Habits Mentally Tough People Embrace Every Day
Grit, science says, is more important than innate ability when it comes to achieving success. Maybe that’s why a post I wrote back in October listing psychotherapist Amy Morin’s habits to break if you want to be exceptionally mentally tough seemed to strike a chord with so many readers. A follow-up piece with advice from Morin on how to tell if you have above average levels of grit was equally popular.
Mental toughness, it seems, is something nearly everyone would like to have—and which many of us think we could benefit from working on. So if you’ve tested your own level of resilience to see where you stand, and kicked the bad habits that Morin called out in her first piece, what’s the next step to pumping up your mental toughness? According to the latest bit of advice from Morin, it’s adding good habits to your routine.
What behaviors should you engage in every day for greater grit? Morin listed nine when she spoke with Business Insider on the topic. Check out the complete post for the deep dive, or read on for a handful of her suggested habits to get you started.
1. Monitor Your Emotions
Contrary to popular belief, mental toughness isn’t about suppressing your emotions, it’s about monitoring them, Morin asserts. The truly mentally tough “monitor their emotions throughout the day and recognize how their feelings influence their thoughts and behaviors. They know sometimes reaching their greatest potential requires them to behave contrary to how they feel,” she says.
2. Practice Self-Compassion
Nor is mental toughness about being your own harshest critic and strictest taskmaster. Instead, those with exceptional resilience speak to themselves with kindness and compassion, not hectoring and insults. “They respond to their inner critic as if they were standing up to the schoolyard bully. They forgive themselves for mistakes and cheer themselves on as they work toward their goals,” Morin tells BI.
3. Be Realistically Optimistic
When it comes to the right outlook for optimum resilience, it’s all about balance. Pie-in-the-sky optimism will only lead to disappointment, but knee-jerk negativity will ensure you never even try to reach your full potential. To maintain just the right amount of optimism the mentally tough “strive to re-frame their negativity,” replacing “exaggeratedly negative thoughts with a more realistic inner monologue.”
4. Set Healthy Boundaries
You can’t be mentally tough if you don’t take responsibility for your own situation. That means being firm about what is and is not acceptable to you instead of letting others influence your behavior and mood in ways that you don’t agree with. The mentally tough, in other words, “refuse to let other people dictate whether they’re going to have a good day or a bad day.”
5. Accept Responsibility
You can’t get better if you don’t admit your weaknesses and you can you learn from mistakes if you refuse to accept responsibility for them. “Rather than make excuses for their mistakes or failures, [the mentally tough] seek explanations that will help them perform better moving forward,” Morin asserts
Build Your Mental Behavior
1.Never Make it Personal
Even though you may perceive that the world is out to get you, and only you, this is in fact a psychological phenomenon called ‘cognitive distortion’. Though it is natural to filter our experiences through our personal lense, or the perspective of ‘self’, in reality the coffee spilling on your shirt had more to do with physics and gravity than it did with you as a person. Those who are mentally tough are able to separate themselves from events, identifying instead that the dog chewing on the shoes has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the dog needing a new chew toy. Most of the time in life things that happen to you aren’t personal.
2. Identify the Motivation
Before you lose your temper, or your focus, you need to look at the situation that is frustrating and ask yourself why it is happening. Take for instance, there are only bran muffins left in the basket. Why is that? Since we’ve followed tip one and eliminated the personal (Bob from the art department didn’t eat all the blueberry ones just to upset you) we can look at the problem objectively. What is everyone’s motivation for eating muffins? Well, they’re hungry, and they have flavor preferences. If bran are left, no one likes to eat them or we can argue a much smaller number of people do. Which means the other flavors in the basket are more pleasing to more people. Solution? Ask the basket provider to eliminate bran if possible and include more apple cinnamon. Or, create and enforce a one person, one muffin rule. Once you can identify other motivations for people’s actions, you’re a lot more likely to keep a cool and an open mind.
3. Really, Deeply, Truly, Let It Go
The masters of mental toughness are the ones who are able to truly release their focus on the mundane, unimportant, and irrelevant. Though the loss of the file/form/phone number might be deeply irritating, even upsetting or deeply important, the mental masters are able to let go of the situation and either focus on solutions, or engage another problem until such time as the first can be solved. Dwelling on, obsessing over or constantly worrying about a problem actually makes us less capable of resolving the issue. This is seen often in sports; athletes who are unable to let go of a bad play or a bad call play statistically worse for the rest of the game than those who are able to acknowledge the moment for what it is (a moment) and return to the game as though nothing had occurred.
So the next time your day starts badly, or you just need to roundhouse kick your brain into overdrive at work, apply these three habits to your daily routine. And if you can rock cowboy boots and a Stetson while you’re at it, it couldn’t hurt.
Job security no longer exists (and that's not a bad thing)
One of the most important ah-a! moments we can have today is to accept that employment stability no longer exists. Every job is temporary. The sooner we embrace and adapt to this mindset, the better. Unfortunately, many professionals are still working with outdated assumptions. Things like, "My goal is to get a good job with benefits that I can stay at for a long time." Or, "A college degree will ensure I get better job opportunities." And even, "If I work hard, keep my head down at work, and just put in the time, they will see my effort and I will be rewarded." If you believe any of those right now, you're setting yourself up for a let-down. Today, there are no guarantees when it comes to career advancement.
4 career mentalities you can't afford to have
A recent survey by LinkedIn of over 10,000 job changers shows that more than 53 percent of them made the change for better career opportunities. While money was important (it ranked second), the need to move to a job that could give them the chance to increase their skills was their primary reason for making the switch. These successful job changers focused on making sure their businesses-of-one stayed employable by keeping their career moving forward. Unfortunately, not every professional will succeed as these job changers did. Why? They have one of four career mentalities that hold them back.
1. Overthinker. The person who thinks about every career option as a scary risk, finding flaws and roadblocks to each one. Such people spend hours, days, weeks, and even years pondering what they should do next. Meanwhile, time marches on in their dead-end jobs. They don't build any new skills. Eventually, they find themselves part of a "corporate restructuring"--they get a month's severance and get thrusted into an unexpected job search.
2. One-track-minder. The person who knows exactly what he or she wants to do and has no desire to consider any alternate options. Convinced they've got the perfect master plan, they work like crazy, often to the point of exhaustion. Over time, their intensity works against them. Co-workers and managers see them as too rigid and controlling, which often gets them passed over for promotions--and, in some cases, let go for failing to be a good team player.
3. All-talker. The person who loves to talk about his or her career, but never really takes action. Such people are full of ideas and sound very convincing that they'll be a huge success. They seem to have it all figured out. However, as time passes, you notice they aren't moving along in their careers. They always have an excuse, and it's usually someone else's fault they aren't where they should be. Eventually, they lose credibility and find people actively try to avoid career conversations with them.
4. Open-roadster. The person who feels fate will guide him or her on the career journey. If they just keep an open mind and let the opportunities present themselves, they believe they'll find the careers they were meant to have. Over time, they drift from career to career, never really establishing any particular skill or specialty. They claim they're enjoying the process, but as the years pass, they find themselves with diminishing options and not a lot of money saved for retirement.
Looking back on your career, can you identify with any of these mentalities? If so, it might also explain why you aren't where you want to be professionally.
If you're thinking, "That's not me," consider this.
Studies by CAREEREALISM show that 88 percent of professionals feel unsatisfied with their career success. While you may not have a severe case of any of the mentalities above, even possessing one of them to a small extent can hurt your ability to move forward.
Ask yourself, "Am I guilty of a career-limiting mentality?" The sooner you recognize what's holding you back, the sooner you can make changes and take action to eliminate it.