Kevin Paxton - Mental Toughness: Learn How to Develop Mental Strength with Simple Strategies and Easy Habits

Have you ever wondered how essential mental toughness is to achieve success in life? Did you ever analyze the strength of your mind?

We all understand one thing very deeply that achieving success in any field of life is not an easy nut to crack. We have to go through several hardships and face lots of challenges before we achieve what we desire. In this long journey of getting successful, we definitely need to be strong physically to face the world at different points but we should not underestimate the value of mental toughness.

The path to success is not simple and straight, you are likely to encounter failure at several points which develop stress in you but still there is something that gets you going and that is mental toughness which helps you fight with all the discouragements and self-limiting beliefs you come across.

It's the specific strength in your mind that does not let you give up at any low point in your life and you keep striving toward achieving your goals no matter what comes your way. You can develop such strength regardless of who you are, which environment you live in and what your beliefs are.

People with mental toughness have higher chances of achieving their goals and getting successful in life compared to those who are mentally weak.

An important question arises here: how to stay mentally tough when there is so much frustration, fear of failure and stress is going on? In this chapter you are going to learn effective strategies that will help you develop mental toughness and excel in life.

Thinking positively is the very first thing you are supposed to do as it will help you develop a positive mindset which ultimately takes you toward becoming mentally tough.

It has been proven through research that an average person's mind comes up with around 60,000 thoughts every single day and 95% of these are repeated every coming day. It's a scientifically proven fact that 80% of the repeated thoughts are always negative.

So this makes us realize how much burden of negative thoughts our brain gets loaded with every single day. While working toward achieving certain goals you set in your daily life this extra burden obviously becomes a big obstacle on the path to success. You are unable to do something really productive when your mind is exhausted with several negative thoughts.

You have to prevent your energy from being wasted and use it for the right things. This is possible only if you start thinking positively and throw all the negative thoughts out of your mind.

Now when you get committed to set yourself on the track of positive thinking, the very first thing to do is to combat with your self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs actually limit your abilities to do something extraordinary in your life and that's why they are called self-limiting beliefs.

You might have a belief in you that you are not intelligent enough like your classmates in school or colleagues at workplace. You might start expecting to get failed in a certain thing even before you start doing it because you have got no experience. Sometimes you are not willing to do a specific task because you failed once in the past and you started believing that you are really bad at it.

All such self-limiting beliefs run negative thoughts on your mind and this situation ultimately leads you to mental weakness. So, these are your enemies you have to fight with and throw them out of your mind. You can use some positive affirmations as a weapon to defeat all your self-limiting beliefs. These affirmations can be:

"I am intelligent enough; I just need to do some learning."

"I have no experience though but I have enough knowledge to get started and gain experience as I move on"

"My past failures should not dictate my future. I will keep on trying until I succeed"

All or nothing thinking is another form of negative thinking that causes hurdles on your way of developing mental toughness. In this situation you mind is expecting 100% success or total failure. You try to achieve perfection in whatever you do and if you're not able to do it perfectly, you consider yourself a failure and you give up. For example, if you set a goal for yourself to lose your weight by 10 pounds in a month and you end up losing 8 pounds. This is still better but if you are in the mindset of all-or-nothing thinking, you might start beating yourself up because you did not achieve your goal 100%.

Always focus on what positives you have got. Just try to forget your desire to get perfection and try to see what you would have missed if you did not make this attempt. Think what you have learned from this experience which can help you do better next time. This way you will get rid of all or nothing thinking.

Dwelling on something bad that happens to you also creates a big hurdle on your way to building a positive mindset. It's obviously natural to feel disappointment and frustration if you lose something or fail to do a certain task but dwelling on this situation for a long time will definitely get your energy wasted that you can use to accomplish your goals.