What is Mental Toughness?

Mental toughness training has changed my life.

I learned the basics during my pro baseball days and it has assisted me through tough times in the boardroom, on the field and at home. Mindset training has had such a profound impact on my life that I have made it my passion and career to help businesses and their employees hone their mental toughness skills and as a result watched them thrive personally and professionally.

I want to talk to you today about what mental toughness is, how to hone your skills and finally how to implement mental toughness training into your business, leadership style and teams.

What Mental Toughness is NOT

Before we dive into what mental toughness is, I want to first kick some preconceived notions to the curb and talk to you about what mental toughness is NOT!

Being mentally tough doesn't mean that you should show NO fear, weakness or emotions! It doesn’t mean you should push your fears away and always act tough as nails.

Have fears, have weaknesses, have emotions and admit to self doubt!

Why? Because letting your emotions bubble up, and identifying what scares you most, or where you feel inadequate means that you know what you are dealing with. Name those fears.

Seriously, get out a pen and write them down. This will help you later on in your mental toughness training because you’ll be able to name the emotion, tap into your toolkit and deal with it faster and healthier.

Identifying and addressing these fears is way healthier than letting them fester deep down inside. When you push emotions and fears away they have ways of coming back to haunt you, or even paralyze you from starting down the road towards your dreams.

You will never get rid of fear or limiting beliefs completely but when they resurface, you will have the tools to deal with them so they don’t drag you down and inhibit your forward motion.

What is Mental Toughness?!

I have spent my career and life honing my mental toughness skills and over the years I keep circling back to these 5 practice areas.

I noticed that when I train to build my confidence, emotional control, focus, and energy levels I was capable of performing, making decisions and navigating through tough changes as my best self. Being able to perform at your highest level is what it’s all about in sports and that translates straight into the corporate boardroom.

My 5 step training carried me through those diverse environments and helped to make high performance habits second nature to me. If you want to operate at your highest ability in life, relationships or in your career, mental toughness is a practice you need to hone.

All of my training to boost these skills is actionable, repeatable and focused so you can move past your stumbling blocks and kick it into high gear. Here’s how…

Confidence – Confidence is always the first to go it seems. One limiting belief and poof! We can build your self confidence and make you unshakable.

Focus – Learning how to hit that sweet spot and staying in the flow zone is an artform. You can recreate and repeat it daily.

Building Energy – This is a look at you as a whole. Diet, sleep and exercise all come together to determine your performance levels right out of the gate. Give yourself a fighting chance!

Emotional Control – Training your mind to return to baseline faster and learning how to manage stress levels in the moment can increase your ability to focus so you can perform at peak levels.

Peak Performance - If you focus on building these four elements you hit the fifth > which is maximum output, hitting the flow zone and tapping into peak performance every day.

Mental Toughness for Leaders

Practicing mental toughness skills on a personal level will benefit you tremendously but learning how to integrate them into your business or corporate team will be life changing.

Achieving greatness takes a ‘secret sauce’, a different way of thinking and acting. Getting mentally tough and boosting your energy can truly unlock possibilities and allow you to handle whatever comes your way as a leader.

These days, competition is more fierce than ever, as is the pressure and stress that comes along with running a top company and team. Why not learn how to change your team’s habits from reactive to proactive ensuring your team is out in front of your clients, sales strategy or whatever project you may need to hit a home run with. Cultivating those mental toughness skills allows your team to consistently execute at their max levels which translates into better work, better relationships and a tighter, more strategic team.

We can work through a company diagnostic and hone in on what is keeping your team in a spiral. Just check out the Ignite Your Mindset Training here.

How Mentally Tough Are You?

Want to test your mental toughness skills? Take this mental toughness test and see where you can make improvements! 

If you aren’t quite ready to take the Ignite Your Mindset leap, tune into my Mental Toughness podcast, a place where you can learn from the best of the best; great leaders, nutritionists, bio-hackers, athletes, and Olympians!

Check out The Mental Toughness Podcast...

By the way, if you are interested in subscribing to a podcast that is 100% focused on mental toughness and leadership growth, you can subscribe to THE Mental Toughness Podcast with Matt Phillips by clicking the links below:

? iTunes

? Stitcher

? TuneIn

? GooglePlay