High mental strength exists not just in your head. It translates to real-life benefits like you wouldn’t believe.
- Most elite athletes report that at least 50% of superior athletic performance is the result of mental or psychological factors. This means that physical ability no matter how insane needs to be complemented by mental toughness for greatness to show.
- 83% of coaches rate mental toughness as the most important set of psychological characteristics for determining competitive success.
Here are 3 unsexy signs of impressively high mental strength:
1. You believe in tough-self love, not comfortable self-love
When my girlfriend of 3.5 years broke up with me, I was all kinds of messed up you can imagine.
I mean, she was my everything, and I lost everything in the span of a 14-minute phone call.
Yes. On call. And I never saw her after that. I never got closure.
So naturally, I decided to show myself some self love because I thought I needed it. I decided that I won’t do anything productive and eat as many chocolate pastries as I want to. I told myself it was okay. I told myself I deserved the comfort.
Only problem? It didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel like sh*t. Absolute sh*t. I felt like this was not self-love. It was self-hate.
Then, I read a book that changed my life — can’t hurt me by David Goggins. I didn’t know this when I picked up the book, but this book is the bible of mental strength.
And it completely flipped my perspective. I did a 180 and decided not to go easy on myself, but to go tougher than I ever have.
- I started working out like crazy. And ate cleaner than ever.
- And I studied around the clock.
And it changed everything. I felt so great. I actually felt like I loved myself.
People think going easy on yourself is self-love. And in very micro-doses, it might be. But on a macro, going easy on yourself, and locking yourself deep into the corridors of your comfort zone is not self-love. It’s self-hatred. It’s self-abuse.
2. You are an unbroken optimist
I learned this term from Niklas Home, And here’s what I think it means.
An optimist tries to look at the bright side in every situation. However, an amateur optimist can get a bit pessimistic in certain conditions. However, with practice, you can reach the peak of this trait. And that’s when you become an unbroken optimist.
Unbroken optimism is when no matter how sh*tty the situation might be, you find some sort of positivity in it.
Of course, optimism and pessimism cannot be proved objectively. Things don’t happen for good, or for bad. They just happen.
However, subjectively, these traits have huge implications.
Pessimism makes you hopeless. It makes you feel like there’s no point putting in the work because it’s all going to turn to sh*t. But optimism induces a positive feedback loop of high mental strength.
Here’s why: when any event occurs, it might have like 10 results. If 7 out of those are objectively bad, and 3 are objectively good, optimism makes you relatively ignorant of the bad results, and focus on the good ones — and you judge the whole objectively bad situation as subjectively good.
3. You get back up stronger
When I started writing, there was this one publication I was dying to get into. But their standards were pretty high. And I was okay with that. So I kept submitting.
After many rejections, I was eventually accepted as a writer. I was elated. And wanted to get published soon, so I sent more articles. However, a few days later I realized that I was removed as a writer
Turns out, that I was not meeting their standards repeatedly. And hence, they removed me as a writer instead of having to reject me again and again.
It was bad. I actually cried. Like, real tears. I remained glued to the couch the entire day, feeling bad for myself.
But then, I stopped throwing myself a pity party and realized they were right to remove me as a writer because I was sending in sh*tty stories.
But I was not going to stop.
The next day onwards, I started spending more and more time writing better articles. Eventually, I got accepted as a writer again. And started getting published as well. Repeatedly.
I was knocked down. But I came back stronger.
Life will trip you down at every turn. It’s a test to see if you really want what you claim to be after. If you get back up stronger, Life respects your mental strength and gives you what you deserve.
