Mental Toughness Is About Breaking Negative Cycles

I am Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits.

—

You feel good about yourself when you stand up in the face of hardship. It’s not about the outcome. Your positive feelings about who you are and how strong you can be, come from the fact that you greeted a problem head-on. Maybe you lost. Maybe you didn’t come close to creating a victorious outcome. That doesn’t matter.

When you display the willpower needed to battle a formidable obstacle, the reward is simply in making that choice. You’ll often find that your decision to try to overcome something formidable often takes away a lot of the power of that difficulty.

Children discover this with bullies, and so do adults. Sometimes all you have to do is stand up to a bully to remove all of his power. He is so used to intimidating others that he backs down when even the meekest and weakest individual refuses to put up with his nonsense.

It’s all about breaking negative cycles. That’s what mental toughness is.

Instead of putting things off, you face them with determination whenever they appear, right then and not later. You silence that negative inner voice that always tells you something bad will happen. Instead, you bravely believe that you will create a positive result, and that’s often enough for you to achieve that outcome.

What Are the Goal-Crushing, Dream-Killing Cycles You Want to Break?

The human spirit is so beautiful. People in the worst possible situations, who have lived in despair and haven’t seen proof that the world is beautiful, still dream big dreams. They’ve never been shown the smallest amount of love or potential happiness, yet they dare to believe in those realities.

This is because when a person has nowhere to go but up, fighting is the easy decision.

The problem is that most of us have pretty decent lives. A lot of us have extraordinary lives. So when we are presented with the choice of embracing change and facing difficulties to get what we want, we choose to stay in our good enough lives. We give up on the idea that we can create a dream world and achieve our goals.

That’s a cycle of thinking you can crush with mental toughness.

What are your goals? Don’t dream small. Dream big. If nothing was impossible for you, what would your life look like? You really can create that outcome. It starts with the understanding that you have all the willpower, determination, and mental toughness you need to take action in the face of big obstacles and seemingly insurmountable difficulties.

It Begins with a Choice

Will you embrace the natural knee-jerk response and walk away from a challenge? Or will you choose instead to prove to yourself that you have reserves of mental strength and incredible power that allow you to take on difficult odds?

Remember this. If you try, you have a chance to be victorious. There’s a chance to make your life better in some way. When you decide instead not to make an effort, you’re embracing low self-esteem, self-loathing, and no possibility of success.

There’s another benefit to grappling with life’s obstacles rather than letting them dictate the outcome of your life. Regularly choosing willpower in the face of difficulty becomes easier every time you do it. Before you know it, your dreams and goals become realities rather than victims of a lack of mental toughness.