What is Mental Toughness?
Mental toughness is a term thrown around by the masses in our world today. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of articles, books, and videos exist that attempt to summarize this polarizing term. Many of them are helpful, but it still feels like its definition and subsequent analysis are more complex than it needs to be.
I began a quest to try to define mental toughness as succinct and concise as possible, and here is where I landed:
Mental toughness is doing what needs to be done even when you don’t feel like it.
You're not always going to feel inspired.
You're not always going to feel motivated.
Shoot, you might not even feel like you care at all.
But mentally tough people push onwards and upwards anyway.
If you're thinking to yourself "well yes, that sounds like me" then perhaps an important experiment would be to examine the ultimate test of mental toughness: your discipline at defining moments.
A defining moment in your career, in your relationships, or in your health puts you face to face with the ultimate test of mental toughness.
What do you do? What does your discipline look like at defining moments?
Your career doesn't care that you had a long day.
Your relationships don't care that traffic was brutal on the commute back home.
Your health doesn't care that you're tired of eating right and would rather eat what you crave.
Sometimes what you feel like doing and what you need to be doing are not the same thing. Mentally tough people understand that when your feeling does not align with what needs to get done, it's critical to have the discipline to take action anyway, embrace productive discomfort, and do the work.
Get better. Get it done. Do the work.
That's what mentally tough people do.