Mental Toughness: Build a Successful Mindset, Self Discipline, Resilience and Willpower To Achieve Long Lasting Goals 9798622763311

Table of contents :
Introduction
Mental Toughness & Resilience
Understanding Fear And Conquering Fear
When Worry Becomes Anxiety
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
The Mythology of Stress and Anxiety
Stress Myths
Myths About Anxiety
Setting Goals
The Right Goals
How to Set Clear Goals that You Actually Achieve
Daily Habits That Can Keep You Focused And Disciplined And Increase Resilience
Dumping bad habits
Starting good habits
Determining the most beneficial habits
Focus on Learning Instead of Past Failure
Zero Criticism or Complaining
Appear to Be in Control at All Times, in All Situations
Feel Happiness When Others Succeed
Shove less Important Situations to the Side
Look at Each Day as a Gift and Opportunity
Bring Your Best to the Table and Others Will Follow
Why Develop Mental Strength?
To establish a winner’s mind:
Mental toughness allows you to be able to prioritize.
Mental toughness teaches you patience
Mental toughness gives you greater life satisfaction:
The Power of Resilience and Discipline
What Is Discipline?
What Do They Have to Do With Mental Toughness?
How to Be More Resilient
Know Your Why
See Change as Positive Instead of Negative
Look for the Good in Every Situation
Have Confidence in Yourself and Your Abilities
Treat Problems Like Puzzles
Get Ahead of Problems When You Can
Never Ever Give Up
How to Be More Disciplined
Take Care of Your Basic Needs
Building Mental Toughness
Mental toughness is required for managing emotions.
Mental toughness is required for controlling and handling your thoughts.
Essential Traits of the Mentally Tough
Self-Confidence
Emotional Intelligence
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
The Ability to Listen to Your Emotions
Why Do You Need Emotional Intelligence?
When Do You Need Emotional Intelligence?
In Relationships
At Work
Emotional Intelligence versus Intellectual Intelligence
How to Gain Emotional Intelligence
Solicit the opinions of others.
Applying Mental Toughness in Different Fields
Applying Mental Toughness in Sports
Applying Mental Toughness in the Workplace
Applying Mental Toughness in Entrepreneurship
Applying Mental Toughness in Education
Applying Mental Toughness in the Military and Navy SEALs Mental Toughness
Applying Mental Toughness in Personal Matters
Gaining Full Control
1: Understand what thoughts actually are
2: Organize your thoughts
3: Turn negative thoughts around
4: Separate yourself from your thoughts
5: Choose acting over thinking
Conclusion

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MENTAL TOUGHNESS

Build A Successful Mindset, Self-Discipline, Resilience and Willpower To Achieve Long Lasting Goals

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Mental Toughness & Resilience Understanding Fear And Conquering Fear When Worry Becomes Anxiety Generalized Anxiety Disorder The Mythology of Stress and Anxiety Stress Myths Myths About Anxiety Setting Goals The Right Goals How to Set Clear Goals that You Actually Achieve Daily Habits That Can Keep You Focused And Disciplined And Increase Resilience Dumping bad habits Starting good habits Determining the most beneficial habits Focus on Learning Instead of Past Failure Zero Criticism or Complaining Appear to Be in Control at All Times, in All Situations Feel Happiness When Others Succeed Shove less Important Situations to the Side Look at Each Day as a Gift and Opportunity Bring Your Best to the Table and Others Will Follow Why Develop Mental Strength? To establish a winner’s mind: Mental toughness allows you to be able to prioritize. Mental toughness teaches you patience Mental toughness gives you greater life satisfaction: The Power of Resilience and Discipline What Is Discipline?

What Do They Have to Do With Mental Toughness? How to Be More Resilient Know Your Why See Change as Positive Instead of Negative Look for the Good in Every Situation Have Confidence in Yourself and Your Abilities Treat Problems Like Puzzles Get Ahead of Problems When You Can Never Ever Give Up How to Be More Disciplined Take Care of Your Basic Needs Building Mental Toughness Mental toughness is required for managing emotions. Mental toughness is required for controlling and handling your thoughts. Essential Traits of the Mentally Tough Self-Confidence Emotional Intelligence What Is Emotional Intelligence? The Ability to Listen to Your Emotions Why Do You Need Emotional Intelligence? When Do You Need Emotional Intelligence? In Relationships At Work Emotional Intelligence versus Intellectual Intelligence How to Gain Emotional Intelligence Solicit the opinions of others. Applying Mental Toughness in Different Fields Applying Mental Toughness in Sports Applying Mental Toughness in the Workplace Applying Mental Toughness in Entrepreneurship Applying Mental Toughness in Education Applying Mental Toughness in the Military and Navy SEALs Mental

Toughness Applying Mental Toughness in Personal Matters Gaining Full Control 1: Understand what thoughts actually are 2: Organize your thoughts 3: Turn negative thoughts around 4: Separate yourself from your thoughts 5: Choose acting over thinking Conclusion

INTRODUCTION One of the biggest reasons we live a disconnected life is because we carry around a lot of emotional and spiritual pain. We may or may not have a reason why we do this but, believe me, many of us are in some kind of pain. Sometimes our hearts are weak and our spirits are broken, but, still, we get up and go about the day and push down the pain. Maybe we were born with spiritual pain or we have unresolved emotional issues that we haven’t let go of and we hold them inside not knowing how to let them go. Some believe in past lives and that we are born with pain and this pain is punishment from a past life. For those who are Christian, they believe that we can remove the pain by giving it to God. Pass it to something or someone and let it go if you have it. It’s not worth holding on to. Without being mindful, we hold on to pain so tight that it leaves us exhausted, spiritually, physically and emotionally. Most of the pain is only in our minds and it is a dialogue we have with ourselves (the so called “negative self talk”). I am not saying things didn’t happen to you in your past. Maybe you can’t even remember or pin point anything. I couldn’t imagine some of the circumstances people have gone through and are still able to live each day. I have had hardships, but I am blessed that my pain is not as deep as other’s pain. All pain needs to be identified and let go of, though. The point here is to give yourself the gift of seeking out help to rid yourself if you are in pain. Start fresh again, even if for only once in your life.

Make the choice to be free. If you are in pain, the only way out of the darkness is to release it and let it go through you and then let it go. We must stop burdening ourselves and others with our pain. No more stories to tell others about why we are in pain. We protect ourselves from feeling the pain and we carry the baggage. We don’t understand how much we suffer and, conversely, we don’t know what it is like not to suffer. We expose ourselves to our pain by virtue of being in pain in the first place. We are constantly thinking about the pain of the past, the

present and the pain we will endure in the future. We don’t know we are in pain most of the time; however, we feel it but don’t recognize it until we have a problem and it affects our behavior. Mental toughness is essential because it compensates for the lack of skill, natural ability, and strength. You have often heard it said that the people at the top, in any field whatsoever, are not the most talented; they are those who stayed and kept at it despite the challenges they faced. Mental toughness is essential to prevent you from becoming a quitter.

MENTAL TOUGHNESS & RESILIENCE Mental toughness may mean something different to you than it means to someone else. Oftentimes, people think about surmounting hurdles and challenges that present themselves in order to keep pushing forward toward a goal. But what allows a person to form the drive and motivation to desire and believe that he can achieve that goal, and then to formulate a plan to achieve that goal? What gets the person to stop procrastinating and take steps toward achieving that goal? And what allows the person to stay focused, not get frustrated, not give up and follow through on trying to achieve that goal until he actually achieves it? Mental toughness is what it takes to channel your motivation, determination, and desire to achieve the objective you’ve set. It takes mental toughness to be on your way to achieving your goals and to take all of the steps that are listed above without getting sidetracked by distractions, emotions, thoughts, and other things that can take you off of your path. In fact, everything that a person wants to achieve in life takes some degree of mental toughness. How much mental toughness it takes is based on the difficulty of the goal. This is especially true because things may not always be easy for you to do and your goals may not be easy to accomplish. Learning how to develop your mental toughness can help you tremendously when setting out to achieve your goal. In fact, it is so important that you have a significant degree of mental toughness when trying to achieve the goals that you have in life. Education, money, and connection may all come in second, third, and fourth to having the mental toughness and fortitude to establish your goal, stick to it, and believe that you can achieve it. Mental toughness is often thought of as resilience - the ability to withstand what life throws at you and to keep going. One example of this comes into play when discussing mental toughness and professional athletics. If a major league baseball pitcher walks three batters in a row, he still must have the resilience to stand on the mound and pitch to the next batter even though the crowd might be booing, the backup pitcher may be warming up, the coach

may be yelling at him, and his teammates are disappointed. Why Do You Need Mental Toughness? Your mental state is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of knowledge, skill or money you have when you are trying to achieve a goal. There are a lot of people out there with the knowledge and education that they need to accomplish big dreams, but they do not have the proper mental state to do so. They may state moving along the way toward a goal and then back down for fear that they may fail, it will take too long, be too difficult, or somehow has otherwise become impossible. In fact, many people fail to state on their way toward achieving big goals at all because either they do not believe that it can be done, or they do not have the strength of mind to think that they can do it. Mental toughness can provide you the inner strength that you need to be on your way to achieving your goals. Much of a person’s inner strength to persevere and achieve is derived from his or her mental state. Thus, it is important for you to have a strong, stable mental state in which you can think clearly and, understand your emotions and desires, and take active steps toward achieving your goals.

Mental toughness is required to manage emotions. It is unavoidable that people will experience emotions. Emotions are a naturally occurring state of mind that is the result of a person’s surrounds, mood, and relationships and interactions with other people. Because emotions are naturally occurring, they may actually overtake a person’s thoughts and become their main focus if a person lets them do so.

This is where mental toughness comes in. Mental toughness gives a person the ability to control, to some extent, his or her emotions, as well as the way in which he or she reacts to them and how much these emotions take over the person’s mind. For instance, you may have had a fight with your spouse or significant other

in the morning which has you stressed out, sad or feeling some other emotion that is not conducive to getting a great deal of work done. Some people may not get much accomplished that day or even irritate their co-workers or make mistakes on the job because they are focusing on their emotions. A person who has mastered mental toughness, however, should be able to perform at a high level even if he or she still cares about the argument and has experienced some of the same emotions as the person who messes up at work that day. The saying ‘it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you handle it’ is true to a significant extent. Thus, mental toughness is very important when you seek to handle your emotions properly so that you can make wise and effective decisions while still experiencing emotions.

Mental toughness is required to control and handle your thoughts. Thoughts differ from emotions due to the fact that they are not always about feelings. In fact, a significant portion of our time is spent thinking about things that do not have much to do with our emotions. You may think about whether or not you are going to be able to finish your homework or work project on time. Although the thought of not finishing the assignment on time may evoke some feelings and emotions, the thought of whether or not you will finish the assignment on time is not primarily based on emotion. In order to think clearly and focus, you need to be able to control your thought. However, a challenge arises when there is a lot of things that are going on around you, and you find it difficult to focus on or even identify what is and what is not important. This is why it is so important to have mental toughness. Mental toughness can help you to control your thought processes so that you can focus and concentrate on the things that you need to be focused on or the task at hand despite whatever is going on in the world around you. There are some key people who are known to need and have an exceptional level of mental toughness. People such as performer and world-class athletes must possess a tremendous amount of mental toughness to perform in front of millions of people and excel without getting distracted by the crowd noise,

problems at home, worries that they have and more. Examples of people who possess this type of mental toughness include people such as Beyoncé, NFL players, Tiger Woods, and more. Beyoncé must get up on stage and perform for crowds of thousands of people on the day of the concert whether she is feeling happy, sad, sick or tired. She must remain focused to hit her dance steps perfectly, remember her songs even with the crowd noise and some of the fans singing along. Furthermore, the amount of talent that she has would not get her to where she is alone. She had to have the drive to get to the top, and she had to be determined along the way and stay focused. There are a lot of other singing acts and groups that were around when she started that were considered to be just as good as Destiny’s Child from which she came. Many of these groups and the singers in them are no longer around because they did not have the mental toughness to forge along through all of the struggles and hurdles that it takes to get to the top of the music field. In fact, many people may not even want to be where Beyoncé is because they understand that it is too much mental pressure for them to handle. Many people would like to accomplish much smaller goals with far fewer people watching in order to minimize the mental pressure that is put upon them. This is why most of the articles and books that you find about mental toughness are focused on professional athletes and major performers, so much so that they often neglect giving advice to the average layman about how he can utilize mental toughness in his daily life. Throughout this book, however, you will learn how to develop mental toughness even if you never plan to play a professional sport or get up on a stage and perform for a crowd of millions because everyone can benefit from developing and increasing their mental toughness to that they can move to new heights in their own lives. Just think about how much mental toughness a major league baseball player must have to stand at the plate with a baseball being thrown in his direction so close to him at almost 100 miles an hour if not more. He must be able to block out the crowd and not let the number of people who are watching cloud his judgment in any way. This is not an easy feat to accomplish, but it is a necessary one is he is to have any chance of succeeding at the game.

Mental toughness is the key to willpower. Most people would be surprised to find out that willpower or lack thereof is the primary obstacle that most people face when trying to better themselves. You would probably assume that it would be money, race or class; however, in this day and age, it is possible to achieve almost anything that you want in spite of these obstacles which used to limit people in the past but are no longer considered to be hurdles today. The lack of the ability to stick to something and see it through and have the determination to make it to a set target is the obstacle that people face. This is something that is within your control; therefore, a lot of people think that they can make a few small adjustments and they will have the willpower and the determination that they need to accomplish something that they want to do. They soon find out that they were wrong when they thought that gaining willpower meant a few small changes and they were on their way toward the end goal that they desired. No, willpower takes a lot of major changes and hard work. The main thing that you need to change to gain more willpower is your mind. Mental toughness plays a substantial role in willpower as willpower is considered to be one of the key traits that those who have mental toughness display. Mental toughness is required to navigate through trying times. During times when you are doing well, have some money in the bank, your relationships are good, you are in good health, and you are rather happy, mental toughness may not be called in as much unless it is I certain highpressure situations. However; if you ever experience hard times such as the death of a spouse or a child, loss of a job and source of income, a natural disaster or something of that nature, it is very important for you to have mental toughness to get through the situation that you are in the best that you can and get back on your feet. Hard times really are a test of your will. And hard times can happen to anybody whether they expect it and have planned for it or not. To be prepared for whatever life throws at you and prepared for a hard time should you experience them, it is good to develop some mental toughness skills in advance. In fact, if you have never experienced true hard times, things that would not seem like as big a deal to someone who has may seem like a bigger deal to you. Thus, you will feel that you need some mental

toughness to navigate through life and succeed.

Mental toughness is required for everyday life situations. Suppose you are driving your car, the same car that you had for the last four years, down a road and you swerve to avoid hitting a deer than just ran into the street and run off of the road. As your car is careening toward a group of trees whether you go into full panic mode and let fate take over or you attempt to steer depends on how much mental toughness you have. I experienced a similar situation, and the main thing that I found out is that a group of trees looks much denser from the road; however, the trees are far enough apart that you can steer through them if you have the wherewithal to do so. A friend of mine was a passenger in a car in which a car accident was about to occur. Instead of trying to help the driver concentrate on steering, she suggested that we all pray together (The driver ignored her suggesting and used navigation skills instead of prayer to avoid the accident). If my friend in the driver’s seat had been the driver when my car ran off the road, I do not believe that she would have made it because she may have been to in shock to realize that steering and maneuvering through the trees somewhat is possible. One of the reasons that my friend may not have survived if she had been in the first car accident is that she does not possess the same amount of mental toughness that I have conditioned myself to utilize, especially in tough and trying situations. I would say she lacks a substantial amount of mental toughness; however, some people may disagree and argue that she possesses a normal amount of mental toughness. This is a skill she may never have tried to hone. But then you can look at the fact that she wanted to go to graduate school, but she didn’t because she didn’t believe that’s he could get the money or would have the time. I, on the other hand, graduated from graduate school because I did not look for the hurdles to stop me, I looked for the hurdles to go. In everyday life, situations that require mental toughness often present themselves and for you to get through the situation intact, you need to have already developed some mental toughness skills that will allow you to handle that specific situation.

Therefore, it is wise for you to take some of the practice lessons in this book to heart and learn some skills for enhancing your mental toughness so that you can handle life at your best.

UNDERSTANDING FEAR AND CONQUERING FEAR Let’s begin by getting our terms straight. When we talk about stress, what we are discussing is a physiological and psychological reaction to a change of environment or circumstance that requires some sort of response from us, and it happens every day. Traffic is slow on the way into work: stress. The electric bill is due: stress. You find out that you and your partner are going to be parents: stress. Normal stress, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. In fact, it can be quite helpful, increasing your alertness and motivation and preparing you to dodge a threat by engaging your body’s built-in fight-orflight response. The problem is that for some people, that stress doesn’t stop. Your body can handle intermittent stress, even severe intermittent stress, as long as that stress is resolved, and the body can relax again. When stress becomes chronic, it causes physical and emotional problems, including anxiety and worry, which bring with them a host of issues, including additional stress. Worry Versus Anxiety The two terms are often used to mean the same thing, and they share many traits, but there are differences. The primary difference is that worry is a temporary, normal mental state. It is marked by dwelling on something real that you find threatening or fearful, but the nervousness that defines it passes when that real fear or threat is abated. Your understandable worry about presenting a paper in class, for example, will pass once you get up there and begin presenting it. Anxiety, however, is different. Instead of a definite threat, anxiety is a physiological response to a potential threat. It’s that unease you feel walking down a dark alleyway. It’s vague, there is nothing you can really pinpoint, but you feel the apprehension nonetheless.

When Worry Becomes Anxiety Worry can get out of hand, becoming chronic and assuming a central role in your life. When that happens, it can go from a normal stress reaction to, say, having to appear in traffic court, to a generalized anxiety disorder that colors

everything in your life.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder Understand that there are a number of different anxiety disorders that arise from a number of different sources. Here, however, we are discussing what is known as Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which presents as severe and crippling worry and agitation about everything and nothing at all. Everyday life becomes a minefield of worry with the sufferer unable to escape the feeling that some tragedy for which they are not ready is just around the corner waiting to happen. This is someone who cannot put things into any sort of perspective. It’s all horrible, and like an alligator lurking just below the surface of the water, it’s going to get them. Some of the things people with generalized anxiety disorder stress over are: Losing their partner, Losing their job, Debt, Their health, Missed appointments, Being cheated, and So much more. In fact, there are those who worry about their worries. It’s a vicious cycle: the greater the stress, the greater the worry, the greater the anxiety, the greater the symptoms, the greater the stress, and the victim is left fearful of life and suffering physical symptoms that can leave them open to heart and gastrointestinal problems.

The Mythology of Stress and Anxiety These are real problems faced by real people, and yet there are a number of myths surrounding them that have become widely accepted and even encouraged in our society because they play into the ideas surrounding success, wealth, and power; myths that often prevent people from finding

treatment and relief.

Stress Myths Here are some of the most prevalent myths about stress that have to be debunked if we want to get beyond management and get rid of stress for good. Stress is always external. There are those who hold that the stress we experience is entirely external, that it comes from the things that happen in life. In fact, stress is the body’s reaction to those external circumstances. It’s based on the personality and the emotional make-up of the person experiencing those events, which explains why different individuals react to the same things in different ways. Stress will spur you to action. Under certain circumstances, it might, but only in reaction to a threat, like seeing a gang while walking along the street, might make you go another way or hail a cab. That is not the same thing as setting and meeting goals and deadlines or training to achieve something. Stress actually keeps you from performing at your best, and any success comes from powering throw it, not using it. Stress is good. Sure, if it keeps you from doing something stupid like climbing up on a narrow ledge. The truth is that stress is a major contributor to the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, respiratory illnesses, cirrhosis of the liver, accidents, and suicide. It also figures strongly in more than 75% of all doctor’s appointments. You need stress to live. As we get older and have more and more responsibility and obligation piled onto our lives, we get used to the stress that comes with it. That’s not to say it doesn’t affect us, but rather that we cannot remember a time when we didn’t have it, leading to the erroneous conclusion that it is somehow necessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Think back to your childhood. Your stress levels were low, your energy was high, and you got things done. You can get rid of stress for good through exercise and

relaxation techniques. No, you can’t. exercise, relaxation, breathing exercises, and so on are good for dealing with the symptoms of stress, but they do nothing to actually stop the stress itself. Without addressing the cause of stress, which is your mental and emotional reaction to external events, the stress will always come back. What you need to do instead is change your relationship with these situations, the way you think about, and react to, them. You can choose to not feel stress. Again, no. Stress is not a choice, like picking eggs over waffles for breakfast. It’s a reaction based on how you see the world, not something you can choose to experience or not experience at will. This means that in order for you to get rid of stress, you need to change the way you see things. Stress is always going to happen. We can all come up with a list of things that don’t cause us stress in the least but do stress other people. You might find flying to be no big deal, while someone else could get physically sick at the mere idea of it. Again, this harkens back to the basis of stress, which is your own thoughts and beliefs. By changing the way you think about situations that are now stressful for you, that stress can be eliminated. You just need to see things differently. Stress is nothing to be concerned about. As mentioned above, stress carries serious health risks, which alone makes it something to be concerned about. Also, the effects of stress are cumulative. They pile up, and with every frustration, annoyance, hurt, and worry you have, that pile gets bigger, and you will find fewer moments of peace, day in and day out, as it takes its toll on your body and mind. So yes, there is a lot there to be concerned about.

Myths About Anxiety Anxiety is a real problem, what with the aches and pains, the panic attacks, the constant sense of foreboding. It will affect a third of the population at one

point or another, and for millions, it will be chronic and debilitating. The fact is that it can happen to anyone, with celebrities like Wil Wheaton, Bella Hadid, Kristen Stewart, and others getting the word out to remove the stigma that still lingers over this as well as many other psychological conditions, and also so others who suffer won’t feel so isolated. What follows is a list of some of the more prevalent myths about anxiety, as well as the realities of this condition. Worry and anxiety are the same thing. While they can feel the same, with vaguely-defined fears, jittery nerves, and so on, the difference is in their underlying cause. Worry arises from something real and external, a situation that the worrier has to deal with, and passes away with the event itself. You might worry about taking your college finals, but once they are over, so is the worry. Anxiety, by contrast, is internal and doesn’t rely on anything external to stimulate it. In fact, is it often so vaguely defined that the sufferer cannot actually point to any one thing causing it. You can just grow out of being anxious. Anxiety is not something that will just “go away” given enough time. An anxious teenager will become an anxious adult if they don’t get help. The nature of that anxiety may change, the symptoms may evolve, and so might the coping mechanisms of the sufferer, but that is hardly the same thing as the condition resolving itself. Treatment by a therapist who understands anxiety and is equipped to deal with it is necessary to find relief. Anxiety is only a problem for women. This is an old one that harkens back to the days when women were considered the “weaker sex.” The truth of the matter is that men and women experience exhibit anxiety differently, with the men tending to show anger while the women are more likely to show more classic symptoms of fear and worry. The bottom line is that you cannot necessarily tell what is going on with someone just by looking. You need to talk to them and find out what has happened.

Panic attacks are not real. When you have a panic attack, you are undergoing a physical stress reaction to a perceived immediate threat. It cannot, and should never be, dismissed as mere “drama,” and it is certainly not a cry for attention, and as stressful and inconvenient as they can be to witness, it is far worse for the person having a panic attack. They experience feelings of terror, difficulty breathing, dizziness and disorientation, chest pains, and other physical symptoms. There are ways to cope with panic attacks that can help the victim get through the experience, but not everything works for everyone. To learn them, you will need the help of a good therapist. There is nothing you can do to help. Anxiety not only makes you feel fearful, but it also makes you feel all alone. After all, other people don’t share your feelings, so how can they understand? The fact is that most cannot understand what the sufferer is going through, but they can understand that they are going through something. That’s the point. Show the person that they are not alone, that they don’t have to face it by themselves. More than that, because anxiety arises from the same area of the brain as decision-making, if you take the lead there, and come up with activities that can calm their anxiety, you will have done them a great service. You just need to breathe. Anxiety can cause a number of different physical symptoms, from rapid heartbeat and sweating to feeling dizzy and losing balance. There are breathing techniques that can help with some of these symptoms, but that is all they do. Because breathing techniques do not relieve all of the symptoms or address the actual cause of the anxiety, the person with the anxiety needs a variety of coping mechanisms. These can include things like muscular relaxation techniques, meditation, weighted blankets, even certain supplements like magnesium. There are quite a few available, and it’s a pretty good bet that the anxiety sufferer will find a combination that will work for them. You are weak if you take medication. There is a stigma attached

to taking psychiatric medications that are not appended to things like antibiotics, hypertension, or diabetes medications. This is more than simple ignorance; it is an injustice to those who need anti-anxiety medication but are reluctant to take it because of how it would make them look. With such medications and treatment from a good therapist, people who suffered from debilitating anxiety have taken their lives back. You can only cure anxiety with medication. There are a number of ways to treat anxiety that have nothing to do with medication. It is one option among many and is often used to supplement other treatments. The truth is that any treatment has to be tailored to the individual patient, and it may or may not include antianxiety medications. Anxiety is the worst thing in your life. As unpleasant as anxiety can be, you have to put it into perspective and remember that it is a physical reaction to something that either has happened or is happening in your life that can help guide you through. Sometimes, when it becomes chronic and overwhelming, we see it as a disorder that requires treatment. It is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. Think of it in the same terms you would use for any health issue. Would you be ashamed of diabetes? Of course, not. Would you hide your arthritis? No, you would not. Why is anxiety any different? It’s an issue, like any other, that needs to be identified for what it is and addressed.

SETTING GOALS Setting clear goals gives you a sense of direction in life. Without goals, it is easy to drift through life without a main agenda. When you don’t have goals, you become open to anything. Suddenly, nothing will seem important to you. If you hit a detour or the going gets tough, you will simply give up, change your mind and go after something else. Setting goals helps you realize what is important to you and what isn’t. Once you become clear about what you want in your life, committing becomes easier. One of the reasons you may jump from one activity to another and fail to push through when times get tough is because at the back of your mind, you know that whatever you are doing may not be very important after all. Goal setting changes all that by giving meaning to whatever you set out to do, and by doing that, it helps sharpen your focus and enables you to go after your goals no matter what stands in your way. That is why it helps to improve your mental toughness. This chapter will teach you how to set goals in the proper way to make sure you achieve them.

The Right Goals Before setting goals, it's important to know what the right goals are. For one, you must be able to differentiate between goals and fantasies or daydreams. Daydreaming and/or fantasizing aren’t just shallow and unsystematic but can also be counterproductive in terms succeeding in life. On the other hand, the right kinds of goals can help you register continuous improvements in the quality of your life. These improvements include upward career mobility in both traditional and unconventional careers. Another thing to consider when figuring out whether the goals you’re setting are the right ones are your life purpose and passion. Goals that aren’t in line with any or both of these two things aren’t worth pursuing. This is because accomplishing them won’t provide any real sense of satisfaction and worthwhile accomplishments. Pursuing goals that aren’t in line with your life purpose and passions will just render your efforts futile. And given your

very limited time, energy and resources, you should choose the right kinds of goals. You must also be able to distinguish between goals and desires. Why? Your ability to do so will determine how successful and satisfied you can be in life. How do you determine which of your “goals” are actually goals and which are merely desires? Goals should be things that you have a great deal of or complete control over. Desires are the things you want to accomplish, acquire, or experience that are greatly or completely dependent on the cooperation of other people, events, or circumstances. For example, let’s say you want to become an actor in Hollywood. Your goals might consist of you auditioning across the world, attending acting workshops, starting off in television, and then working your way into films. Your desires would be to work with Robert Downing Jr., Kevin Hart, Julia Roberts, or any other great actor in the industry. You’d feel a great degree of satisfaction from working with these people, but it is not necessary to achieve your true goal. Furthermore, reaching top level status, building a raving fanbase, and a pinch of luck would probably be the necessary potion to fulfill that desire. These desires are out of your control compared the actions set in the goal creation. Why's it important that you properly classify the things you want to accomplish, acquire or experience as goals or desires? If you set a desire as a goal, your chances of being able to accomplish them are at best, low. Why? It’s because accomplishing, acquiring, or experiencing them are largely dependent on other people, events, and circumstances. When others aren’t able to do their part or if events and circumstances don’t turn your way, you won’t accomplish your goal. If most or all of your goals are like this, you’ll have a very low success rate with your life goals. With more failures than successes, it will be very hard to stay motivated in life. You might just lose hope. If the goals you set are mostly – if not completely – within your control, your success rate will be much higher. Why? Because your success doesn’t have to be dependent on other people’s ability or willingness to act, circumstances, and events. The only hindrance to your ability to accomplish your goals will be yourself. There’s no one else to blame. There’s no one else to take credit.

It’s just you…making things happen. So, what about desires then? Does this mean you should just leave them completely to chance, fate, or the God that you worship? No, it doesn’t mean that. What it means is that you should focus your energy, time, and resources on goals instead of desires. In fact, goals are the means by which you can significantly improve your chances of acquiring, accomplishing, or experiencing those, which you desire. In other words, you can use your desires as the bases for setting your goals, i.e., your goal-setting map. I know it can sound a bit too philosophical so allow me to use another example for a clearer understanding. Let’s say you want to earn at least $10,000 monthly so you can provide for your family’s needs and more. Being able to earn $10,000 every month isn’t something you have complete control over. If you’re an entrepreneur, it will be highly dependent on the cooperation of customers or clients. If you’re an employee, getting a substantial raise will be entirely dependent on your bosses. If you’re a blogger, vlogger, or self-publishing author, it will be entirely dependent on your audience’s patronage. Hence, you should classify this as a desire. Now that you know what you want, you can set and pursue goals that will either enable you to get what you desire or substantially raise your chances of being able to do so. Examples of the “right” goals that will enable you to get what you desire may include: Writing a kick-ass, bestseller-material e-book and sell it on Amazon’s Kindle Store (self-publishing author); Creating engaging written or visual content on a weekly basis for either a blog or a vlog and publishing them regularly (blogger or vlogger); Exceeding your monthly production quota at the office so that your bosses will see that you deserve to be promoted and paid much more (employee); and Reach out to at least 3 customers every week to get product or service feedback that can be used to improve your business’ products and services even more. By doing so, you can ensure

superior services or products that customers will prefer over your competitors (entrepreneur). Take note: the examples above are things you have a great deal of or perfect control over. As such, your chances of accomplishing them are very, very high. And when you’re able to successfully accomplish them, you can substantially increase your chances of getting what you desire. And in this case, it’s to earn at least $10,000 monthly.

How to Set Clear Goals that You Actually Achieve So how do you go about setting clear goals that motivate you and enable you to achieve your goals? Just follow the steps covered below.

Step 1: Start by visualizing what you want to achieve The first step that you need to take is that of forming a mental picture of what you want to achieve in life. You cannot achieve anything unless you first see it in your mind. Any great achievement by someone else started as a mere thought. And that is why you need to start there. Many times than not, this is always the hardest part. For many people, knowing what they want in life can be a tough question to answer. So, it helps to give yourself as much time as you need so that you can come up with an accurate assessment. A good starting point would be asking yourself a question like, “What do I want to offer the world, the community or my family.” You could also try, “How do I want to grow?” It doesn’t matter if you come up with broad and vague answers at this point. Long-term as well as short-term goals are just as good. You can redefine them later.

Step 2: Redefine your goals: Ensure they are specific Being very specific about your goals makes you push yourself to achieve

them as opposed to those that are general and vague. As an example, let us look at a goal like, “I want to be rich.” Wait a minute, exactly how rich do you want to become? This goal is very general and nonspecific. The very nature of this goal gives you no motivation to set out and achieve it. Look at a modified version that says, “I want to make one million dollars.” This one is more objectified and specific. You are more likely to act on this one than the first. Moreover, you need to know why you want your specified amount. Wanting one million dollars is cool, but for what? It sounds nice to be a millionaire, but it may far exceed the necessary wealth required to live life the way your truly desire. Figure out the specifics of your desires and how much they cost to find the total sum of your true goal. Write these rewards down and keep them in very close visual proximity to your goals. Take the same approach to every goal that is on your list. Revise the list and come up with an entirely new list that contains goals that are specific.

Step 3: Ensure that the goals are measurable What does it mean to set measurable goals? This simply means that you should be able to tell when you have achieved your goals. If we go back to our example of setting out to becoming rich, you will see that the goal itself is not measurable. At what point, will you be able to tell that you have attained your goal. It helps to know the destination of your journey. The more refined version of making a million dollars is measurable. All you have to do to be certain that you have attained this goal is a look at your bank balance. So, go over to your list and try to ask yourself, “At what point will I be certain that this goal has been achieved?” Write the answer below the goal. It also helps to set small checkpoints, otherwise known as milestones, along the way so that you can check your progress, especially when it comes to long-term goals. Therefore, in the case of the one million dollars, you can have milestones/short-term goals of making 100,000, 250,000, 500,000, 750,000 and then 1,000,000.

Step 4: Set attainable goals

Next, make sure that your goals look and seem achievable from a realistic point of view. First, assess the position that you currently are in life. It does you no good to set a goal that seems too far-fetched. Sure, ambition is a great thing, but being over-ambitious is just as bad. If you take this approach, you may end up feeling down and disappointed for not achieving your goals, and this can be a great setback. For instance, setting a goal of earning a million dollars when you are earning a minimum wage seems very unrealistic. It may help to set a goal of earning maybe ten, perhaps fifty thousand, and then work your way up from there. Accomplishing smaller goals first is the key to success as momentum is the most powerful asset you can have. Why do you think artists like Drake or actors like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are ALWAYS working on one project after another? Why do you think one-hit wonders are so common in today’s entertainment industry? It’s very simple. One person understood that you have to keep going when you reach success in order to keep it whereas the other thought they “made it” after going viral, but actually lost everything after a few months.

Step 5: Attach a time limit to your goals Finally, make sure you attach a time limit to every goal. Whether your goal is a short-term or a long-term one, no goal is supposed to take forever. Setting a time limit gives you a sense of urgency, which helps you stay disciplined and work towards achieving your goals. So make sure you assign a realistic time limit to every goal.

Step 6: Write them down Once you have considered all the above when coming up with your goals, write them down. Writing serves a very important purpose. Often, people just assume that you could keep the goals you set somewhere at the back of your mind. This is very wrong. For one, your goals need to feel tangible. Writing them down accomplishes that. Otherwise, they will remain to be just some abstract concept and therefore, you may not attach as much importance to them. In addition, you increase the chances of forgetting, if you do not write your goals down.

Further, you clear space for other important things in your mind.

Step 7: Prioritize Once you have come up with a list of the goals you want to achieve, the next step is that of prioritizing. Obviously, some of the things on your list are more important than others. Prioritizing helps you sort them out in the order of their importance. A simple way to do this is to classify your goals into three categories, first tier, second tier and third tier. Goals in the first tier are attached with the highest priority. Imagine these goals as “must be achieved” for success in your head. Goals in the second tier are important but are not crucial to the ultimate vision you have set. In other words, you should want to accomplish this goal as it will only help boost your sense of self-worth. Lastly, those in the third tier may not be as essential and you could get away with not accomplishing them. This is the “sure, why not” section of goals. Let me give you an example. A dancer decides to sit and write down prioritized goals to improve their success. This particular dancer is at a point in their career where they feel the need to broaden their repertoire of dance styles. A first tier goal may be to attend a specific amount of dance conferences across the country in the span of six months. This goal is paramount to improving their success because it offers a chance to learn more styles of dance. An extra bonus is the networking opportunity to meet other dancers who specialize in their respective styles. A second-tier goal would be to eat healthy foods or go to the gym at least four times a week along the way. Do you see how this type of goal serves as a supportive role to the first tier? Healthy food provides nutrition. Nutrition provides stability and longevity in an athlete’s career (or anyone else’s career for that matter). Going to the gym supports muscular endurance and joint strength which are major keys for the body to stay active at peak performance. Lastly, a thirdtier goal would be to learn social media marketing to build a following. It’s a great goal to obtain. However, it is not directly related to the art of dance or this person’s burning desire to simply improve as an overall dancer. To summarize, goals not only act as guides in life but also help you realize what is important in your life. They help give you a laser-sharp focus that will make you impervious to distractions and setbacks that will inevitably come along the way.

DAILY HABITS THAT CAN KEEP YOU FOCUSED AND DISCIPLINED AND INCREASE RESILIENCE The habits you develop, good or bad, play an important role in every aspect of your life. Developing a bad habit of forgetting to set the alarm clock means you will find yourself running late most days. Bad habits are a killer when it comes to the development of mental toughness. You need to get every area of your life shored up and supported by good habits and tendencies. The best intentions will not get things done. Bad habits are self-made barriers to progress. No matter what your bad habits might be, they will impact your life negatively at some level. The ability to be mentally tough can be sidelined by bad habits like procrastinating, not finishing a project, focusing on past failures, or feeling bitter about someone beating you out of a job promotion. Becoming cognizant of the habits you have and getting rid of the bad is a sure way to increase your mental toughness.

Dumping bad habits Getting rid of bad habits is the fastest way to begin creating the personality you need to tackle any task and get things done. Habits are not always easy to quit. It becomes second-nature and might take having people that can help hold you accountable. Use post-it notes and calendar reminders to break tougher habits of putting off projects or poor time management.

Starting good habits Beginning new habits that are good and productive might be as difficult as stopping the bad ones. The difference will be in your experience of positive benefits from good habits. Leaving to appointments on time, never being late to the job, always getting started on projects right away are all habits that will provide nearly immediate positive results. Sticking with your new routine and habits for 21 to 30 days will ensure that they are there for life, or at least the length of time you figure they are beneficial.

Determining the most beneficial habits Determining the good habits to initiate that will benefit you most is easiest when taking a complete assessment of your current bad habits. It gives you a cheat sheet that allows you to see the areas in your life that are in need of a little reorganization or attention to specific details. You probably already have somewhat of an incomplete mental list already. Choosing from there will depend on how you highlight them in order of importance. Overwhelming yourself with changes will not be helpful and could actually make you give up in a short amount of time.

Focus on Learning Instead of Past Failure If you try and focus on failure, your mind will gravitate towards it every time. Many of the most powerful men and women in business have had to file bankruptcy and create a business more than once. Rather than looking at it as a failure, they chose to view it in the light of education and learning. Failure is a negative term that leaves no room for actual improvement of skill, knowledge, and business acumen. Giving an idea a try and learning from a few mistakes is putting it to a brighter and more positive level.

Zero Criticism or Complaining Mentally tough people are not prone to complaining or criticizing a great deal. For one thing, it does not bring about any sort of resolution to an existing problem. You are more apt to turn people away and get them criticizing and complaining about your own behavior. The best way to deal with any problems is to roll up your shirt sleeves and get proactive. Solutions are all around, but it is up to you to find the right one to fit the situation.

Appear to Be in Control at All Times, in All Situations If you have earned the designation of mental toughness, not much should bother you to the point of losing your cool. Everything should wash off like spring rains. Personal upsetting news or finding out a friend or family member passed away should be the only times you really struggle. Whether you feel completely calm on the interior, your exterior should exude the ultimate state of relaxation and reason. Setting the example will earn you

bigger rewards down the line.

Feel Happiness When Others Succeed It is never an emotionally healthy thing to have hard feelings towards anyone that is experiencing a round of success. A strong mentality is not given to the weakness of feeling bitter and resentful over the happy moment's others are trying to enjoy. You have no idea how hard their walk was that got them to this moment, and they have every right to savor the excitement. You would not want your celebratory mood ruined if success had come your way. Find reasons to experience happiness at their achievement.

Shove less Important Situations to the Side Mental toughness means you have to value every available second of your time. The time you have is something that cannot be reclaimed. Give priority to the important things in life such as family, your business or job, and spend less time in petty endeavors that you could care less about. Trade the evening at a political club dinner for a class on something you really want to learn. As simple as it sounds, it can increase your satisfaction by a huge percentage margin. Spend an afternoon with your kids at the park rather than in some boring literary club meeting.

Look at Each Day as a Gift and Opportunity Another important habit to develop for mental toughness is looking at each day as an opportunity to expand your horizons. It is a gift that you can take time to share with loved ones and make the most out of every moment in this life. Place your focus on the things that are important to you. Give everything you can to get the maximum enjoyment out of life.

Bring Your Best to the Table and Others Will Follow Good habits can be the skeletal system that the rest of your mental toughness skills rest on. If you there are areas that can be improved or bad habits deleted, take time out to get it done. Be persistent and remember that it takes a solid four-weeks to make the changes permanent. You can see immediate improvements in every area of life quickly. Do not be afraid to take the

plunge and make dramatic, sweeping change. Mental strength can be developed over a period if you choose to make your development and growth a priority. You learned about the things that a mentally strong person will never indulge in. In this chapter, you will learn about the different daily habits of mentally strong individuals that help in making them stronger. Read on to learn more about the various habits.

Habit 1: Judicious use of your mental energy It is quite easy to get distracted by different thoughts and things. Did you ever start working and get distracted by something that’s entirely different? Not everything is essential, and you indeed don’t have to exert the same mental energy and focus. A mentally strong person is capable of prioritizing and knows the importance of making proper use of their mental energy to accomplish their goals. Perhaps the best way to envision the benefits of using your mental energy judiciously is to liken mental energy to money. The average person has a fixed amount of money that they can spend at any given time. Unfortunately, it can be all too easy to “leak” small amounts of money here and there, resulting in having less to spend on things that matter. For this reason, one of the first rules when it comes to saving money is to cut out unnecessary spending, thereby eliminating the seemingly small expenses that tend to add up. Thus, by not buying a cup of coffee a day you can save as much as five dollars a day, which can add up to over one hundred dollars a month. The same is true for mental energy. When you allow small amounts of your concentration to wander in different areas you wind up with less mental energy to spend on the things that matter. Therefore, it is critical to eliminate even the tiniest of distractions so that you have the bulk of your mental energy to spend on the tasks that are important. The more energy you spend is the better your performance will be, and thus the greater the results you will be able to accomplish.

Habit 2: Reframing all negative thoughts

Who doesn’t have negative feelings? A mentally strong person knows that there is no point in encouraging negative thoughts and such a person would try to reframe all their negative thoughts into positive ones. Instead of getting discouraged by the negative thoughts, they would think of a way in which they can make it positive. They consciously try to change the pessimistic dialogue in their head to something positive that will encourage them to work harder. Whenever they feel low, they give themselves a pep talk. There are two main ways in which reframing negative thoughts can benefit your life. The first is that when you turn negativity into curiosity you eliminate the burden of having to succeed. In other words, the fear of failure might cause you to feel responsible for avoiding failure. However, when you turn the fear of failure into a sense of curiosity regarding the outcome you remove the burden of having to succeed. This frees your heart and mind to focus on the things you can control, which, in turn, increases your chances of success exponentially. The other way that reframing negative thoughts can benefit your efforts is that it can enable you to open your mind to other possibilities. If you are afraid that a certain plan will fail, or that you will fail if you pursue a certain goal, simply ask yourself “why?” Now, instead of running from a fear of failure you can examine the situation to see if there are better ways to achieve your goal, or better goals to pursue altogether. In the end, a fear of failure can be turned into a wakeup call to examine bigger and better options.

Habit 3: Working towards established goals A mentally strong person always establishes precise personal and professional goals for themselves. They don’t believe in immediate gratification and can work towards long-term goals without giving up. Every hurdle that they have to overcome is viewed as a challenge and not a problem. When you establish goals you essentially create a roadmap to follow in order to arrive at your ultimate destination–turning your dreams into reality. Only by working toward specifically established goals can you ensure that your

direction remains true. Unfortunately, most people lose their way by not creating established goals, and this is what keeps so many people from ever achieving their ambitions. However, when you established specific goals you set a clear and measurable course that will take you to where you need to be. Another benefit of working toward established goals is that this process allows you to break down large, overwhelming objectives into smaller, more manageable projects. This is the same concept as that embodied in the ancient Chinese axiom which states that even the longest of journeys is made up of individual steps. Thus, by breaking down a large goal into smaller “steps” you can avoid being overwhelmed by the size and scope of the overall goal, only ever having to deal with smaller objectives that are within your ability to achieve.

Habit 4: Reflecting on your progress A mentally strong person will spend a couple of minutes daily to review their goals and their progress so far. Only when you consider your performance you will understand how well you are doing and the scope for improvement. They are capable of holding themselves responsible for any mistakes they make and will strive for something better. When you take the time to reflect on your progress you will set yourself up for success in ways that you may never have imagined. The first thing you do by reflecting on your progress is avoid the trap of being carried away by the momentum of your efforts. All too often when people simply push ahead with their efforts, never taking the time to reflect on their progress, they become swept away in the direction that their efforts take them. If things are going the right way this won’t be a bad thing. However, if things start to go wrong this momentum can keep a person from changing their actions from wrong ones to right ones. However, when you take the time each and every day to examine your progress you will ensure that you never get swept away by the momentum, thus you are in constant control of your actions and the direction those actions take you. The second way that reflecting on your progress will benefit you is that it will keep you from feeling as though you will never reach your goal. This is

particularly true in the event that your goal is one that requires a great deal of time and effort to achieve. After a while it can be tempting to give up when you still feel so far away from the proverbial finish line. However, when you take the time to reflect on your progress you will be able to see just how far you have gone. Even though the finish line might still be a long way off, by being able to see how far from the starting line you are you can feel as though your efforts have been worthwhile. Taking the time to celebrate even the smallest amount of progress can go a long way to keeping your heart and mind motivated, which can make all the difference.

Habit 5: Tolerate discomfort At times, people tend to go to great lengths to avoid any form of pain or distress. A strong person knows to endure a little discomfort if it means they can achieve greater things. It could be something as simple as pushing yourself to exercise after a long and a tiring day at work. This is where the axiom “no pain, no gain” proves to be entirely true. When people only ever stay within their comfort zone they restrict the opportunities available to them. As a result, they will never achieve any meaningful success. Instead, they will only ever do things that they know are possible, leading to the meager results that reflect the meager efforts they are willing to invest. By contrast, when a person is willing to break out of their comfort zone they are able to broaden their horizons, thereby making themselves available to a whole host of opportunities that would have otherwise been hidden from them. Therefore, instead of shying away from the things that you know will take you out of your familiar territory, embrace the discomfort, knowing that it will lead to bigger and better things. Another way in which embracing discomfort can lead to success is to recognize that discomfort is a sign of transformation. Again, the axiom “no pain, no gain” is highly significant here. When a person feels pain and ache as a result of exercise, especially weight lifting, they are feeling the effects of exercise on their muscles. By continuing the exercise they will continue to develop their muscles, thereby gaining the strength and physique that they desire. Thus, the pain they feel is indicative of the gain they are experiencing.

So it is with all things. Always embrace discomfort, knowing that it is a sign of personal growth and development, not something to be avoided.

Habit 6: Being grateful A mentally strong person believes in practicing gratitude daily. They know how fortunate they are and will always count their blessings instead of thinking about all the things they don’t have. You should always be grateful for the things you have. Any self-help book that you pick up will tell you the same thing. Appreciate what you have, that’s the only way in which you will learn to be happy with yourself. Taking the time to be grateful for what you have can make a huge difference in terms of your overall success in life. As a result, no amount of acquisition ever satisfies their desires. Only when you take the time to appreciate what you already have will you be able to appreciate any success you go on to achieve. Therefore, it is critical that you nurture and develop a strong sense of gratitude in your heart and mind. Another reason why gratitude increases your chance of success is that it keeps you from constantly feeling as though you don’t have enough to achieve your goals. If you aren’t grateful for the things you have you will see them as being inferior, or less than what you need. This, in turn, will undermine your confidence in being able to fulfill your ambitions. However, when you are grateful for what you have and who you are you find that you are more confident in your ability to achieve any level of success that you desire. This creates the irony that when you are grateful for what you have you stand an infinitely better chance of being able to acquire and achieve even more!

Habit 7: Balancing emotions and logic Balancing logic and emotions is important. A mentally strong person realizes the importance of doing this. Such a person won’t react to a situation immediately and would instead spend some time to analyze the situation and then respond accordingly. A mentally strong person will never let their emotions get the better of them and will decide rationally.

The importance of balancing emotions and logic cannot be overstated. Most of the people you come into contact with on a regular basis are controlled by their emotions. This causes them to react impulsively, often doing things that they later regret. Needless to say, such a lack of control will keep anyone from ever achieving any level of meaningful and lasting success. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is to control your emotions. When you balance your emotional response with logic you allow your critical thinking to rein in your passions, thereby keeping you from doing anything that could undermine your chances of success. There is another side to this, however, and that is balancing logic with emotions. All too often it can be easy to simply ignore and reject any emotions regarding a situation. After all, if emotions lead to impulsive behavior, then removing them should be a good thing. Unfortunately, there is as much danger in too few emotions as there is in too many emotions. When you become unfeeling you ignore the needs of those around you. Since success is often the result of a collective effort, the needs of those around you should always be taken seriously. Therefore, never allow your logic to blind you to the simple emotional needs of yourself or those in your inner circle. Instead, make sure you give them the support and encouragement they need. This will keep them loyal to you, and will increase the value of their efforts.

Habit 8: Living according to your values You might feel like measuring your self-worth by comparing yourself with others. However, mentally strong people avoid doing anything of this sort. All such comparisons are nothing but unnecessary distractions. Instead, they focus all their energy on doing their best, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. All that matters to them is whether they managed to do something productive or not. The very measure of success comes down to whether or not a person lives according to their values. All too often you see examples of people sacrificing their morals in order to achieve the success they crave. Unfortunately, in doing so those people tend to lose the things that truly matter in their lives, such as friends, loved ones and even their own sense of self. Alternatively, when a person is true to their values they ensure that they are able to share their eventual success with their friends, family and loved

ones. This provides a greater sense of meaning to any success achieved. After all, if you can’t share your success with those who matter then can you really call it success? Staying true to your values can also come in handy when you choose the goals you want to pursue. Too many people set their sights on goals that others find meaningful, rather than on goals that are meaningful to them. As a result, they often lose interest in the journey long before they reach the end. However, when you live according to your values you will always set goals that are meaningful and fulfilling to you. This means you will stay motivated longer, and that the successes you achieve will serve to improve your life. In the end, only by chasing dreams that are true to you will your life possess any true meaning or purpose.

WHY DEVELOP MENTAL STRENGTH? The answer to why develop your mental strength is a rather easy one – because if you have not taken the time to do it yet, there is a good chance that your mental strength is not as developed as it can be and you are not able to achieve your goals at the level that you would like as a result of this fact. You should develop your mental strength so that you can be more productive in your life. Productivity and mental strength go hand and hand. It takes mental strength to concentrate on tasks and fortitude to finish them. This is especially true with complicated tasks. Productivity is one of the key factors that determine how well you perform on your job and in any other tasks that you choose to undertake in life. If you lack productivity, it may be due to lack of concentration, being distracted by your emotions, lack of drive, energy, desire, and more. To become more productive, have more success in your career and accomplish more of the things that you want to do in your life, you should practice mental strength exercises. You may even get that raise that you have wanted for so long! You should develop your mental strength so that you can overcome challenges and hurdles. Mental strength gives you the ability to overcome challenges and hurdles. The difference between people who keep going when they reach obstacles that they need to overcome on their way to a goal and people who do not overcome these obstacles but instead turn away and decide that the tasks are too tough is that the first group possesses mental strength. Mental strength is what is needed to see a way around the hurdles that you face in life and try to go around them so that you can achieve larger goals. Thus, lacking mental strength allows you to only achieve smaller unimpeded gaols in life that are easy to attain. If you ever desired to get a job which requires you to have a master’s degree or a PhD, you can either see the hurdles ahead of you such as lack of time or lack of money or energy or you can see the opportunity for advancement in front of you and decide that these aforementioned hurdles can be surmounted. This is not to0 say that these hurdles are less real or apparent to the people with the mental strength to try to go past them and enroll in the school

program that they want. This hurdles are just as real and may result in struggling and difficulty for a time; however, the people with mental strength are willing to handle these struggles in order to achieve the end goal whereas the people who lack mental strength try to avoid the struggles toward the goal and thus avoid the goal itself. You should develop your mental strength so that you feel that you have more control over your life. In order to have control over your life, you need to have mental strength. Mental strength conditions you to believe that you have the power to control the things that are going on around you. You should develop your mental strength to adjust to change. The world is changing every day. Many so-called baby boomers know that when they first entered the workforce, it was far different than it is today. The use of computers was minimal, and the internet was not as popular as it is today. Social media was nonexistent. Then a change came that hit the workplace and society in general and these older members of society saw the skills that the younger generation possessed take over even after all of their years on their job and seniority. Some of these people may have had a hard time adjusting to the changes that were taking place; however, those who wanted to be successful worked hard to make sure that they could keep up with the changes that were taking place in society so that they could fit in with the times and still have value at work that would allow them to receive the salary that they desired and qualify for the jobs that they wanted. This is something that is normally discussed with the younger generation which is just coming in to work. Flexibility and the ability to adjust to change are keys to longevity that one must possess to keep going and stay current in this world. Mental strength allows a person to realize this and make the changes that he or she needs in spite of p0ride or years of doing things a certain way. Change comes at many times in our lives. Sometimes change comes when you move to a different city for a new job. Sometimes change comes around when you leave a relationship that you have been in for a while such as what occurs with a divorce and sometimes change occurs when you enter a different stage in your life. Many people try to resist adjusting to the changes that are occurring and what things to stay the same. People with mental strength, however, are mentally tough enough to understand that changes take

place in life and in order for you to be successful and live life to its fullest, you need to change with it.

To establish a winner’s mind: Working on and establishing mental toughness is like setting a standard of excellence for yourself that causes you to strive for a higher level of excellence that you may have ordinarily strived for had you had you not worked to cultivate your mind. It is like setting a higher level of expectations for yourself, and you are aware of what these expectations are. Oftentimes, thinking that you can do or excel at something is half the battle and when trying to establish mental toughness, conditioning your mind for winning thoughts processes is very important. Your mindset can help you with your willpower, dedication, time management, and the other essential things that you need to do to establish your goals and to succeed at the things that you set out to do. Mental toughness promotes longevity in your career or goals: Mental toughness is what allows you to stick around in your career or at your set goals. For instance, let’s say that you want to be a dancer. You must undergo a great deal of practice and training to get started. Then you go on a number of auditions, a number of which will be rejections. You may hear criticism of your skills in a not so friendly manner, maybe even a little hurtful. If you ever want to get on Broadway, you have to go through all of this and that just to make it in the show. After that, there are rehearsals, shows, and more rehearsals and shows. If you do not have a strong mind, you are not going to make it that long under these conditions. It is very important that you use your mental strength to keep pushing on and to help you understand what you are working for. Building mental toughness allows you to stand up for the difference between right and wrong when others won’t: Most people know the difference between right and wrong, but does that mean that they are willing to stand up for it? It takes mental strength to stand up for what is right when other people won’t. You may feel like you are standing by yourself which can make you nervous and a little scared but you

will only be able to stand up for right versus wrong if you build up enough mental toughness to withstand the crap that gets thrown at you for not staying on the side of the majority of the people. Mental toughness allows you to be able to handle distractions and keep your focus: Building mental toughness allows you to keep your focus and not be swayed by distractions when they come your way. This is very important because life is full of distractions and you will run into a large number of them if you want to achieve lofty goals. This distraction will not knock you off your game as much if you have a strong mind and the ability to focus. There are a lot of things in life that may cause someone to lose their focus. Everything that happens in life generally involves some type of emotion and not having mental toughness can allow these emotions to take over your thoughts, cloud your judgment, cause you to dwell on issues instead of using your time wisely and be an all-around distraction. Even though you may have a number of important things to do, you will find them very difficult to get done if you cannot focus. This can even lead to dangerous situations if you become distracted while driving or doing other things that really require concentration. Mental toughness is the answer to being distracted. Although mental toughness does not allow you to block out emotions and emotional situations, it does allow you to handle your emotions and emotional situations in the proper manner so that you can address these issues at the proper time and still be able to function during the day.

Mental toughness allows you to be able to prioritize. The new slogan Priorities First is very important. You need to handle your priorities first and then handle the rest of the stuff later. It is not okay to neglect your priorities for something that seems more enjoyable or more important. This can cause you a great deal of problems in the future, and you will regret it. Mental toughness helps you understand your priorities and your obligations no matter how many other things you need to do.

In life, there will be a great number of things that you need to get done that may cause you to neglect your priorities. This is simply a fact a life that can not be changed, and you need to have the mental toughness to figure out what your priorities are and how to get everything else done without neglecting them. Mental toughness helps you to identify and change irrational thoughts: Mental toughness allows a person to identify irrational thoughts so that you can address these thoughts and their origins and replace them with new beliefs that are more accurate. This is very important for people to do so that they have an accurate perception of the things going on around them. People who have not established mental toughness often stick to old belief; however, people who have developed mental toughness have the strength to examine their beliefs and admit when one of them falls short from what is rational and let it go. Establishing an accurate perception is very important because your perception is your reality. Inaccurate perceptions can skew your way of thinking so that you cannot make proper judgment decisions.

Mental toughness teaches you patience You cannot have everything at once, and mental toughness will help you with patience in the same way that it helps with willpower. You cannot expect immediate results. Time and patience are part of the key to success in the long run. You can expect to get everything at one time; therefore, patience is a virtue that mental toughness instills in us.

Mental toughness gives you greater life satisfaction: Mental toughness helps to increase a person’s life satisfaction. This is because it gives you the basic tools you need to succeed and the drive to do it. Mental strong people are able to handle life, in general, better than people who lack mental strength. They are able to control their emotions, work more efficiently, they are better listeners, and they bond better with others. The people who are the most satisfied with their lives are the people who

make wise choices and exercise some form of control over themselves. It is very important to control the need to spend money, waste time, or do harmful things that seem fun at the time. Developing mental toughness affords you the mental resources to live your life more responsibly. This is the primary reason that people who have taken the time to develop mental toughness are more satisfied with their lives. The fact that someone has spent time honing their thoughts and brain power into a winner’s brain also shows determination. This means that this person is willing to do what it takes to achieve his goal and one of which is life satisfaction. Mental toughness helps you understand that it does not make sense to complain that you are not satisfied with your life and not do anything about it. There is no point in expecting anything to change unless you take steps and do something to move toward happiness. Mentally tough people plan out goals that are the steps that move them along the way to happiness. These people do not take no for an answer. They are strong enough to face challenges that they may encounter and determined enough to make it to the point at which they feel that they can rest assured and happy that they have done all that they could do to be satisfied with the way that their lives are going and the way that it turned out. Mental toughness is akin to inner strength, and it makes life easier in general: Developing mental toughness does for the mind what working out does for the body. It makes your brain stronger, faster, and better than it would have been if you had not taken the time to do so. Thus, mental toughness is like a workout routine for the mind that strengthens your thought processes, your emotions, and your resolve to succeed. Just as working out makes it easier for you to walk around, jog, run, walk upstairs and participate in daily activities, working out your mind by developing your mental strength makes it easier to think under pressure, establish and fulfill goal, focus on the things that are important at the time, establish willpower and more. Many people do not have the mental strength to make tough choices and take the steps that they need to to get them done. This makes their lives more

difficult, so it is very easy to see why mental toughness makes life easier. It is much better to be mentally tough, with inner strength, than to not develop your mind just like it is much better to be physically strong than it is not to develop your body because you never know when you are going to need to use your mental strength and fitness just like you never know when you are going to need to use your physical strength and fitness. But it definitely makes life easier to have it so that you never get caught off guard. It is of utmost importance to make sure that you mental toughness skills are at their peak when you need them so that you can navigate through the things that may trip others up in life and give them a difficult time. Mental toughness allows you to reduce stress and anxiety: Stress and anxiety, a subject that will be discussed in more detail later in this book, are harmful to your mind and body if left unchecked and allowed to fester. Stress causes a number of health problems, both mental and physical. It can affect everything in your life as well. You may become agitated when you get stressed out and take it out on those around you including family members, children, co-workers, friends, strangers and more. This can cause problems in relationships that may be hard to fix if done repeatedly, over a period of time, or the stressful situation is not fixed. Stress is not something that should not be addressed; however, people who do not have fully developed mental toughness skills may not know how to cope with stress healthily. They may come up with negative solutions to dealing with stress such as drinking, smoking, and more. When you develop your mental toughness, however, you develop skills to help you adequately cope with stress and stressful situations so that they do not get out of control and you can handle such incidents and occurrences better. Furthermore, people who do not have mental toughness skills suffer from more stress than people who do. There are a number of reasons that stressful situations arise. One common reason that a stressful situation occurs due to poor time management. For example, let’s say that you have a project that is due on the first of the month and you have had two weeks to complete it. You know that you should start on the project immediately, yet you choose to procrastinate until you only have four days left before the project is due. If you had managed your time properly, you would have had it completed with

ease; however, because you failed to manage time properly, you are down to crunch time. This can cause you to stress out about whether you will get your project done in time. In addition, you may become stressed when thinking about whether you will be able to complete the rest of your obligations. If you had developed your mental toughness skills before this situation arose, you would have been less likely to fall victim to stress. This is because you would have understood the importance of managing your time properly and had the discipline to do so. There are many other examples of how mental toughness skills and development can help you to reduce, avoid, or alleviate stressful situations. This is because mental toughness involves discipline and being disciplined in areas of your life helps to keep you from finding yourself in negative situations which can cater to the creation of stress and anxiety.

THE POWER OF RESILIENCE AND DISCIPLINE It’s time to address the core tenets of mental toughness: resilience and discipline. These are the key concepts behind everything that mental toughness can do for you. Once you’ve learned to apply them in your life, you’ll witness changes that you may never have imagined before.

What Is Resilience? When faced with hardship, what do you do? Do you wallow and wonder how your life has gone so wrong or get up and fight? Your reaction to adversity shows your resilience, which goes hand in hand with how you manage stress. More resilient individuals will be less affected by stress than those who rarely or do not show resilience at all. It doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, but they have learned how to set it aside so that they can focus on the issue itself and not on their reaction. Resilience, in the simplest terms, is your ability to adapt to and come back from difficult life situations and setbacks. Examples Here’s what resilience looks like in real-life situations: An athlete who suffers from a devastating injury and comes back to win it all A divorcee who becomes financially stable after bankruptcy A child with a severe illness who keeps fighting until they beat it Rescue workers who don’t stop until they’ve combed every pile of rubble and saved as many lives as they can Refugees who cross oceans, mountain ranges, rivers, and countries to escape war, crime, and poverty and give their children the chance to live a better life

What Is Discipline? This isn’t the kind that parents use on kids or you use on yourself. Selfdiscipline is setting aside all excuses, temptations, and distractions and doing what needs to be done. It involves learning to master your emotions and push past your limitations in order to achieve greatness. Discipline is what you turn to when motivation and inspiration aren’t enough.

Examples Discipline comes into play in the following situations: Going to the gym when you want to go home and eat cake Focusing on an important project instead of allowing distractions to take you off task Practicing with a musical instrument every single day, even when you don’t want to Getting up early to read, exercise, or make a good breakfast when sleeping in sounds more appealing Putting money in a savings account instead of buying useless items that provide temporary joy

What Do They Have to Do With Mental Toughness? In short: everything. Without resilience and discipline, mental toughness is not possible. They’re the backbone, the foundation, and the cornerstones that every other aspect of mental toughness leans on. Without these two, you’re back to square one. It’s 1000x harder to get out of your comfort zone, develop habits, and manage stress if you’re not resilient and disciplined. They’re essentially requirements, so it’s of the utmost importance that you take their development seriously. The wonderful thing about both resilience and discipline is that they’re not for occasional use only. You can apply them to everyday life and situations. Like a muscle, the more you exercise them, the stronger they will become.

Don’t wait for the going to get tough before you turn to discipline or resilience. Build them up each and every day so that when you’re faced with adversity, you already have what you need to conquer it.

How to Be More Resilient The obvious next step is to learn how to build up your level of resilience, but it can be tough to know where to begin. The following tips will help you start applying resilience to your own life starting today, this very minute. There’s almost certainly a situation you’re facing right now that requires or could benefit from resilience. Don’t wait for the “right time.” Start now.

Know Your Why If you don’t know why you need resilience, how can you use it? If you have no end goal, what’s the point? Businesses rely on identifying a ‘why’ in order to motivate employees and know where to pool resources. You can apply the same thinking to your life in order to know where the focus should go and where resilience is needed the most. Your ‘why’ is essentially your purpose. Why are you in your career field? Why are you going to the gym every day? Why are you saving every penny? Without a why, you might as well not do any of these things. Without a why, you’re shooting arrows in the dark hoping a target will magically be found. Your ‘why; doesn’t have to be grandiose or world-changing (although it most certainly can be). If it’s meaningful to you, it’s enough. To find your why, ask yourself these questions: What would I be happy to do every day, even if I didn’t get paid for it? What do I want my legacy to be? What does success mean or look like to me? What gets me out of bed every morning? Once you have the answers, you’ll not only be able to find your why, but

you’ll also know more about yourself and what drives you. It’s easy to be resilient when you’re working towards a purpose that means something to you. Just as Fredrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

See Change as Positive Instead of Negative It’s all in your mindset. If you expect bad things to come from change, what do you think you’ll see and experience? It’s far easier to be resilient when you begin from a place of positivity. Even if change brings with it difficulties, don’t automatically see them as negative. By doing so, you’ll have a harder time dealing with and accepting them. Instead, treat change as a welcome reprieve from monotony and sameness. When life stays the same, we become bored and complacent. Change allows you to grow, and that’s always a good thing. Embrace change with positivity, and you won’t have to rely on resilience alone to get you through.

Look for the Good in Every Situation Just as in times of change you should look for something positive, it also helps if you purposefully seek out the good. Have you ever heard the phrase “look for the silver lining”? It’s good advice. When you look for the good ━ 　 or the silver lining ━ 　 you’re redirecting your attention from what may bring you down. You’re not ignoring your problems; instead, you’re seeing beyond what is immediately obvious. For example, you were laid off. Immediately, you’ll be worrying about how to pay the bills, where to start looking for a job next, and how to communicate to your loved ones that you are no longer employed. None of this seems like a good thing, but look closer. Were you happy with your job? Did you feel you fulfilled? Was that the only job for you, or could you find a better one? On the surface, it looks like a setback. Underneath, though, it’s a chance to point yourself on a different path. It’s an opportunity for reevaluation. Instead of letting yourself feel dejected and stressed, look for what the situation can offer you. Resilience is, after all, about bouncing back, which is far easier to do if you treat adversity as opportunity.

Have Confidence in Yourself and Your Abilities

If you always expect yourself to fail and have no faith in your ability to succeed, do you think success will find you? Definitely not. Do you think you’ll want to keep going after you fail if you knew it was going to happen? No way! Resilience requires confidence both in yourself and in the things you do. If you aren’t confident, you’ll have no reason to believe you can do anything. Where there is no confidence, there is no resilience. Confidence is just as important when you win as when you fail. You don’t stop believing in yourself when things go wrong because that’s not what true confidence is. True confidence means knowing you can persevere just as much as you know you can succeed. If you know you can, you will. Remember how mentally tough Olympic athletes knew they would win before they did? That’s confidence. Apply the same idea to your life, and resilience will have something to lean on.

Treat Problems Like Puzzles Resilience isn’t about strength alone but intellect as well. This doesn’t mean that you have to have a high IQ, though. It merely means training your brain to treat problems like puzzles that have a solution and can be solved. In every aspect of your life, your ability to use logic to solve an issue will help you remain resilient and work towards an ideal outcome rather than give in to your emotional response. Here are a few ways to exhibit your problem-solving skills effectively. Make sure that you know what the core issue is. For example, if your daughter is having trouble in a class, the problem may not be the class itself. Before you look for solutions, know exactly what you’re solving. It’s just like putting together a puzzle—the box shows you a picture so you know what you’re working on. List every possible solution, no matter how impractical or silly. Brainstorming isn’t about being perfect. Instead, it’s about putting every idea on the table so that you know your options. Evaluate the solutions you’ve come up with and choose the best possible one. If that doesn’t work, move onto the next one and so

on. Don’t be afraid to be flexible. Your solution may not fit the problem perfectly, so be willing to trim around the edges.

Get Ahead of Problems When You Can If you were standing in the middle of the road and saw a truck barreling towards you, would you stay there and wait for it to hit you? The answer should be ‘no.’ So, why do you do that with problems? When you know one is coming, why wait for the dust to settle before taking action? Do what you can to prepare before it arrives. Let’s say your firm is going to lose a big client, and the fallout will affect the whole company. You can just wait for whatever is going to happen to happen and then clean up the mess afterwards. However, why will you do that when you can make preparations now? Instead of accepting the ‘inevitable,’ find out if there’s anything you can do to keep them around. If there isn’t, try to find a client or clients to replace them immediately. Don’t keep the lose from other employees. Instead, let them help you find solutions. Some setbacks may not be avoidable, but many can be anticipated and prepared for.

Never Ever Give Up In the end, resilience is just about fighting when you don’t think you can fight anymore. You have so much more strength in yourself than you realize. Only a few of us ever truly reach our limit, the point where we can’t go on anymore. Even if you feel run down, beat up, and tired from the struggle, you’re not done. You haven’t reached the end of the road until you’re in the grave. Even then, who knows what happens after that? Your brain and your body are capable of great things. If you quit before learning what they can do, you may miss out on the revelation of a lifetime. Do you want to spend your life wondering what could have been, or do you want to find out for yourself?

How to Be More Disciplined Thank goodness, we’re not born with a set amount of discipline that’s supposed to get us through the rest of our lives! You certainly (hopefully) have more discipline now than you did when you were a kid, which proves that discipline is a skill that can be learned. The main reason why many of us have issues with discipline is that we live in a world of instant gratification. We’re used to getting what we want when we want it. Because there’s no time between asking and receiving, we have no time to consider the consequences. Discipline involves acknowledging that part of us that wants to give in to temptation and telling it no. After all, as Jim Rohn once said, “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.” Use these strategies to become more disciplined in every aspect of your life.

Keep Temptation Far Away This seems obvious, but it’s actually harder to implement than you think. When you’re on a diet that limits sugar, isn’t it counterproductive to have candies and desserts in the house? If you want to read before bed instead of watching TV, why have a set in your bedroom? Logically, we know that having temptations nearby makes them more tempting. When it comes to getting rid of these temptations, though, discipline can be difficult to come by. You may get rid of most forms of sugar, but leave one candy bar in the cupboard, just in case you have a bad day. The TV set has to stay because what if something important happens in the world that you need to know about right away? Excuses readily appear when we don’t want to give up what we’ve become accustomed to. This will be your first discipline challenge. After all, that’s what you need in situations like these. You need to be firm enough in your convictions and recognize excuses as the limitations they really are. Identify your goals, discover which temptations are getting in the way of those goals, and get rid of them.

Tackle the Toughest Task First This is often known as eating the frog, and it really is one of the best pieces of advice you’ll ever get. If you know that you have a difficult task to do and put it off for later, what do you think is going to happen? You’ll keep putting it off until it’s moved to tomorrow’s to-do list, then the next day, and so on. An important part of discipline is recognizing what’s most important and going after it with everything you’ve got. Hence, by doing the toughest task first, you’ll be exercising that discipline muscle and start to get used to the process of prioritizing.

Procrastination Is the Enemy Building off the last point, procrastination is the enemy of discipline. By putting things off until the “right time” or until you “feel like doing it,” you’re telling yourself that those tasks aren’t important and that your priorities lie elsewhere. The more you procrastinate, the harder it is to call on discipline when you truly need it. The reason you procrastinate is simple—it feels good. Happy chemicals in your brain are released when you put off doing something you don’t want to do. Sounds great, right? However, that’s not the end. Once those happy chemicals wear off, you’re left with guilt for putting off an activity, as well as anxiety when you realize that you now have more to do in less time. In order to feel better again, though, you put it off again, and the cycle continues. On the other hand, when you decide to tackle something right away, you may feel displeasure at first. However, when you finish something important, that accomplishment also puts those happy chemicals into motion, except there’s no guilt to lessen the effects this time.

Keep Your Promises How often do you make commitments only to back out at the last second? This can be acceptable in certain situations, such as if you’re sick or have a family matter to deal with. However, what if you do it all the time? It takes a fair amount of discipline to stick to your commitments and responsibilities

when something better comes along. When you cancel plans at the last minute, leave the laundry in a pile when you promised you’d fold it, hand a task off to someone else that you said you would do, you’re sending the message that whatever you’ve chosen to do instead is more important. Take a good look at what you’re prioritizing over your promises. Are those things you want to be known for?

Keep Your Goals Where You Can See Them Just as you’ve committed to keeping temptations far way, do the opposite with your goals. When you’re hard at work on a Saturday morning when you may sleep in, seeing your goal in front of you either in writing or in the form of a picture will remind you why you’re doing it and give you the discipline that you need to keep on going. If you’re saving for a trip to a country you’ve always wanted to visit, wouldn’t it be easier to stop spending if you have a picture of the destination close by? When you want to get into shape, photos of the body you’re after will inspire you to keep on going to the gym even when you feel worn out. Have a visual representation of what you’re working for, and the discipline will be there.

Take Care of Your Basic Needs When you’re hungry, tired, sick, or unhappy, discipline is nearly impossible to conjure. Before you pursue anything that requires discipline, ensure you’ve taken care of the basics. Eat whole foods that fill you up and give you the right kind of energy, sleep 7-8 hours a night, go to the doctor when you’re sick, and practice being grateful and seeing the good to ward off unhappiness. Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but make an effort to prioritize your well-being. Your mind and your body work together, so when something’s off about one, both are thrown out of whack. If you find yourself struggling to implement discipline, check in with yourself. Does anything feel wrong, or is there a basic need you haven’t met? Once you’ve addressed whatever it is, you should find it much easier to focus on other things.

Don’t Equate Discipline with Depravation We all think of discipline along the same lines as keeping our hands out of the cookie jar. While this isn’t an entirely inaccurate idea, it suggests that all we’re doing is forcing ourselves to give up something, but it doesn’t take into account the benefits received. Instead of thinking about discipline in terms of ‘can’t,’ ‘won't,’ or ‘shouldn’t,’ replace them with ‘will’ and ‘can.’ For example, rather than telling yourself you can’t watch TV before bed, say that you can read an interesting book. With this new phrasing, you’re giving yourself something instead of taking away what you can have. This removes the negative connotation that makes discipline seem difficult. The worse you make something sound, the less you’ll want to do it. So, by presenting yourself with a beneficial alternative, you’re seeing the positive in the situation. Try this the next time you need to apply discipline to any situation. Avoid thinking about the lack and instead think about the gains. Anyone who has ever achieved anything did so by applying resilience and discipline to every situation. The people who do not do it rarely make history.

BUILDING MENTAL TOUGHNESS You need to be mentally tough to squash and stomp out any doubts that may creep into your mind. Mental toughness is a valuable asset when it comes to overcoming your distractions and becoming a more self-disciplined person. Mentally tough people are not quitters. They have the drive to do what it takes to succeed; to get back up ten times after falling for nine. A strong character is also essential for self-discipline. Often, a lack of selfdiscipline is a sign of weak character. Building a character will enable you to withstand any challenge you may face. If you are successful, self-discipline will never be a struggle in your life. Now let’s get more specific: Why Do You Need Mental Toughness?

Mental toughness is required for managing emotions. It is unavoidable that people will experience emotions. Emotions are a naturally occurring state of mind that results from a person’s surroundings, moods, and relationships and interactions with other people. Because emotions are naturally occurring, they may actually overtake a person’s thoughts and become their main focus if a person lets them do so. This is where mental toughness comes in. Mental toughness gives a person the ability to control, to some extent, their emotions, as well as the way in which they react to them and how much these emotions take over the person’s mind.

Mental toughness is required for controlling and handling your thoughts. Thoughts differ from emotions due to the fact that they are not always about feelings. In fact, a significant portion of our time is spent thinking about things that do not have much to do with our emotions. You may think about whether or not you are going to be able to finish your homework or work project on time. Although the thought of not finishing the assignment on time may evoke some feelings and emotions, the thought of whether or not you will finish the assignment on time is not primarily based on emotion.

Mental toughness is the key to willpower. Most people would be surprised to find out that willpower or a lack thereof is the primary obstacle that most people face when trying to better themselves. You would probably assume that it would be money, race, or class; however, in this day and age, these hurdles have been lessened by the slow growth of acceptance in the workplace.

Mental toughness is required to navigate through trying times. During times when you are doing well, have some money in the bank, your relationships are good, you are in good health, and you are rather happy, your mental toughness may not be called in as much unless it is in certain highpressure situations. However, if you ever experience hard times, such as the death of a spouse or a child, loss of a job and source of income, a natural disaster or something of that nature, then it is very important for you to have mental toughness to get through the situation the best that you can and get back on your feet. Hard times really are a test of your will. And hard times can happen to anybody, whether they expect it and have planned for it or not.

To establish a winner’s mind Working on and establishing mental toughness is like setting a standard of excellence for yourself that causes you to strive for a higher level of excellence that you may have ordinarily strived for you had you not worked to cultivate your mind. It is like setting a higher level of expectations for yourself, and you are aware of what these expectations are. Oftentimes, thinking that you can do or excel at something is half the battle and when trying to establish mental toughness, conditioning your mind for winning thought processes is very important. Your mindset can help you with your willpower, dedication, time management, and the other essential things that you need to do to establish your goals and to succeed at the things that you set out to do.

Mental toughness promotes longevity in your career or goals Mental toughness is what allows you to stick around in your career or at your

set goals. For instance, let’s say that you want to be a dancer. You must undergo a great deal of practice and training to get started. Then you go on a number of auditions, several of which will be rejections. You may hear criticism of your skills in a not-so-friendly manner, maybe even a little hurtful. If you ever want to get on Broadway, you have to go through all of this and that just to make it in the show. After that, there are rehearsals, shows, and more rehearsals and shows. If you do not have a strong mind, you are not going to make it that long under these conditions and deadlines. It is very important that you use your mental strength to keep pushing on and to help you understand what you are working for.

Mental toughness allows you to handle distractions and keep your focus Building mental toughness allows you to keep your focus and not be swayed by distractions when they come your way. This is very important, because life is full of distractions, and you will run into a large number of them if you want to achieve lofty goals. These distractions will not knock you off your game as much if you have a strong mind and the ability to focus. Mental toughness is the answer to being distracted. Although mental toughness does not allow you to block out emotions and emotional situations, it does allow you to handle your emotions and emotional situations in the proper manner so that you can address these issues at the proper time and still be able to function during the day.

Mental toughness teaches you to prioritize In life, there will be a great number of things that you need to get done that may cause you to neglect your priorities. This is simply a fact of life that cannot be changed, and you need to have the mental toughness to figure out what your priorities are and how to get everything else done without neglecting them.

Mental toughness teaches patience

You cannot have everything at once, and mental toughness will help you with patience in the same way that it helps with willpower. You cannot expect immediate results. Time and patience are part of the key to success in the long run. You can expect to get everything at one time; therefore, patience is a virtue that mental toughness instills in us.

Mental toughness gives you greater life satisfaction Mental toughness helps to increase a person’s life satisfaction. This is because it gives you the basic tools you need to succeed and the drive to do it. Mental strong people are able to handle life, in general, better than people who lack mental strength. They can control their emotions, work more efficiently, they are better listeners, and they bond better with others.

Mental toughness allows you to reduce stress and anxiety Stress and anxiety, a subject that will be discussed in more detail later in this book, are harmful to your mind and body if left unchecked and allowed to fester. Stress causes a number of health problems, both mental and physical. It can affect everything in your life as well. You may become agitated when you get stressed out and take it out on those around you including family members, children, coworkers, friends, strangers, and more. This can cause problems in relationships that may be hard to fix if done repeatedly, over a period of time, or if the stressful situation is not fixed.

But How to Build Mental Toughness: Develop a strong support system Create a positive, strong, and encouraging support system to gain strength from whenever required. During challenging times, we must be able to share our feelings with a close, trustworthy, and motivating group of people. Exchange thoughts and feelings, enlist the support of people you trust, learn about people’s journey, gain constructive feedback, enlist support, and discuss possible alternatives. The people you surround yourself with contribute largely to your thoughts and mental framework. Speaking to

trusted people can help you gain new insights, views, and solutions about challenging situations, which in turn boosts your mental toughness.

Take cold showers You might think this is unnecessary suffering, but it is not because taking cold showers has a lot of benefits such as boosting your immune system, increasing levels of testosterone, reducing inflammation, and so on. When the cold water touches your skin for the first time, try not to yell or wince. Just bear it and keep your mind and body as relaxed as possible by taking deep breaths. Try to stay in the cold water for at least 30 seconds and just make it longer as you get used to the coldness.

Minimize social media usage It takes a lot of mental toughness to unplug from social media. You can either stop using it completely or try to use it only when necessary, like for communication or sharing important stuff. But minimize social media usage as much as you can and just spend your free time doing more productive things. Believe it or not, Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use iPads because he knows how toxic it can get once people start to go online and use social media.

Get out of bed right away When you hear your alarm go off in the morning, do not press the snooze button, and do not stay in your bed even for just one minute longer. Get out of bed right away and do something to keep your blood flowing. Splash your face with cold water, make coffee or tea, prepare breakfast, and just do anything to wake yourself up. This is all just mind over matter. And you will feel a lot better later on when you realize how much you were able to finish in a day because you woke up early.

Sleep on the floor You can also try sleeping on the floor once in a while. You don’t necessarily need to give up your comfortable bed for good. Just do this from time to time to help you build your mental toughness. For a really tough challenge, sleep

without a blanket. Use a thin sheet if you are not ready for the difficulty level.

Do small exercises This will not be your regular full-blown workout. That is another thing that you should be doing even if you are not trying to lose weight because it will keep your body strong and healthy. These mini workouts are workouts that you can incorporate in your everyday life.

Move slowly You might think that this tip is counterintuitive, because slowness is often not associated with success and achieving goals. But this does not literally mean working at a slower pace. It just means that you do not make impulsive actions and snap decisions.

Get dirty Some people are so afraid to get themselves dirty because getting dirty is way out of their comfort zone. Although being clean is something that we should all strive for, there is nothing wrong with getting yourself dirty from time to time.

Read Reading a book can make you tougher mentally because it helps you improve your mental focus for a long period of time. Read a book for a couple of hours every day; that can teach you a thing or two about delayed gratification, unlike television and online videos that are passive entertainment and do not really contribute anything to improving your mental toughness. Reading is also an activity that allows you to use your mind active and learning new words and information is always a welcome bonus.

Take a break When something doesn’t help you achieve the desired results, go on a break or change your strategy rather than giving up. Tackle the task with a

rejuvenated, fresher, and brand-new perspective after recharging your batteries. True success and glory come to people who do not quit.

Build a mindset When faced with tough situations, brainstorm. Think of solutions, ideas, alternatives, and possibilities for resolving the situation instead of giving up. There are various ways to work out a solution strategy by keeping your mind more open, flexible, and fearless. You may require a change in the approach or a slight strategy change. Recognize various ways to deal with a challenging or overwhelming situation.

Develop a sense of humor This is a simple, easy, and enjoyable hack for people to develop mental toughness, yet a good number of people fail to see its virtues. When you experience challenges, humor can help you sail through the situation with ease. Look at the lighter side of things. This helps us overcome stress, disappointment, and anxiety connected to it. You gain a totally different perspective about challenges by viewing them using the lens of humor. Build a positive or constructive view of your skills and abilities An individual’s sense of self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-image is largely affected by perseverance. Keep reminding yourself about your strengths, achievements, skills, abilities, and wonderful moments. Make a list of tough situations you have tackled, and how you battled them. Draw inspiration from winning and positive moments of the past.

Observe your self-talk What is your mental talk sound like? If it isn’t positive, abundant, and successful, latch on to a different frequency. Our self-talk has the power to determine our chances of success. This self-talk can help us sail through challenging circumstances or dive into failure. Realign your self-talk for success by making it more positive, balanced, and constructive. How Mental Strength Improves Self-Discipline

Mental strength is one of the most important elements of self-discipline. Knowing how it contributes to self-discipline will help you to see why you need to be constantly working to enhance it. When you are mentally strong, it allows you to conquer self-doubt so that it is not able to interfere with your level of discipline or cause you to procrastinate out of fear. Motivation comes from your mental strength. When you are not mentally strong, you will find that it is much easier to lose your motivation before you even have a chance to take full advantage of it. You can easily tune out comments and advice that are simply not going to help you. This is critical for self-discipline since it is all about efficiency and removing unnecessary baggage. When you are mentally strong, you are able to face your fears. Fears are one of the biggest reasons that people are not able to develop a strong sense of self-discipline. You can more easily rebound from failure with mental strength. When you quickly come back from failure, it’s more difficult to disrupt your ability to be disciplined. Lastly, you can easily learn from your mistakes. Remember that learning and accountability are paramount when working to enhance your discipline level.

ESSENTIAL TRAITS OF THE MENTALLY TOUGH While there are many different habits and practices that define the actions of a mentally tough person, there are only three essential traits that make a mentally tough person unique from everyone else. These three traits are selfconfidence, critical thinking and setting goals. Each of these traits represents a specific path to success, therefore when you develop them all you increase your chances of success exponentially. Since all of the habits and practices covered in this book can be traced to one or more of these traits, it is critical that you develop them within your day-to-day life. This chapter will focus on the first of the three traits, self-confidence. It will reveal 16 different tips on how to develop and strengthen your sense of selfconfidence. Each tip will discuss a specific practice that you can perform each and every day, thereby instilling self-confidence in everything you do. By the time you have read this chapter you will have everything you need to build the confidence required to pursue any dream, regardless of size, scope and inherent challenges.

Self-Confidence In this section, you will learn about the different tips that you can make use of for developing your self-confidence.

Tip 1: Invest your energy carefully Ask yourself an elementary question, “What is the worst that could happen.” More often than not, we tend to place a lot of importance on “likely” or potential problems. Our energy reserves are finite, so instead of wasting it all on worrying about hypothetical problems, why don’t you concentrate on building and developing your personal and professional relationships? Spend your energy on positive and important things like your personal and professional goals that you would like to achieve. If you are really worried about something, then why don’t you take some action to correct the problem

or minimizing the risk? Be careful while investing your energy and time.

Tip 2: Visualization can help If you are doing something for the first time, then visualize that you have done that task in the past. Close your eyes for a moment and conjure up a vivid image where you have succeeded in doing what you are doing now for the first time. The mind doesn’t know the difference between a vivid imagination and something that’s real. So, make your imagination as vivid as you possibly can.

Tip 3: Try copying others Find a role model for yourself and observe their attitude and behavior. Try adapting all their positive qualities while letting go of the negative ones. Try being as confident as that person seems to be. How can you do this? Try talking to them, provided you have access. If you cannot talk to them, try gathering as much information as you can about them.

Tip 4: “As-if” Try making use of the “as-if” frame of mind. This is quite simple. Imagine that you are a self-confident individual and think about the manner in which you would approach a given situation. How would you behave? How would you move? How would you talk? And what would you be thinking? When you do this, you are encouraging yourself to put yourself in a state of mind where you are self-assured and quite confident. Do this often, and within no time, you will start feeling confident as well.

Tip 5: Step into the future Take a peek into the future and ask your “future” self if the problem that you have to overcome is as difficult as you think it is. At times, the problem might not be difficult or even complicated. We tend to complicate it. Make use of the 5*5 rule. Take a moment and think about whether the problem that you are faced with would matter to you five years down the line. If your answer is no, then it isn’t worth wasting 5 minutes of your time. At times a slight change in perspective can be really helpful.

Tip 6: Let go of the negative internal self-talk Self-talk is useful only when it is positive. Negative self-talk can make you feel quite low. Ignore the nagging internal voice that isn’t positive. You have the option of listening to it or ignoring it. So, decide carefully. If the voice is bothering you, mute it! After all, it is in your head. So, you can decide whether you want to listen to it or not. Self-confidence is a beautiful accessory, and when you are confident in yourself, you will be able to think more clearly and decide rationally. Selfconfidence also helps in improving your mental toughness.

Tip 7: Self-motivation You can start out in a straightforward manner. You can motivate yourself by placing motivators around your workstation. Motivators are the things that keep you going; elements that provide the initial spark. Things like a family photograph, an inspirational quote, a picture of an exotic destination you want to visit and so on. Always keep good company. Your circle can have a positive or a negative impact on the way you think and behave. Surround yourself with happy and optimistic people, and you will feel optimistic. Never stop learning and keep reading. When you start learning more, you are bound to feel more confident about yourself. Don’t let negativity get to you. Maintain a positive outlook towards life in general. Look for the good in bad! If you find that you don’t have the necessary motivation to do something, then you should perhaps set that project aside for a while and get started on something else. This will help you in building some momentum. Once you have gained some momentum, you can go back to the previous project. The more you keep telling yourself that you aren’t supposed to think about something, the more time you will spend thinking about it. It is how the human psyche tends to work. It becomes almost impossible to not think about it! The trick is not to let this happen. When you feel yourself leaning towards postponing something for a while, you should try and avoid it. Just shift your attention towards something else. For instance, instead of thinking that you aren’t supposed to procrastinate, try thinking about how good you will feel once you have completed the task. In this manner, you will be able to take the necessary action instead of worrying about a specific behavior.

Keep track of times when you feel motivated and the times when you feel like giving up. There will be a specific pattern in it, and once you know the pattern, you can find a way to work around it. Keep track of your progress. You can make a progress bar, and when you see it grow, you will want to keep nurturing it, and it will keep you motivated. When you are motivated, it is easier to accomplish things. It is even easier when the motivation comes from within and is not dependent on someone else. You can help others as well!

Tip 8: Stop procrastinating The act of intentionally putting something off for a later date even though it should be done right away is known as procrastination. Not all procrastination is negative. For instance, if you rush off to your yoga class before starting a new project at work will make you feel energetic for the new challenge. Maybe you like cleaning and organizing your room before you start studying. These habits are not harmful and will help in preparing yourself for the challenge that lies ahead. However, if procrastination is wreaking havoc on your personal and professional life, then it obviously isn’t constructive. Once you have decided whether it is constructive or destructive, you will need to identify the underlying cause for procrastination. Here are the most common reasons. Drama: It can be quite exciting to procrastinate, waiting until the very last minute to complete a task can feel like you are gambling against all odds. You are betting on yourself that you will be able to pull it off and the things that aren’t in your control (reaction of your coworkers, the copy machine, or even the highway traffic), will work in your favor. So, procrastination can create drama in your life that might make things seem interesting, and this might feel better than going about doing things promptly. The fear of failure: If you wait until the very last to perform a task, then you can always claim that you could have done better had there been more time. Procrastination helps in providing yourself with an excuse when things don’t work in your favor.

Fear of success as well: Being afraid of success is quite real. Maybe you are worried that your responsibilities will increase if you perform well. This fear might deter you from performing well. In fact, you are effectively sabotaging yourself and your career. Perfectionism: You are your worst enemy. Trying to be a perfectionist will prevent you from completing a task. It is almost impossible to live up to the standards that you have created for yourself, and this will demotivate you from even starting. Hostile feelings towards someone: Perhaps you resent the person that assigned you the work, and by procrastinating you are merely channelizing your hostility towards them. When you don’t like whom you work for, it is very likely that you wouldn’t want to do the things assigned to them. Lack of interest: Perhaps the task that you are put up to is boring, or it doesn’t interest you. Or maybe you don’t have any personal interest vested in its outcome or result. Task seems confusing: Maybe you don’t understand something about the task on hand. Or maybe it looks unmanageable and you don’t know where to start from or even organize it. It is important to determine the reason for procrastination. Once you know the reason, you can try to rectify it.

Tip 9: Focus Your level of mental toughness depends on your ability to stay focused. If you can stay focused, only then will you be able to achieve your goals? In this section, you will learn about the different tips that you can follow to stay focused.

Tip 10: Getting some exercise is important Physical activity is essential to improve your ability to focus and concentrate.

Exercising or any other form of physical activity helps in releasing chemicals that enable the brain to learn and remember. Exercising is so much better than a cup of coffee. It can provide you with a boost of energy that improves your mental and cognitive functioning. Thereby making it easy for you to stay focused.

Tip 11: Staying hydrated Did you know that mild dehydration could lead to wavering of your attention? Yes, it does! So, make it a point to have at least 8 cups of water per day. Keep drinking plenty of fluids. If your consumption of coffee is high, then increase your water intake accordingly.

Tip 12: The important things in life Take a couple of minutes and think about all the things that are important to you in your life. What are the tasks or chores that cause you a lot of worry and stress? Now, think about whether you think these tasks are important to you. If the things that stress you out the most aren’t amongst the list of important things, you can safely stop stressing over them. By getting rid of such unnecessary tensions, you can start focusing on things that are important to you. Once you know where you need to focus, you can start breaking down those important things into smaller functions that are manageable.

Tip 13: Getting rid of all distractions Technology is the cornerstone of the world that we live in these days. Technology has provided us with the ability to stay connected with everyone, regardless of where you are. Technology has plenty of advantages. However, one of the major disadvantages is that it is a distraction. So, technology does lead to inattention, and it diffuses your focus as well. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to concentrate on something if your phone keeps buzzing constantly! So, get rid of all your gadgets and gizmos when you are trying to concentrate on something. It is a common habit to wake up in the morning and immediately check your texts, emails and social media updates. Your mind tends to be fresh, and your ability to concentrate is quite high in the morning. When you squander away this energy on trivial things, you are hurting your productivity.

Tip 14: Working on one thing at a time Don’t try to multitask. If you want to accomplish something, then focus on that one thing alone. If you try to multitask, you are spreading your attention on multiple things, and you will not be able to give it your best shot. Learn to prioritize your tasks and start with the ones that are your top priority and work your way down the list.

Tip 15: Taking small steps If your goal is to lose weight, then you will need to start taking small steps that will help you in achieving your goal. You cannot achieve a goal if you don’t focus on the little things that are equally important. If you want to lose weight, you shouldn’t just concentrate on getting physical exercise. You need to make sure that you are eating healthy food, you are getting sufficient sleep, and you are exercising too.

Tip 16: Prioritizing Making a to-do list is very helpful. Take a paper and make a note of all the things that you have to do on a particular day. You have two options when it comes to making a to-do list. You can either make this list early in the morning or before going to bed on the previous night. When you have a to-do list prepared, you don’t have to worry about running around like a headless chicken and will have a sense of direction. When you have a sense of course, you can start working towards achieving the goals you have set for yourself. When you know what you have to achieve, you can set aside all the other distractions and instead focus on your goals. When you see the tasks that you need to complete, there is no room for distractions. You can develop your mental strength if you have goals.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE What Is Emotional Intelligence? Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions as well as the emotions of others. It has a variety of different definitions with no one definition being superior to the others. Some texts define emotional intelligence as having four fundamental parts which include: managing emotions, perceiving emotions, understanding emotions, and using emotions. Other texts consider emotional intelligence to be selfawareness, social awareness, relationship management, self-management, and emotional intelligence. Still more consider emotional intelligence to be composed of five parts; these five parts are social skills, self-awareness, selfregulation, motivation, and empathy. One thing that is agreed upon is that emotional intelligence consists of being both aware of your own self and your emotions as well as being conscious of the people around you and their emotions. Emotional intelligence gives you the ability to differentiate between different emotions that you may experience and identify and label each one correctly. This skill is a very important skill for people to possess because understanding your own emotions and being able to differentiate between them gives you the opportunity to control your emotions and take steps to adjust them. For instance, if you notice that a given thing makes you depressed, you can take steps to counter that in advance to avoid or minimize this emotional response. Understanding and being able to differentiate between the emotions, responses, and behaviors of others allows you to interact better with other people. This is very important because a great deal of our lives has to do with interaction with other people. You can benefit from this in almost every facet of your life. A salesman can understand body language, and facial expressions, and understands which statements a person may take offense.

The Ability to Listen to Your Emotions Emotional intelligence is also the ability to listen to and adjust your thinking and behavior based on the information that your emotions are giving you.

For it to be a good idea, however, for you to listen to your emotions and be guided by them, you need to have the ability to keep your emotions in balance. Your emotions need to be under control before it is okay to listen to them. It would not be wise for an overly emotional person to listen to and be guided by his or her emotions. Thus, you must be able first to identify your emotions, and then understand where your emotions are coming from and what triggers them. Is it an event from the past? Is it negative thoughts about your worthiness? Is it an overly inflated ego? It is important to understand whether your emotions are coming from the event or person that you are dealing with or something else before you judge your reaction. Your emotions need to provide you with accurate information in order for you to be able to use them in a manner that is beneficial to you. Thus, you need to be in tune with your emotions and tune them up from time to time so that the information that they are presenting to you is useful and accurate and thus a good guide for your behavior.

Why Do You Need Emotional Intelligence? Everyone needs to have emotional intelligence, and it can definitely make your life easier if you have a great deal of emotional intelligence. The ability to understand the way that others are thinking, feeling and may react as well as being in touch with your own emotions that are formed for the situations that are in can help you navigate through situations in daily life far more effectively and with greater ease than you would if you lacked this skill. It is important for a person to understand how his or her emotions connect to his or her behavior. Emotions have a significant effect on how a person perceives things, and in turn how he or she reacts to it. If you do not understand and are not in control of your emotions, you may not understand the reason for your reaction. Many people never even bother to think about why they react a certain way to certain things. Your behavior directly relates to your reaction to certain stimuli. Furthermore, the way in which other people react and behave toward you is directly correlated to the emotions that they feel when they are around you as

well. So, it is best to be in tune to the so that you can do well. In fact, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence often manipulate other people’s emotions to tilt situations in their favor.

When Do You Need Emotional Intelligence? There are a significant number of situations in life when you need to have emotional intelligence so it would be wise to think that it is always good to have and utilize emotional intelligence. In fact, it can be argued that the only time that you do not need to have emotional intelligence is when you are sleeping…alone. This is because life is filled with interactions between other people and these interactions often involve emotions.

In Relationships One of the most obvious times in which you can benefit from having emotional intelligence is in your personal relationships. Relationships are often filled with and even based on emotions. Knowing when your spouse or significant other is happy, upset, or annoyed can help your relationship run a lot smoother, so does knowing the right thing to say and when to say it. Awkward people, people without adequate people skills often have a difficult time meeting people and thus forming relationships. If you have no clue what to say to the opposite sex, when or what they may find offensive, you may have a difficult time finding a mate, most cases are not this extreme, and most people do have some emotional intelligence; however, improving your emotional intelligence can help you to enjoy your relationships more, form more relationships and closer bonds with other people, feel less intimidated in social situations and network better with others.

At Work Although it may not seem as though emotional intelligence comes into play as much at work, if there are other people around you at work, and these people are likely to experience emotions, then emotional intelligence can be a great asset to you in the workplace. In fact, emotional intelligence can help your workday go more smoothly, help you to get along with your coworkers

better, get the people around you to look more favorably upon your ability to do your work and even get you a raise or a promotion that you have wanted for a long time. The first time you use emotional intelligence at work is at the job interview itself. Since the interviewer may be seeing a number of different candidates, you do not only want to make sure that you impress him or her with your credentials and impressive resume, you also want to make sure that you do not rub the person the wrong way. Yes, catering to your interviewer’s emotions is important if you want to land that job. You know you need to be able to read signals and take hints in order to secure the position. But what does taking hints involve? Taking hints and reading signals involves identifying the emotions of the interviewer and acting according to what is pleasing to him or her. Or, it may mean realizing that this is not a person that you want to work with and that you need to look for another job. Either way, it is important for you to be in tune with the thoughts and feelings of the interviewer so that you can perform well or make a judgement call as to whether this is an environment that you can work in.

Emotional Intelligence versus Intellectual Intelligence When looking at the benefits of having emotional intelligence, one has to wonder which one is better to possess, emotional intelligence or intellectual intelligence. Intellectual intelligence is a test of someone’s academic intelligence and is often measured by standardized tests. Intellectual intelligence gauges your ability to learn and understand information that is being presented to you. In addition, it is representative of your logical reasoning ability, reading comprehension skills and often reading and math skills as well. This type of intelligence is very beneficial to have in the workplace and is often an indicator of who will perform well at the tasks assigned and shine at his or her job.

How to Gain Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence is important to have since so much of life is spent dealing with other people, and you also need to understand your own emotions in order to be successful and enjo0y your life.

Some people may be blessed with emotional intelligence already, and these people may know who they are. They are the ones who are always making friends and have an easy time with people. Even still, they may not have developed their emotional intelligence skills in all situations and environments. A person can have a high level of emotional intelligence with their friends but a very low level of emotional intelligence at work. This can come from feeling connected to friends and taking the time to listen and emphasize while, at the same time, feeling disconnected at work and not making the same effort to understand the emotions of others and interact with them well. This type of person can benefit from learning how to gain emotional intelligence as it applies to different situations. Other people may have a more difficult time around people and fail to make friends easily. They may also have trouble relating to people at work. They may even experience some anxiety when they are in situations where they are meeting people for the first time. If you are one of these people, you probably already believe that you need some extra help when dealing with other people and trying to understand how to better interact with them. You simply may not have been aware that increasing your emotional intelligence can help you do this. Here are some ways that you can improve upon your emotional intelligence: Get in touch with your own emotions by taking time to reflect on them. Emotional intelligence involves not only understanding the emotions of others; it also involves getting in touch with your own emotions as well. This is important when interacting with others because the way people think, feel and act towards you may be significant in the way you interact with them. It is also significant to how you perceive the experience no matter how it goes. Because it is so important to understand your emotions in different situations, you need to get in touch with your emotions and the best way to do this is by taking the time to think about them actively. Reflect on your emotions through the day at the end of the day. Jot down the emotions that you experienced in different situations, how you felt, whether or not you enjoyed it. Did something make you nervous? Did you experience fear? Understanding what emotions you experience in different situations can

allow you to gain better control over your emotions. This is especially true if you are a person who experiences anger issues. Determining exactly what type of events may trigger anger in you will help you to control it better.

Solicit the opinions of others. When assessing emotions and trying to gain a great understanding of how yourself and others think and feel, it is important to get other people’s opinions. This is because another person may view a situation differently than you do and may experience different emotions in the same situation. Another person may even offer you a different way for you to look at a situation that is troubling you or you have not figured out how to handle on your own. Ask as many questions as you can about different situations and scenarios that you face and interactions that you have so that you can gain the most accurate insight into how the other people involved and even the people watching think and feel about the situation.

Stop and think before doing some things or having some interactions Normally, we go through our day doing the things we need to do and interacting with the people that we need to interact with without thinking about it first. Take a moment to stop and think about some of these things before you do them and some interactions before you have them. As yourself what do you expect to feel about doing this? How would you feel if you did not do it today? How do you think that this interaction is going to go? Do you think that you will enjoy the interaction? Are you dreading it? After taking the time to stop and think and asking yourself some of the questions listed above, you may want to jot the answers down on a piece of paper and slip it in your pocket. After the event or interaction takes place, think about whether it went the way you expected and whether it went differently because you stopped and thought about it. Answering the first question will help you to understand how closely your expectations about the event or interaction coincided with

the actual occurrence. After doing this a few times you may be able to see where your perception is off and start bringing your expectations beforehand and the actual occurrence closer to matching. Answering the second question, ‘Do you believe that the event or interaction went the same way or that it went different from what it would have if you had not stopped and thought about the situation first?’ can help you understand whether you need to take the time out to think about your actions, thoughts, and interactions before you have the to make sure that you are in control of your emotion and react the best way that you possibly can to the situation.

Observe and study the emotions and interactions of others. To learn more about how other people experience emotions and how they think and react to things, it is a good idea to simply watch them for a while so that you can see for yourself how they experience certain situations. Maybe go to a local park or a shopping mall, sit on the bench and simply watch people when they walk by. How do people seem to treat each other? Are people who do not know each other polite to each other? Jot down so notes about some of the things that you see. Especially note the reactions that you did not expect and maybe hypothesize as to why your opinion of what the reaction would be was wrong. Practice putting yourself in situations which may help to improve your interactions with others and your ability to understand their emotions. If you are uncomfortable meeting people, you should not try to avoid such situations. On the contrary, you should go to as many of these types of events and place yourself in as many of these situations as possible until you get better at it. (Important Note: If you really need practice in this area, it may be best to start off in some places where you do not have to worry about seeing the people again. Try and out of state conference for a hobby or interest of yours and see how you do at mixing and mingling. Or try going to a nightclub or bar in a neighboring city, mingling and asking someone to dance with you. You can even stay at a hotel overnight and think about your experience.

The more experience you gain in certain situations, the better you will become at understanding them and handling them with poise ease and grace. So, go out there and practice interacting and take notes to see how this improves your level of emotional intelligence. Practicing certain situations which you find socially challenging is also part of developing mental toughness, the ability to endure and succeed in the given situation through practice and perseverance. And take notes!

Learn to handle criticism well and even learn from it. Sometimes, as you go throughout your day something that you have done or said may receive some criticism from someone else. Do take this personally. On the contrary, try to learn to handle criticism, so long as it is not too harsh, in a constructive manner. Ask the person who gives the criticism of what he or she saw wrong with the situation that led up to the criticism. If there really is a flaw of some sort, this gives you the opportunity to fix it. And even if you do not agree with the criticism, you get to hear the other person’s thoughts and feelings on the matter which leads to an improvement in your level of emotional intelligence.

The Negative Effects of Not Having Emotional Intelligence There are a number of negative effects of not having emotional intelligence. In fact, if you lack emotional intelligence, you are probably experiencing the negative effects and may even know what they are. People who do not have emotional intelligence struggle when dealing with other people, some may not even realize it. Emotional intelligence is often referred to as people skills. People with poor people skills tend to misread situations and may say things that are inappropriate or even offensive due to the fact that they have a lowered ability to read other people. As stated earlier in this book, empathy, or the ability to empathize with others is a trait that a person needs in order to have a higher level of emotional intelligence and form significant connections to others. Without the ability to place one’s self in another person’s shoes and understand how he or she feels, a person can only relate to situations from his or her own perspective. This is similar to ‘going in blind.’ This type of person can get some things right, but

he or she would get a great deal wrong due to the fact that he is only speaking from his own perspective. There are certain signs that a person may have a low level of emotional intelligence. These signs tend to illustrate a failure to understand and relate to how other people feel.

Getting into frequent arguments When you do not have the emotional intelligence to communicate well with others, oftentimes, this can result in your communications becoming contentious. This is because positive communications often break down when one of the parties in the conversation is insensitive, condescending, arrogant, selfish or displays other negative characteristics that may frustrate, annoy, or anger the person with whom he or she is conversing, and this may often escalate into an argument.

Feeling a lot of negative emotions Emotional intelligence is not just the awareness of the feelings of others; it includes self-awareness as well. Therefore, if you are feeling a lot of negative emotions, you may not be in touch with your emotions and what is causing you to feel this way. People with higher amounts of emotional intelligence tend not to let a lot of negative emotions linger. They seek to find out what is causing these emotions and try to address them so that they can experience more positive emotions and less negative emotions.

Overly negative perceptions of other people and situations Poor emotional intelligence can lead to not only negative feelings and emotions but also overly negative perceptions of situations which other people may not have viewed as poorly. Failure to be able to connect to people can lead to you seeing more negatively than people who have the emotional and social skills to make a connection.

Behavioral Issues Some people who have low emotional intelligence actually develop

behavioral issues as a result of not knowing exactly how to handle their negative emotions. Negative emotions which are not addressed and remedied to some extent often aggravate things and can lead a person to develop frustration and anger which often manifests itself as behavioral issues. Lower Performance When you are dealing with unresolved emotional issues which result from a lower level of emotional intelligence, this may often result in lower performance. Emotional issues cloud your mind and your judgement causing you to be able to concentrate less on your work. In addition, these issues could be the elephant in the room in a workspace if this is where the emotional issues originate.

Lower Level of Self Confidence When you do not know how to relate to other people, this can result in a lower level of self-confidence. The fact that things tend not to go smoothly, and problems tend to originate when dealing with other people can weigh on a person’s self-esteem until it starts to diminish.

Refusing to Listen to the Opinions of Others and Their Point of View People who have lower levels of emotional intelligence often have narcissistic personality disorders that cause them to believe that their thoughts and opinions are superior to that of others. You have probably met this type of person who tends to be loud, rude, and wrong. It is hard for this person to understand that there can be another way of thinking about things that differ from the way that he or she thinks about it.

Blames Other People for His or Her Own Mistakes Everyone has met someone who has someone else to blames for everything that goes wrong around him or her. This person barely takes responsibility for his or her own actions if something goes wrong. Part of mental toughness is feeling as if you can control a situation; therefore, people who have developed their mental toughness and emotional intelligence tend to take

more responsibility for the mistakes that are made.

Find it Hard to Develop and Maintain Close Relationships Close relationships are important to develop and maintain; however, they take a good deal of emotional intelligence to do so. Close relationships tend to require that one person empathize with the other, take responsibility for his own actions, listen to the other person’s thoughts and opinions, and understand how the other person may feel in given situations. Just as there are traits that people with a significant amount of emotional intelligence display, people with insufficient degrees of emotional intelligence tend to display some common traits as well. These traits are, of course, negative in nature and result from a lack of understanding or caring about other people. Part of developing mental toughness includes developing emotional intelligence which can benefit a person in many facets of daily life and help minimize these negative traits.

APPLYING MENTAL TOUGHNESS IN DIFFERENT FIELDS Applying Mental Toughness in Sports Mental toughness originally started in sports, and naturally it was highly successful in this area which is why the concept has since spread to many other areas of life. In sports, people who are mentally tough are far more capable of achieving their fitness goals. They lose their weight the fastest, bench press the most pounds, run the fastest, swim the longest, and can ultimately achieve any fitness goal they set out to accomplish. The athletes who partake in the Olympics are known especially for their mental toughness. If you listen to any Olympic athlete, they always have a story that involves overcoming many challenges in order to get to the level they are at now: competing in major international sporting events. Overcoming cravings, encouraging themselves to show up every day to work out and eat healthier, and stopping themselves from comparing their own success to others can be extremely challenging. Not only will they hit periods where they may feel like they are severely failing, but they may also feel guilty or jealous when they see that other people have quicker success than they do. This is completely natural. However, it can also be very taxing on your emotions. In fact, this is often why many people will stop working toward their weight loss goal altogether. This doesn’t have to be the case, though. If the person were to first focus on developing their mental toughness, and then work toward developing mental toughness throughout their entire weight loss experience, they would be far more likely to achieve their goals. They would be resilient toward their challenges, confident that they can accomplish their goals, brave enough to say no to the urge to quit, and emotionally intelligent enough to recognize that the feelings of guilt or jealousy are only temporary emotions that can be leveraged to motivate them to show up even more. Other people who benefit from mental toughness include those who genuinely enjoy sports and simply want to get better at their favorite sport, those who are interested in taking up new hobbies such as body building or basketball and want to increase their abilities, and even those who simply

want to see themselves living a more active lifestyle. Moving beyond your current abilities often means moving beyond your comfort zone and pushing yourself harder than you have ever pushed yourself before. Being able to do this takes incredible energy, but also incredible mental strength. Therefore, mental toughness is a powerful asset for anyone who is invested in or looking to become invested in physical activities.

Applying Mental Toughness in the Workplace In the workplace, mental toughness has a powerful effect in helping us move forward and see success in our careers. One major way that mental toughness helps us in the workplace is by teaching us that there are always solutions and opportunities to the many challenges we face on a daily basis. The workplace can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Perhaps, for example, you work somewhere and you are not particularly fond of some or even many of your coworkers. You may also not have an affinity for your boss, or other people who are in charge. In these circumstances, exercising mental toughness means that you not only show up to the job each day, but also that you are willing to give it your best. You show up each day, put the previous days behind you, and focus on what success you can create on that day. You pay attention to opportunities to increase productivity, do your job with your best abilities, and ensure that everything flows smoothly. When the people you are not fond of or the work you are not fond of comes along your way, you are willing to put in the effort it takes to make these situations positive. You do not let them hold you down, nor do you let them hold you back. You are not willing to let these circumstances stand in the way of your own success. Not only do you show up, but you show up your best, ready to work and with a willingness to perform. Problems at work can seem so overwhelming that quitting may seem easier than carrying on. However, what separates those who quit and those who persevere is how mentally tough the latter is. There are circumstances when you have no choice but to stop. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you have to develop mental toughness no matter what you are doing or where you are. Here are some tips on how to do it. When you are not satisfied with how your career is going, or you are facing

problems at work, you might lose interest in your work. You will develop and practice mental toughness by defining and upholding your standards even when you are facing a tough situation. When things don’t go as planned, your ability to maintain high standards will help you get through it. Having a moral compass is also important. What is your viewpoint? Your beliefs define who you are. You will also know the path and direction you should take. It is easy to get confused and lost when you want things to end. Don’t be someone who can be influenced easily. You can’t really control everything. That’s a fact you need to accept. You will have to give up some control so that you can control what is important. This way, you can avoid pointless conflicts.

Applying Mental Toughness in Entrepreneurship Just like with your job or career, mental toughness has a powerful ability to help those who are involved in entrepreneurship. Arguably, those who do not possess any level of mental toughness will not succeed in entrepreneurship. The reason why is simple: you are on your own. When you have a workplace that is complete with a boss and a set of employees, you are not on your own when it comes to achieving things. You do not have to set your own schedule, make all of the difficult sales, and do all of the other challenging aspects involved in the business side of things. You leverage the strengths of both your coworkers and your management team. However, when you are an entrepreneur, you are faced with all of these challenges. You must learn to develop your confidence, your resilience, and your overall mental toughness enough that you can show up every day and create success in your business. If you don’t, your business will not become successful. People who have mental toughness can handle the natural ups and downs that come with business. When it is your own business, the stress that comes from the downs in particular can be extremely difficult to handle. With these downs come a large amount of fear, uncertainty, and even desperation if you are trying to come back up again. If you are able to exercise your mental toughness, it means that you will effortlessly bounce back from these downs. Not only will you be able to exercise your emotional intelligence to help regulate your own emotions, such as fear and desperation, but you will also have the confidence necessary to take the action that is required in order to

come out of these natural ruts. The more resilient you are, the more resilient your business will be. This is especially true for entrepreneurs because in the beginning it is often just them and a few other people. A company is only as strong as its leader, so lacking mental toughness means that your business will be at a serious deficit when it comes to having a faithful, resilient, confident and brave leader to drive it forward, even in times of uncertainty. If you want to become an entrepreneur, or if you already are one, developing your mental toughness on an ongoing basis is completely necessary. Not only will this skill help you start your business if you haven’t already, but it will also help take you to entirely new heights. Even if you already have some degree of mental toughness, regularly focusing on developing it is necessary if you want to have total success.

Applying Mental Toughness in Education Educational settings can be difficult! In fact, they may be even more difficult than a career. In an educational environment, you are constantly being pushed to learn new things. Rarely do things ever slow down for you to fully embrace everything you have already learned. Instead, you must take your personal time to study so that you can fully grasp and memorize what you have already learned. Then, you are fed more information to learn so that you can continue your education and earn your certificate, diploma, or degree. People who lack mental toughness often struggle greatly in educational environments. They are often unwilling to devote their personal time to studying, likely because they struggle to overcome difficult emotions and commit themselves to the studying process. Sometimes, they might feel like they are already behind, or they may simply feel uninterested in the learning process. Therefore, rather than overcoming these emotions and dedicate themselves to studying, they will skip studying and struggle to keep up with the rest of the class. Negative grades can harshly affect their confidence, especially if a person lacks resilience. If they are having a hard time in school, someone who lacks mental toughness is likely to fall behind and either hardly pass, fail, or even drop out altogether. Without mental toughness, it can be very difficult to brave educational environments. Mental toughness can play a huge role in making education feel a lot easier

and more achievable. People who are mentally strong have the capacity to “turn off” their disinterest and regain focus on what they are attempting to achieve. They are more likely to bounce back from bad grades and try harder to ensure that they do better in the future. They are committed to studying, and they possess the confidence that they can achieve their education if they set their mind to it. These people know how to say no to distraction, no to fear, and no to feelings of unworthiness or inferiority. Instead, they are willing to show up every time and put their greatest effort into successfully completing their educational program. They are capable of recalling why they started in the first place and they can use this goal as motivation to keep them moving forward, no matter what challenge they may face along the way.

Applying Mental Toughness in the Military and Navy SEALs Mental Toughness When it comes to particularly difficult careers such as being a part of the military or Navy SEALs, mental toughness is an absolute must. Virtually every aspect of these careers is difficult. These individuals are actively involved in war and war-oriented practices, such as their trainings, and they are subjected to incredibly strict rules. They are expected to behave a very specific way, are required to submit completely to their sergeants or leaders, and are not allowed to show weakness on any level. Weakness may imply that they are not qualified, which is detrimental to the entire team on both the physical and psychological levels. They are yelled at often, put through incredibly difficult training as well as physically-and emotionallytaxing practices, and may see things that are extremely traumatizing for them. In many cases, they will even have to face seeing the death of many other people, some of which are comrades. In fact, they may even find themselves responsible for it, as per the nature of their job. Based on everything that these individuals must go through, mental toughness is absolutely necessary. In fact, they test for it before even allowing people into the military or Navy SEALs. If someone is not mentally tough, it is assumed that they will not be able to handle the stress and hardship that comes with being a part of these programs. They will be far more likely to develop severe cases of PTSD, or even suicidal depression. They may have regular and severe emotional breakdowns, which can be

incredibly dangerous if they have them in the wrong place at the wrong time when they are on active duty. Furthermore, they would likely struggle to handle the exceptionally high standards that are expected from them on every level. From their fitness capabilities to their ability to keep their bunk clean, and to complete every other task given to them with complete perfection and attention to detail would likely be far too difficult for a person who lacked mental toughness. Those who are mentally tough, then, would be the ones that experience greater success in these career paths. Not only can they handle the yelling and constant pressure applied to them by their higher ups, but they will also be more likely to bounce back from any potential depression, PTSD, or other mental challenges they may face during and after their involvement. People with mental toughness will also be able to get themselves through the exhausting amounts of physical training that is required in order to be a part of the military. Since there are so many demands that a military or Navy SEALs member must go through, both physically and mentally, it is imperative that they possess a level of mental toughness that will successfully carry them through these challenges. Otherwise, they will be at a severe disadvantage and may not be able to physically or mentally handle the challenges they will face.

Applying Mental Toughness in Personal Matters Believe it or not, mental toughness is not only an asset when it comes to facing large obstacles such as the obvious mental and physical challenges that come with the previously discussed situations. In fact, mental toughness can be a powerful asset when it comes to managing your personal life as well. Developing your mental toughness will not only help carry you through these difficult obstacles and challenges, but it will also help you tremendously in your personal life, too. There are many times in our personal lives that we are faced with challenges. These challenges can be related to family, friends, finances, racism, sexism, societal class, religion, personal beliefs, politics, or any other number of topics. We face challenges on a daily basis, often surrounding one or more of these particular subjects. If we struggle with mental toughness, we will likely find ourselves being victimized by these challenges. Perhaps you may feel

that you are hopeless against them, or that there is no chance that you will ever be able to prevent them from harming you. Maybe you feel as though these are things that you will have to face forever based on your circumstances, which may be ones that are outside of your control. These feelings can lead to many more difficult challenges, such as increased stress levels, anxiety, depression, and other hardships. If you were facing these challenges with mental toughness, however, they would not affect you the same way. Instead, you would have the confidence to face them and stand up for yourself when necessary. You would have the resilience to bounce back whenever you were struck by these challenges, and both the faith and confidence in yourself and your ability to do better by yourself. You would not feel additional levels of stress or depression because you would not victimize yourself. Your emotional intelligence would help you understand the true nature of these hardships. If you were facing racism or sexism for example, you would know that the true problem belongs to the people who are abusing you and not you personally. You would also have the confidence to stand up and fight for change, rather than sit back and let these things happen. You would also be able to sort through the inevitably painful emotions that would arise as a result of these experiences, rather than bottle them up and have them turn into depression or something else that is equally as painful. Any challenge you would face in your personal life would be far easier to navigate and overcome if you were equipped with an advanced level of mental toughness.

GAINING FULL CONTROL If you are like most people you probably have a whirlwind of thoughts spinning around in your head every minute of every day. The chances are you have wished that you could empty your head of every thought, memory and idea and simply enjoy the peace and quiet of a clear, silent mind. While this may seem like a good idea the fact of the matter is that thoughts aren’t always a bad thing. After all, without thoughts you wouldn’t have dreams, ideas or ambitions–things that keep your life from becoming stagnant and boring. However, when you allow your thoughts to dictate your life you create a whole list of other problems to deal with. The trick is to understand that you are not your thoughts. Instead, you are defined by the actions you take. Therefore, it is vital that you separate yourself from your thoughts so that you can make clear and informed choices. This will ensure that the actions you take are meaningful and effective, thereby leading you towards the accomplishment of your goals and dreams. This chapter will reveal several methods for gaining full control over your mind, including how to organize and control your thoughts so that your thoughts no longer control you.

1: Understand what thoughts actually are In order to be able to control your thoughts you must first understand what thoughts actually are. While they may appear to be many different things, the fact is that thoughts are nothing but sound bites of information, or better said they are ideas. Many of those sound bites come from your surrounding environment. Conversations you have with other people, things you hear on the radio or on TV, and even random things you read on billboards, cereal boxes and the like all serve to deposit fragments of information into your mind that become stored as thoughts. Needless to say, most of these thoughts are of no real value, however when left unchecked they can collect in your mind the same way that spam can collect in your email account, taking up valuable space and energy.

Alternatively, there are thoughts and ideas in your mind that are highly valuable and meaningful, and that can serve to help you improve your life in any number of ways. These thoughts include your dreams, ambitions and visions of a better life. More often than not such thoughts come from within rather than from without, being born of your imagination and subconscious. Other times such thoughts may be inspired by outside people or events, especially those that encourage you to discover and fulfill your true potential. In any event, such positive thoughts are critical for creating a better life, and thus should be nurtured and utilized to their fullest. Finally, there is the category of thoughts that are comprised of memories. These thoughts can be the most poignant as they tend to instill emotional responses. On the one hand, any memory of failure will usually evoke a fear of failure that will make pursuing your goals ever more difficult. Ignoring such memories is all but impossible, which is why most people succumb to their fears and never chase their dreams or ambitions. On the other hand, any memory of success will evoke a sense of confidence, one that provides the strength and will power to chase your dreams regardless of their size and complexity. Such thoughts prove valuable beyond measure for those who want to live a life of meaning and fulfillment.

2: Organize your thoughts While it might seem tempting to try to empty your mind of the thoughts that fill it, the fact of the matter is that all such efforts usually prove futile. Even if you could empty your mind of every single thought, which is the goal of certain forms of meditation, such emptiness would prove short lived as your mind would begin collecting thoughts as soon as you got back to your regular life. That said, this doesn’t mean that you have to endure the chaotic flow of thoughts that most people experience. Instead, you can actually organize your thoughts so that your mind becomes a neat and orderly repository of dreams, ideas and goals. How you organize your thoughts is entirely up to you. One method is to separate those thoughts that come from within from those that come from without. This will help you to keep track of which thoughts are truly yours as opposed to those that are put in your mind from the words and actions of other people. A benefit of this is that any negative thoughts that come from

without will have less power over your mind when you realize that they don’t reflect your true feelings. This will also help you to keep track of which dreams and ambitions come from your heart, enabling you to choose ambitions that are truly yours over those that are put into your mind by others. Another way to organize your mind is to separate thoughts by category rather than origin. In this way you keep all negative thoughts together, whether they come from your own heart or the words of others. This can be highly effective as you can close the door to all negative thoughts when they are kept together far more easily than if they are allowed to flow freely among all the thoughts in your mind. Furthermore, by placing all positive thoughts together you can choose to focus on those, thereby increasing your confidence regarding any dream you are pursuing. In the end, when you organize your thoughts you make it possible to control which thoughts to entertain and which thoughts to ignore. This is a critical element of mental toughness.

3: Turn negative thoughts around When you have your thoughts organized the next step is to decide what to do with each type of thought. Some thoughts, such as hopes, ambitions and dreams should be nurtured and pursued, whereas other thoughts, such as fear of failure and regret, should be neutralized in order to minimize the damage they can cause. Again, it is almost impossible to rid your mind of negative thoughts, regardless of where they come from. Therefore, another method for neutralizing their effects must be found. One proven method for overcoming negative thoughts is to turn them around, thereby reversing their polarity. For example, if you have a fear of failure based on a memory of failing in the past, rather than letting that fear control your thoughts and actions you can turn it into motivation. Instead of trying to forget that you failed in the past you can focus on how it felt to lose, determining to never face those feelings again. Now you will be even more determined to succeed, not just for the sake of succeeding, but also for the sake of not having to feel defeated again. Another way to turn negative thoughts around is to treat them like warnings.

Again, in the case of facing a fear of failure, consider why you failed in the past. Perhaps you weren’t as prepared as you should have been, or perhaps you ignored important information or advice that could have led to your success. In any event, if you learn the lessons from past failure you can use your current fear of failure as a warning against making the same mistakes again. Now, instead of the fear being a negative it can be seen as a guiding hand that is keeping you from repeating the actions that led to failure in times past.

4: Separate yourself from your thoughts Defining and organizing your thoughts are critical steps in taking full control over your mind, but they aren’t the be all and end all. Instead, it is critical to actually separate yourself from your thoughts, even after they are organized and tamed. This helps you to maintain a clear perspective on the fact that your mind doesn’t necessarily reflect who you are. Instead, it reflects the information you have been exposed to on a daily basis. While you can choose the things you listen to and the people you spend time with to a certain degree you can never totally control those things. As a result, ideas, thoughts, fears and the like can enter your mind whether or not they are things you agree with or believe in. This is why it is absolutely vital to separate yourself from your thoughts. The easiest way to do this is to reflect on the true nature of thoughts, namely that they are simply sound bites of information. A person can have thoughts of any nature, but that doesn’t mean that the nature of those thoughts defines the person. This is where programming comes into play. If you allow the thoughts in your mind to run wild they can begin to define how you think, which in turn will define how you act. However, when you remain detached from your thoughts you maintain control of your mind, thereby preventing yourself from being programmed by the fears, envies and negative thinking of those around you. Perhaps the best way to separate yourself from your thoughts is to question every thought you have. By asking the simple question “how do I feel about that?” you avoid defining yourself by a specific thought. In the event that you

disagree with the thought you can easily cast it aside as the junk that it is. However, if you decide that you like and agree with a particular thought you could put it in a safe place and nurture it accordingly. In the end it’s about recognizing the simple fact that while you might be a vital part of what’s in your mind you aren’t necessarily the thoughts contained in your mind. Rather, you are the intelligence that sorts through and processes those thoughts in a way that creates meaning and value in your life.

5: Choose acting over thinking There is one final step that goes above and beyond separating yourself from your thoughts. This is the step of choosing acting over thinking. The old axiom “Actions speak louder than words” sums up this concept quite well. Although the axiom refers to actions over words, the same principle applies to actions over thoughts. What keeps so many people from ever being truly successful is that they never translate their thoughts into actions. Subsequently, their dreams remain dreams, their hopes remain hopes, and their lives remain unfulfilled and stagnant. Only when you turn thoughts into actions can a dream begin to transform into reality. A simple way to see this is to consider someone who has achieved greatness in their life. Take Napoleon for example. Whether you respect Napoleon or not, the fact remains that he became emperor of most of Europe for a while. This is no small feat, especially when you consider his humble origins. The key was that he took every opportunity for self improvement that came his way. He made the most of every position he held, did as much as he could with what he had and actually transformed his environment based on his vision of how things should be. As a result, he rose to power and became a name remembered by history. Thus, it was his actions that defined him, not his dreams. If dreams alone defined a person then most people would be emperors, kings and billionaires. However, dreams don’t define a person, only actions do. As a result, only those people who choose acting over thinking will ever transform intangible dreams into solid reality.

CONCLUSION Almost everything that you want to do and is worth doing in life takes some degree of mental toughness that is the determination to push forward and surmount hurdles, stay organized and motivated, use willpower and resilience to keep moving forward toward the goals and dreams that you want to achieve. Mental toughness is as important, if not more, than how much money, education or status you have when you are trying to achieve the goals that you have set for yourself. There are some traits that are common to people who have established and developed their mental toughness skills; and these traits include: mental competency, emotional intelligence, resilience, willpower, a winner’s mind, the ability to focus, they surround themselves with people who are mentally tough, and they avoid trying too hard to go against the grain. They also possess some common habits: one consists of leaving the past behind and learning from it by improving the present situations. There are even some interesting techniques that you can use to let go of the past if it is still weighing on your mind. You can try holding a ceremony to let go of the past and move on positively. There are a number of reasons that you should develop your mental strength, and one of the primary reasons is so that you can be more productive. Did you realize that people who have a great amount of mental strength get more things done? This is because they are able to concentrate and focus. They handle emotional issues when they arise so that they do not become overrun with emotion. Moreover, they manage their time and money wisely. Feeling in control of your life is another reason to develop mental strength. Feeling that the things that take place around you are out of your control is a feeling of powerlessness that can be remedied.

Furthermore, building your mental toughness will help you transition more smoothly through the changes that occur in your life. Mental toughness is needed for everyday life situations because you never know what is going to occur. Additionally, mental toughness helps a person navigate through tough times more smoothly. Mental toughness helps you prioritize. And there are a number of other reasons that a person should develop mental toughness. There are certain techniques that you can use to build mental toughness. One such technique is to take a long hard look at yourself and evaluate who you are. Evaluate where you are in your life and your values and belief systems. Identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can strengthen the areas where you need improvement. It is important not to allow your mental energy to be wasted on either things that are insignificant or things which you have no control over. Meditate and reflect on your day at the end of each day. Do not try to be a perfectionist. To develop mental strength, you also want to practice staying calm in high-pressure situations.