Mak HILL - Mental Toughness: Essential Principles of Leadership and Success (Self Discipline Book 1)

Congratulations on downloading Mental Toughness: Essential Principle of Leadership and Success, and thank you for doing so. As long as we are living, we are bound to encounter challenges, both in and out of our control.

A wrong investment could cost you millions in losses, but so could the collapse of the economy. You could wake up in the morning, only to lose the job you have held for 20 years. Anything could happen and turn your world upside down. However, the secret to life is in the ability to pick up the pieces, or even start building anew resolutely. To do this, you need to be mentally tough, and downloading this book is the first step towards that.

By yourself, you will find it almost impossible to remain strong at all times. Some challenges you will overcome easily, while others will outwit you. However, if you learn how to be mentally tough, you will build your mental muscles through a combination of skill, willpower, and resilience.

To that end, the following chapters will seek to sensitize you on the relevance of mental toughness towards the achievement of success in your life. You will learn how to distinguish mental toughness from other attitudes of the mind. You will also get to know why mental toughness is a critical requirement for successful leadership and why it could provide you with a competitive edge against your competition.

You will also get to see some of the big names in the sports and the corporate sector who have excelled in their crafts, courtesy of the mental strength they developed, and how they got to that point. This book is strategically written to point you towards taking up mental toughness techniques that will get you the success that others have achieved.

There are plenty of books on this subject on the market, so thanks again for choosing this one! Every effort was made to ensure it is full of as much useful information as possible. Please enjoy!

Mental toughness for an individual is his ability to deal with pressures, stressors, and challenges, and to give the best possible results, in spite of the circumstances that individual finds himself in. Others define it as the ability to rise after failures and setbacks, and the resolve to spot and take hold of the opportunities that come up.

For your memorization, however, here is a more straightforward definition coined by the legendary Vince Lombardi who played and coached in the NFL football. He said that mental toughness merely is character in action. This definition may be short, but it captures all that mental toughness is: it is the inner drive to push on and pursue what you want to, driven by your wits or character.

Mental toughness is essential because it compensates for the lack of skill, natural ability, and strength. You have often heard it said that the people at the top, in any field whatsoever, are not the most talented; they are those who stayed and kept at it despite the challenges they faced. Mental toughness prevents you from becoming a quitter. In Pumping Iron, Arnold Schwarzenegger says that you must go on and on, not caring what happens. This resolve is what gets an athlete through the competition at the marathons - they must keep running until they get to the end.

Therefore, whatever you call it: balls, guts, wits, or will, this is what we are calling mental toughness. The question now is: how do you become mentally strong?

If you ask around, many coaches, athletes, and corporate leaders will tell you that mental toughness is inborn or developed in the earlier stages of life depending on the environment a child grows up in. It is challenging to transform a wuss into a hardcore unless of course, you take him to prison. However, prison matters aside, we can assume that anyone is capable of improving his patience, tolerance, and concentration, and this is what mental toughness is about.

Mentally tough people easily rise to positions of influence and power in business, leadership, sports, and even in life. Observing them keenly, experts have lined out some skills common in all of them. These skills include:

A hyper focus

This is the ability to perform at peak levels without giving in to distractions with ease and with a clarity of mind. This is commonly referred to as being in the zone.

A Winning Mindset

A winning mindset is an attitude by a performer that he must win or at least operate at the maximum possible efficiency level, maintaining consistency. For a person to do this, he must have a strong belief and faith in his field expertise, and skills despite the challenges presented to him.

Willpower

As pointed out earlier, willpower combines effort, intention, and courage. Intention is the will in willpower. It is the insistence on staying on the same task until all the work is done. The effort you put into doing something is the power. It propels you into achieving what is required of you despite the challenges you encounter. Courage is the readiness to bear up all the fear and other emotions that you need to accomplish the task.

Composed

A mentally tough person has to keep calm under pressure. As the situation heightens and everyone else is freaking out, the individual remains calm, takes time to assess the situation and then makes the best possible move. He must stay engaged to the case no matter how high the pressure rises.

Lose Nice

Along with the mindset of a winner is the ability to accept that the performer is capable of failure. Sometimes, even with the highest focus and a rich investment of skills and resources, a performer can fail to meet the set objective. However, the trick lies in the ability to extract lessons and values from experience and to channel it to the next trial, for continued success.

Own Up

To develop mental toughness, you need to own up to every situation, both the good and the bad. A mentally strong person is ready and willing to take up that responsibility and pressure. He or she believes that whatever the challenges and the odds, he or she must come up with a solution. In case of failure, the person will take stock, evaluate his steps to see where he went wrong, gather lessons from it, and then move on past it. This person knows how to overcome negative emotions and thoughts effectively.

Preparation

Preparedness involves lots of planning. A performer plans in advance to prepare for any unplanned event, during, and at the end of the event. He or she then creates a backup plan that can be pulled out if indeed the primary plan experiences significant challenges, or that it just will not work. Planning and preparation of this nature allow the performer to remain at ease regardless of the situation. In addition, the task itself can be fully recovered and completed without having to return to the starting point. Whats more, the teams or the performers spirit is not crashed, and the performance rhythm is not affected much by the perceived loss and failure.

Ready to Take On the Challenge

A mentally tough person does not whimper. He does not whine. Whatever comes his way, he readily welcomes it. Be it having to stay up late to work on some project work, be it having to take on more people for training, be it running several extra miles. Whatever it is, this individual has a bring it on attitude, and this produces exposure, experience, and success.

Stress Optimization

This is the ability to manage pressure and stress in an event, without any anxiety, fear or doubt, or at least maintaining performance undeterred by them. An individual who has learned how to optimize stress will take advantage of a stressful environment and come up with results that others could not have presented under similar conditions.