Mental strength has become somewhat of a buzzword in recent years. Many successful actors, entrepreneurs, and public speakers attribute their success to having mental resilience.
Some go so far as to say the right mindset is the key to success. However, developing mental strength seems just as difficult, if not even more challenging, than gaining physical strength.
How can the average individual develop personal resilience and what benefit does building resilience have on one’s everyday life and long-term goals?
In this article, we will address these questions and help you develop a personal strategy to build mental toughness. To kickstart your journey, consider taking the HIGH5 strengths assessment. This powerful tool helps you identify your unique strengths, providing a solid foundation for developing mental resilience tailored to your individual attributes.
What is Mental Strength?
Having mental strength means being able to manage your unhealthy habits and perform your best regardless of the circumstances.
Mental strength is often associated with mental health, but these two terms are quite different. Mental resilience is the ability to deal with the stress and adversities of life.
As you can see, there are many aspects of resilience and there are a few other definitions of resilience. Other psychologists have proposed a slightly different definition.
Mental strength can be defined as the ability to overcome negative emotions and thoughts in an adaptive way. It’s a synonym for “mental resilience,” which means being able to deal with different types of stressors effectively, overcoming challenges in a healthy way, and having the capacity to adapt to an ever-changing environment.
People who are mentally strong or resilient can manage to function efficiently even during times of difficulty. They are strong-minded individuals who have the ability to live their lives to the fullest.
Mental strength is described as a flexible personality trait that allows individuals to deal with their unique challenges while leveraging their inherent strengths. The HIGH5 strengths assessment can be instrumental in this process, helping you identify and understand your top strengths. By recognizing these strengths, you can more effectively build mental resilience, using your natural talents as a foundation for overcoming obstacles and thriving in the face of adversity.
Mental strength combines anxiety control and personal development so individuals can tackle challenging times effectively and come out of difficult times as stronger person.
People with psychological resilience do not simply cope with their stressful life events but rather maintain a positive outlook on life regardless of their current situation.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
After identifying your top strengths through the HIGH5 assessment, practice using these strengths in challenging situations. This approach can help you build mental resilience in a way that feels natural and authentic to you.
15 Benefits of Being Mentally Strong
Since becoming mentally strong takes time and patience, here are the benefits of having mental strength:
- Increased life satisfaction.
- Greater productivity at work.
- Increase in persistence and patience.
- Find ways to address your sources of stress.
- Gaining an appreciation for life, both the positive and negative moments.
- Learn to evaluate the helpfulness of criticism and whether or not your coworkers are aligning their values with yours.
- Develop a positive self-image.
- Address your bad habits and overcome your desire to participate in unhelpful activities.
- Increase your level of confidence.
- Makes you more confident with calculated risks.
- Gives you an opportunity to learn about anxiety management.
- Provides you with the courage to face your fears and push beyond your boundaries.
- Helps you regulate your negative emotions.
- Keeps you motivated even when confronted with the challenges of life.
- Helps you explore new ways to learn from your mistakes.
Why is Mental Strength Important?
Mental and emotional strength is crucial for personal and career development. It provides a plethora of benefits to nearly all individuals and improves one’s mental health.
The amount of mental strength someone has is directly associated with their level of success later in life. Mentally strong people meet deadlines, are on time, and have better outcomes.
However, mental toughness is an important life skill for activities outside of work as well. Inevitably, all relationships will go through difficult times.
Mental toughness helps people build up stamina over time, so they can overcome such challenges without leaving their partners.
In fact, tough and confident people understand that the uncomfortable emotions associated with relationships are often temporary.
They create strategies to deal with this stress together with their partner and come out of difficult times as a stronger person. There are even more important reasons to focus on mental resilience.
For instance, mental strength gives people a better sense of well-being, improves positivity, assists in building positive mental habits, increases aspirations, and lowers one’s stress when subjected to a changing environment.
As you can see, mental toughness is crucial for success in both careers and relationships. By taking the HIGH5 strengths assessment, you can gain valuable insights into your unique strengths, which serve as the building blocks of mental resilience. Understanding and leveraging these strengths can significantly enhance your ability to navigate challenges, adapt to change, and maintain a positive outlook – all key components of mental toughness that contribute to success in various aspects of life.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
Leverage your HIGH5 strengths in both your personal and professional life. For example, if ‘Chameleon’ is one of your top strengths, consciously use it to navigate changes at work or in relationships, thereby building your mental toughness.
How to Train & Develop Your Mental Strength
Being consistent is key for many activities. Anything from sports to career development requires consistently putting in the effort day in and day out. The same is true with strength development.
Negative ideas and a negative outlook on life are holding you back. You must overcome negativity to become stronger. One way to do this is to utilize SMART goals, which are both realistic and specific.
Once you accomplish a goal, it’s crucial to recognize the strengths that helped you succeed. This is where the HIGH5 strengths assessment becomes invaluable. By identifying your top strengths through this assessment, you can consciously leverage them in your journey to build mental toughness. Even before starting to develop a resilient mindset, take the time to understand your strengths and plan how to use them effectively. This self-awareness ensures you’re not just avoiding environments that set you up for failure, but actively creating situations where your strengths can flourish, accelerating your mental strength development.
Consider whether or not you would continue buying alcohol if your goal is to quit drinking. Clearly, gaining the mental toughness to say ‘no’ to addiction starts by committing to putting yourself in the right environment.
However, simply occasionally going outside your comfort zone is not enough to build strength. Resilience is built through consistently pushing beyond your boundaries and challenging your limiting beliefs.
You do not have to overcome huge challenges daily, as it is the consistency that truly matters. Gaining mental strength will inevitably involve exposing yourself to unpleasant feelings from time to time. When you feel like you wish to give up, remind yourself of why you need to get stronger.
This way, you can become more confident in your mission and truly understand your end goal. Excuses will be your worst enemy.
Remember that if you do not meet a goal, you should evaluate why you did not succeed. This gives you an opportunity to look back on the task in detail and learn which strategies you could use in the future to achieve success.
Another crucial element of your mental strength development is understanding your end goal. A clear reason to continue your journey will help you stay productive and clear on which tasks to prioritize.
There will surely be days when you are less motivated and might consider throwing in the towel. There must be a powerful reason that keeps you going during dark times. Think of this motivating reason whenever you feel like quitting.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
Create a strengths-based routine for mental toughness. Choose daily activities that allow you to exercise your top HIGH5 strengths, gradually pushing your comfort zone in areas where you’re naturally talented.
Importance of Mental Strength in Sports
Many individuals overlook the importance of mental toughness in sports. In actuality, mental strength is as important, if not more important, than physical skills in the sports world.
The world of sports is immensely emotional and filled with lots of highs and lows. Athletes need to be able to push through and address their negative feelings to move on instead of sulking in their negativity.
Mental strength helps individuals focus on the positive and address and analyze failure. Many athletes start to quit when faced with extreme challenges.
Mental toughness sets true athletes apart from the crowd, enabling them to push beyond their comfort zone and achieve more than they believed possible. The HIGH5 strengths assessment can play a crucial role in this process for athletes. By identifying their unique strengths, athletes can tailor their mental toughness strategies to align with their natural talents. This personalized approach not only enhances their ability to overcome challenges but also contributes to long-term improvement and sustained positivity. In essence, understanding and leveraging their strengths allows athletes to build mental resilience that’s authentically aligned with who they are, leading to more consistent and impressive performances.
This positivity helps motivate the entire team, thus creating collective resilience in a sports team. Mental strength also allows individuals to maintain their calmness when faced with the immense pressure of professional sports.
Mentally tough athletes use a long-term perspective when it comes to analyzing their success. If they fail, they will focus on the big picture and continue pushing for their success. Weaker athletes may dwell on this failure and start thinking negatively.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
Athletes can use their HIGH5 strengths profile to develop personalized mental toughness strategies. For instance, an athlete with ‘Focus’ as a top strength could create pre-game rituals that harness this ability, enhancing their mental preparation for competitions.
Best Books on Mental Strength
In addition to quotes, books are another great way to keep yourself motivated throughout your strength development journey.
Some of the best books on mental strength are:
1. The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles – Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte Ph.D.
This book features a plethora of engaging, science-based exercises that help individuals develop their inner strength. The authors focus specifically on using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help increase your resilience.
You will first learn to assess your current resilience level and measure your level of confidence. Later, the authors discuss how to regulate emotions, address negative feedback, cope with adverse life events, embrace life, and achieve greater mental and physical health.
2. The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child – Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
Siegel and Bryson center this book around setting your children up for success. They share strategies on how to instill creativity, resilience, and passion into your kids.
Specifically, they address when children need to be pushed beyond their comfort zone and when they need to stay within their boundaries.
Additionally, they address multiple strategies for increasing a child’s positivity and steering them away from negative emotions. Overall, the book assists parents in instilling a creative mindset for their children.
3. The Power of the Other: The startling effect other people have on you, from the boardroom to the bedroom and beyond- and what to do about it – Henry Cloud
A New York Times bestselling author and leader in the field of resilience research, Dr. Henry Cloud uses his neuroscience knowledge and clinical experience, as well as personal experiences with business leaders, to teach readers about relationships.
He explains how such relations are a key resource for personal growth, but they can be equally detrimental if not utilized properly. Dr. Cloud makes a clear point throughout this book: choose your relationships wisely.
Mental Strength FAQ
What is strong mental strength?
Having strong mental health means being a resilient person who’s capable of finding the sources of their stress, dealing with them effectively, and developing adaptive and functional coping mechanisms.
Strong mental health is the ability to face challenges without stressing too much, being comfortable with your own mistakes, and finding ways to learn from your mistakes in order to grow as a person.
How do I get mental strength?
In order to get mental strength, you need to overcome negativity and understand that it’s okay to make mistakes. However, you should also realize that you should use your mistakes in order to learn, grow, and avoid making the same mistakes again in the future.
Becoming mentally strong also means developing healthy and adaptive coping strategies. For this, sometimes you need to expose yourself to challenges and critical situations and see what makes you feel good or bad in these situations.
As a result, you can develop productive coping strategies such as problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, social support, or meaning-making.
