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. Some psychologists define mental strength can be defined as the ability to overcome negative emotions and thoughts in an adaptive way.
Both mental resilience and mental toughness can undergo the definition of mental strength. Although interlinked, these two terms convey slightly different meanings. While resilience is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties despite setbacks, mental toughness focuses on maintaining focus, determination, and perseverance. These two qualities are both important when building confidence, success, and better mental health, and both are developed through experiential learning – either through targeted development, coaching or simply living through life’s experiences [1].
People who are mentally tough and resilient 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. Research has suggested that mental toughness is associated with many positive psychological traits, such as more efficient coping strategies and positive outcomes in education and mental health [2]. Mental strength combines anxiety control and personal development so individuals can tackle challenges effectively and come out of difficult times as a 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.
Based on this, 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., using your natural talents as a foundation for overcoming obstacles and thriving in the face of adversity.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
After identifying your top strengths through the HIGH5 assessment, practice using these strengths in challenging situations. For instance, if your main strength is ‘Empathizer’, you can seek inspiration from other people by observing and learning from their behaviors. If you are a ‘Time Keeper’, you can focus on making plans for executing specific tasks and monitor progression. If ‘Chameleon’ is one of your top strengths, consciously use it to navigate changes at work or in relationships, thereby building your mental toughness. 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.
- More persistence and patience.
- Finding ways to address your sources of stress.
- Increased appreciation for life, both the positive and negative moments.
- Learning to evaluate the helpfulness of criticism and whether or not your coworkers are aligning their values with yours.
- Developing a positive self-image.
- Learning about your bad habits and overcoming your desire to participate in unhelpful activities.
- Increasing your level of confidence.
- Becoming confident in taking calculated risks.
- It gives you the 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 [3]. 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 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 emerge from difficult times as a stronger person. Moreover, 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 and 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. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, and involves using use a specific set of criteria to help ensure that objectives are clearly defined and attainable within a certain timeframe [4]. You can read more about goal setting in our article Personal Development Goals: 43 Examples & How To.
Once you accomplish a goal, it is 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.
If your goal is to quit drinking, learn to say ‘no’ to yourself when faced with the choice to buy alcohol and commit to putting yourself in healthy environments rather than situations that focus on drinking as an activity. If your aim lose weight, focus on developing persistence and challenge yourself to try new activities. If you want to be more social, practice going out of your comfort zone by engaging in conversation with strangers at work or social gatherings. 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. Whenever you feel like giving up remind yourself of why you need to get stronger. Excuses are your worst enemy.
If you fail to meet your goal, however, do not punish or blame yourself too much. Instead, evaluate why you did not succeed, and use it as a lesson. 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. Hence, there must be a powerful reason that keeps you going during dark times, which you can use as a reminder to gain motivation 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. Several studies have shown that physical training alone is not beneficial for athletic success, and recognize the importance of incorporating psychological interventions in their practice to strengthen their resilience and mental toughness [5].
Mental toughness sets true athletes apart from the crowd, enabling them to push beyond their comfort zone and achieve more than they believed possible. It also allows individuals to maintain their calmness when faced with the immense pressure of professional sports. 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 also helps motivate the entire team, thus creating collective resilience in a sports team. 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.
Mental strength and academic performance
Similarly, research has consistently shown that mental strength facilitates academic success. Many studies show that mental strength has great potential value for application in educational settings, and mental toughness is a strong predictor of more positive and fewer negative emotional states and higher thriving, thus facilitating more academic and social goal progress [2]. For instance, a study performed with high school children explored the degree to which individual differences in mental toughness associate with individual variation in secondary school performance. In a sample of 159 adolescents, they observed positive correlations between total mental toughness and academic attainment and attendance [6].
Naturally, this also applies to higher education. Several studies – both on sports and vocational students – have found significant and positive correlations between mental toughness, grades, and progression, suggesting that mental toughness and interpersonal confidence were predictors of academic achievement [7,8]. As a student, it is therefore important not only to focus on learning strategies but to practice resilience and toughness. This will help you bounce back from failures, better tackle difficult material, master stress, and persevere through hard exams – which are challenges all students ultimately have to face.
Best books on mental strength
Reading books is a great way to keep yourself motivated throughout your strength development journey. It will help you gain insight into valuable methods and learn from other people’s experiences. 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 in 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 present 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 in 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?
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. 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.
How do I develop mental strength?
In order to develop mental strength, you need to overcome negativity and understand that it is okay to make mistakes. You should also use your mistakes as an opportunity to learn, grow, and avoid making the same mistakes again in the future. Becoming mentally strong also means developing healthy and adaptive coping strategies. In order to do this, you sometimes 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.
References:
- Clough PJ, Marchant D. (2021). Resilience and mental toughness: Is there a difference, and does it matter? Kogan Page. https://www.koganpage.com/hr-learning-development/resilience-and-mental-toughness-is-there-a-difference-and-does-it-matter.
- Gucciardi DF, Hanton S, Gordon S, Mallett CJ, Temby P. (2017). Mental toughness and individual differences in learning, educational, and work performance, psychological well-being, and personality: A systematic review. Front Psychol. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5554528/.
- Stock, R., Lynam, S., & Cachia, M. (2018). Academic success: the role of mental toughness in predicting and creating success. Higher Education Pedagogies, 3(1), 429–433. https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2018.1507623.
- Kat Boogaard. (2023). How to write SMART goals. Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/how-to-write-smart-goals#:~:text=The%20SMART%20in%20SMART%20goals,within%20a%20certain%20time%20frame.
- Soundara Pandian, P. R., Balaji Kumar, V., Kannan, M., Gurusamy, G., & Lakshmi, B. (2022). Impact of mental toughness on athlete’s performance and interventions to improve. Journal of basic and clinical physiology and pharmacology, 34(4), 409–418. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbcpp-2022-0129.
- St Clair-Thompson, H., Giles, R., McGeown, S. P., Putwain, D., Clough, P., & Perry, J. (2016). Mental toughness and transitions to high school and to undergraduate study. Educational Psychology, 37(7), 792–809. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2016.1184746
- Crust L, Earle K, Perry J, Earle F, Clough A, Cloud PJ. (2014). Mental toughness in higher education: Relationships with achievement and progression in first-year university sports students. Personality and Individual Differences. 2014;69:87-91. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914003006
- Gerber M, Brand S, Feldmeth AK, Lang C, Elliot C, Holsboer-Trachsler E, Pühse U. Adolescents with high mental toughness adapt better to perceived stress: A longitudinal study with Swiss vocational students. Personality and Individual Differences. 2013;54(7):808-814. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886912005806
