The Makeup of Mental Strength

When situations overwhelm people to the extent that they feel unable to react correctly, they often turn to coaching for help. While they enter into coaching with the idea that it will help them work things out, they do not realize that it also will provide them with mental strength. Making the correct decisions and the necessary actions afterwards takes more than just willpower.

How Mental Strength Works

We come up against all sorts of unplanned challenges in our lives such as the recession worldwide that caused a number of companies to close their doors permanently. An issue such as this negatively affects your life, when your company informs you that it is closing in 7 days after 20 years of business.

Suddenly, your life goes from simple to complicated and stressful. You cannot think straight enough to take action at that moment. Once you calm down, you discover that you face certain unsettling choices. Do you select a different career and take the first job you come across? Is returning to college for additional training the answer? Will you need to relocate to a smaller residence to save money?

You may also have great difficulty making the appropriate phone calls to enact the necessary measures in this situation, and this could make you feel lazy or weak. At this moment, you just do not have the energy to make a move in any particular direction. You might even force yourself to take action. Why is it still so difficult, though, are you really that weak or lazy? How can you move beyond this rough spot?

Those With Mental Strength Endure When Life Becomes Difficult

Society has this ideal that in adversity, an individual should be strong. An ideal such as this is not one all can live up to in their lives. In addition, it is too easy at times, to view strength during difficult moments as a virtue you either have or will never have in your life. Absolutes are not plentiful in this world today.

The majority of people handle certain situations easily while other ones overwhelm them. Can you improve your ability to stay calm under pressure? Most definitely, you can improve this ability! Read on to learn how you can increase the strength of your mental muscle to help you through adversity.

Consider an Olympic decathlete who competes in a total of 10 activities across a 2-day period to test his or her skill, endurance and strength. His or her training must cover all these attributes over an effective amount of time for the decathlete to realize success, or else the decathlete may excel at the 1500-meter run, but fail badly in the javelin throw or shot put competition. Similarly, when you attempt to increase your mental strength, you will work on your strong points and decrease your weaknesses.

When people possess mental strength, they face difficulties straight on in an effective manner to solve the issues. I feel that people who are strong mentally have the valuable characteristics of resilience, willpower and skill. In what way does coaching assist you in developing these characteristics? Let us examine these traits of mental strength and how coaching addresses them.

A skilled coach first analyzes your particular needs before he decides which methods will assist you in your efforts. Typically, growth will not occur in one easy, smooth path, but you realize it over time through trial and error. Coaching moves the pace along faster than you can do on your own and helps track your progress.

Increasing Mental Strength Under the Guidance of a Coach

Think of willpower as an attribute that combines courage, effort and intention. Let us examine each of these values separately.

Intention provides your "will" for the first half of the word willpower. It is the resolve to remain on or return to the task until you complete it. Your coach may assist you in determining your values in order for you to build awareness and make consistent choices. In addition, you might explore how altering your behavior will lead to certain consequences. Exploration in this manner will look at that which you are afraid of losing and the gains you may realize, so when you are ready to proceed you can select the changes that are correct for you.

Effort is the force you exert towards a goal, and coaching enhances this by teaching you to gauge how much force you need to exert to accomplish the goal in a more effective manner. When you face difficult challenges, you might feel afraid or helpless, or that it is a hopeless situation.

A coach will focus on this susceptibility to stress and depression when this pertains to your specific situation so that you can rise above it. When you throw in the towel too quickly, thoughts of past experiences may surface where you had the same helpless, hopeless and fearful feelings, and coaching will help you explore new ways of viewing these situations. The coach will support and encourage you throughout the process.

Courage is the readiness to feel the intense emotions such as fear and anxiety while you perform the necessary actions in spite of them. Awareness is one of the essential components of courage. Coaching works with people to increase their mindfulness to enable them to face a challenge despite feeling uncomfortable or anxious to perform appropriate actions to help them through the situation.

How Stress and Depression Influence Each Other

When people are under stress, they feel anxious and at times, depression sets in, but both feelings influence each other, so they hinder people's ability to cope in difficult situations.

An example of an anxious response is when you face an uphill battle you start feeling stressed out to the point that you lose the ability to think clearly enough to deal with the situation. The fear you feel takes over your life at that moment, and it overwhelms you. As a result, you withdraw from not only your fear, but also the issue.

When delivering a depressive response, you feel that the entire situation is hopeless, and that you are helpless to change it. Feelings such are these zap your energy totally that you require to take effective action.

How do stress and depression influence each other? Feelings of fear make you think that it is hopeless to tackle the challenge so you avoid the issue completely, which compounds the problem. Reacting to anxiety with avoidance and escape, whether through watching television, drinking alcohol, or other ineffectual actions convinces you that you do not have any willpower. Once this happens, then you feel shame and guilt since you also lose faith in your abilities, and this leads to additional avoidance to start the cycle once again.

Working with a coach is an effective way to avoid this vicious cycle. You will reach beyond your own abilities to learn better coping skills and actions. Your self-esteem may still take a hit here, though, as you are admitting you cannot deal with the situation on your own.

Do not be trapped by this type of negative thinking! You should first admit that the situation overwhelms you. After this, find the determination to reach out to a reliable, knowledgeable coach who will help you to build up your strengths to the point where you will be able to react effectively to challenges in your life.

Coaching shows clients how to stay calm in difficult scenarios. A coach will spur you on to discuss your experiences in detail. He or she also will travel along with you while both of you examine negative thoughts and emotions that come to light, and at times, discover their relationships to past issues, which in turn helps you release their influence on you.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression in the 1930s got up out of his wheelchair to stand on weakened legs to speak from the inaugural podium to state that the only thing the American people had to fear was fear itself. Can you build this type of courage within your own being? By tackling fear head on and performing the necessary actions, you successfully conquer your fears.

What Is Skill?

Skill is a blend of thinking, perspective and awareness.

Awareness provides with focus and the ability to be attentive. You develop both over time by examining the reason for the challenges and the contributing factors. You may learn meditation to teach you to concentrate even when happenings stir up unpleasant feelings or emotions so that you can still perform daily tasks mindfully without fumbling the ball so to speak. Other ways to develop awareness include concentrating on your emotions to gain a deeper understanding about what they truly reflect, or dream analysis to discover additional understanding of your life situation and attitude. Writing in a journal also is beneficial when you are working on your mindfulness.

How to Free Yourself From Avoidance

Certain individuals practice a type of avoidance where they appear to be busy with something, but in reality, they are wasting time instead of taking care of the issue.

As an example, a husband starts to surf the net on the computer as if he is busy with an important task just to avoid the discussion his wife wants to have with him. Another example is a woman reading romance novels since she feels inadequate to take charge of her life.

Escapism also can occur in a number of other ways. While you are still conscious, you are not exactly fully alive either, and it allows you to provide the illusion of performing a productive action, when you are just practicing the art of avoidance.

When you are in the lethargic zone, the first action you must take is to acknowledge this fact. The next step is to get up and act! Address what you have been avoiding head on or at least, discover why you feel so hesitant. Either way, remove yourself from the trap you are in before you wind up in the midst of a depression.

Thinking: A coach will teach you mindfulness and thinking using automatic thought records. Below is how this works:

Certain challenges knock you off course. When this happens, you need to jot down everything that went on to discover and explore what type of thoughts the events triggered and if your thoughts are distorted by these same events. Next, you document your feelings that accompany these thoughts and analyze their strength. You talk about these thoughts to learn a better response to the situation. Finally, you measure how intense your feelings are to this situation.

Many times, after you calm down a more adaptive response will be evident, so you can proceed through the situation. When you analyze with your coach other scenarios, emotions, thoughts and potential actions, you will realize similar solutions. On top of this, a coach may ask you to participate in role playing in an effort to teach you new skills and build your self-confidence. All of these processes will help you react and think more decisively under pressure.

Perspective is another part of mental strength, and it allows you to analyze the immediate issue objectively to understand better how to react to it. Coaching can help you imagine life as you wish it to be and what steps to take to turn it into reality.

Imaginative activities such as image streaming, artistic endeavors and dream-work will help you analyze images that you create on your own accord. When you participate in activities such as these, you realize that your subconscious mind is the key to the perspective you are in search of to deal with situations in an objective manner.

Coaching often depends upon the process of talking to assist you in developing perspective. The coach will help you examine what influences cause your situation to occur in the first place. When you use unresolved conflicts to explore your reactions, you begin to understand that certain responses are no longer viable to deal with the situation at hand. You could always reap satisfactory results through reading certain materials that your coach recommends and followed up by in-depth discussions on your findings in relation to your specific situation.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from adversity, depression or other issues. A characteristic such as this is a blend of flexibility, support, self-care and patience, and provides your mental strength with staying power.

Patience helps you to keep from making a snap judgment that can intensify the issues and lets you more effectively time your final response. The coach teaches this through emphasizing realistic goals.

When you practice meditation, it will increase your focus ability even through uncomfortable situations or other discomforts. When you are impatient, you form impulsive, ineffectual decisions. Instead, you should develop anxiety-coping skills, stop nurturing addictions and learn to regulate your emotions.

Anger is one of the main triggers for impulsive actions. People who become angry easily will profit from participating in classes on anger management in order to learn how to react without anger and to consider other people's needs in addition to their own.

Flexibility is the ability to alter the course when a situation calls for such action. To develop this ability, you must first understand the scope of your situation and the various ways to deal with it. A number of remedial approaches, such as training in role-playing, communication and problem solving are effective in building flexibility.

Self-care is a necessity for those people who are in anxious moments as stress has negative effects on the mind! An overall healthy physique provides you the ability to hold up under stressful conditions.

At times, people will rise out of a depression just by eating a healthy diet, sleeping soundly and exercising daily. In addition, people also remain in relationships or circumstances longer than necessary, and until they resolve these issues, the stress will continue in their lives. A therapist may be necessary to help you through these kinds of issues.

Compassion for oneself is possibly the most crucial component of self-care as not many individuals deliberately select to feel stuck in a situation. Typically, you handle difficulties to the best of your ability with the skills and knowledge that you possess at the time.

A coach will help you analyze whether or not your self-care habits are up to par. Self-care should not only increase your strengths, but also eradicate your addictions, as these will interfere with your healing process.

Support helps you be stronger as you have others to rely on for help. A solid support network can include your coach, members of the community, family members and others who are willing to help you succeed in life.

Enact Enduring Change

You now know all the elements that comprise mental strength. Along with this, you should understand in what way a coach will assist you to build your strengths through various challenging exercises. People receive a number of benefits from coaching, including positive ways to overcome stressful situations. Building mental strength provides you with certain advantages that will last a lifetime!

Gregg Swanson is a peak performance consultant and human potential coach and has authored several books and numerous articles on peak performance. Gregg specializes driven individuals that have a burning desire to achieve their full potential including entrepreneurs, sales professionals and athletes.  You can pick up your free eBook, ”Why Change is So Hard” by going HERE.