challenges you experience in life or at work. So if you want to experience greater overall life satisfaction, you must be in a good mental state - you must be mentally resilient.