Mental Toughness for Sport, Business and Life

Book excerpt: In all facets of life, most people strive for success. This could mean getting a promotion to vice-president, making the high school basketball team, having your children grow up to be good citizens, or getting the family together for holidays. Many of the elements of success are likely to include recovering from failure, short and long-term goals, perseverance, focused concentration, coping with adversity and keeping confident despite obstacles. To be successful requires many of these attributes and some people might consider them to be ingredients of mental toughness. But what is mental toughness? Let’s look at the following examples and you can decide whether the person is mentally tough or not. A basketball player is injured and despite the fact that he may re-injure himself and hurt his long-term career, he decides to play in the championship game to help his teammates. A businesswoman is feeling really sick but she has a big presentation scheduled for today. Even though she might not be at her very best she “sucks it up” takes some medicine and goes into work to deliver her presentation. Are these examples of mental toughness or not? Would your conclusion be any different based on the outcome of the situation? For example would you say the businesswoman was mentally tough if she gave a great presentation but should have stayed home if, due to her illness, gave a poor presentation? These are difficult decisions, and people will typically come to different conclusions concerning what is mental toughness. In this book, I will provide evidence regarding the meaning of mental toughness. Its component will be broken down and tips for how to build mental toughness will be provided. So get started on the journey of understanding mental toughness and taking concrete steps to become more mentally tough.