Mental toughness is the ability to perform and persist even in the face of the most challenging conditions and situations.
As someone who worked in commando units in my past career and successfully completed very long, very challenging physical courses for special unit operations in order to better perform my duty and served in very difficult terrain conditions, I will try to explain to you a little bit by blending my knowledge and experience on mental endurance with the information I have gained from many books I have read. In today’s conditions, I think mental endurance is needed more than ever. I will try to explain it to you as much as I can, both with the short videos I share from my social media account and the blog posts I will discuss here. I hope I can be useful to you.
In this article, I will try to explain what mental toughness is and what it means. In the following articles, I will try to explain how you can gain it. I must say in advance, mental toughness, I call it a bulletproof mind, is not a skill that you can get just by reading articles and watching videos. Your knowledge increases, in some cases this knowledge can guide you, but if you want to identify mental toughness as a skill, you need to practice and apply it a lot.
Let’s do some mental gymnastics with you. I ask you to be brave with yourself. Many people are deprived of their personal abilities because they cannot be brave enough to be self-critical.
What is your course of action when you realize that you have lost your current job, that your spouse or significant other has broken up with you, that you are facing a hefty foreclosure suit for a loan you cannot pay because of income deductions, and that an unexpected health problem has suddenly arisen? I don’t have the answer to this scenario, but I can tell you that it sucks. This is just a scenario for you to think about and to generate ideas.
Let’s do some mental gymnastics with you. I ask you to be brave with yourself. Many people are deprived of their personal abilities because they cannot be brave enough to be self-critical.
What is your course of action when you realize that you have lost your current job, that your spouse or significant other has broken up with you, that you are facing a hefty foreclosure suit for a loan you cannot pay because of income deductions, and that an unexpected health problem has suddenly arisen? I don’t have the answer to this scenario, but I can tell you that it sucks. This is just a scenario for you to think about and to generate ideas.
Mental toughness is the ability to perform and persist even in the face of the most challenging conditions and situations. It is not easy to say that it is exactly right to equate this ability with success, but we can predict that people who have this ability will be more successful. What we do know is that success is achieved by working and continuing to work. We can think of people with high mental resilience as being able to face the challenges they may face in their professional or personal lives, and to continue by finding solutions, and this enables them to continue even under difficult conditions. I think people who behave in this way are closer to success.
I will try to summarize the mental endurance we are talking about by giving an example from a point in my own career. In the commando specialization course, you are subjected to different physical tests. I can’t give you the exact details, but there is a test where you are asked to complete a distance of around 30k with a 50kg load under a certain time. About 20k of this load is a sandbag with no handles to hold it. The only way you can carry it is on your lap with both arms. The other sandbags are in your backpack. I would like to add that the weather conditions are hot as hell and you are wearing your equipment and training suit, and unfortunately the distance to be walked is in off-road conditions. Before I forget, it might be good to know that the long trainings are done in the middle of the journey with your tired body and after a half sleepless night. You will be subjected to serious pressure to give up along the way. In this test, where physical capacity is pushed to the limit, the idea of quitting is constantly on your mind due to the constant negative input from the outside. Now it’s time for you to be brave, what do you do in such a situation, do you keep going? Or…? Well, how would it make you feel to know that the work does not end with this test and that the trainings will continue after a short rest with that fatigue? Knowing that the training will continue for months under similar conditions.
Can we say that mental toughness is not giving up, not giving in, not giving up, not giving up, continuing and doing your best in the face of external negative influences? Can we say that your mind is bulletproof? Can we say to control your mind as much as possible towards your goal and direct it towards your desired outcome? Even if we can’t turn negative circumstances into positive ones, can we say that in the chaos and confusion, we can organize our minds and focus on our own purpose? Does such an ability give a person who has lost what they had the strength to move on, to recover and start again?
In my opinion, it is very difficult to translate mental resilience, the bulletproof structure of the mind, into a memorization format in a few sentences. It has a much broader structure. The good news is that it is a skill that can be acquired, the sad news is that it is also a skill that can be lost. Being able to focus and keep going even under difficult circumstances is the main skeleton of this skill.
What do you think about this? I would love to hear your thoughts.
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