Mental Toughness is a “A personality trait which determines, in a large part, how people respond to challenge, stress and pressure, irrespective of their circumstances”
People often ask me, “Where should I start?”, “Do I need to take on more challenging tasks?”, “Do I need to be more determined?”, “Do I need to develop more self-confidence?” “Should I be more resilient?”, etc.
My answer is always the same, it depends; it depends on your Mental Toughness “profile”.
Mental Toughness is a personality trait and it is made up from eight constructs or elements, and it is by understanding your strengths and weaknesses within these elements that you can pin-point developmental actions. You can identify whether you need to develop:
- Your Life Control
- Your Emotional Control
- Your Goal Orientation
- Your Achievement Orientation
- Your Risk Orientation
- Your Learning Orientation
- Your Interpersonal Confidence
- Your Confidence in your Abilities
You can have relatively high “overall” Mental Toughness while being relatively low in one or two of the eight elements above.
If you are already, for example, high in terms of your Risk Orientation and your Achievement Orientation, it may not be productive to concentrate on taking on yet more difficult challenges and doggedly seeing them through. However, if you are low in Emotional Control and Learning Orientation, it may well be worthwhile looking at how you can better manage your emotional responses and how you can benefit more from your successes and failures.
You are only as strong as your weakest link; strengthening your already strong links can be comfortable and comforting but …………………. your weakest link is still there and it will invariably “let you down” when the going gets tough.
Mental Toughness does not develop in “leaps & bounds”, it is an aggregation of small micro-changes that contribute to long-term sustainable increased Mental Toughness.
If you would like to Discover, Develop and Deploy your Mental Toughness in order to Drive the personal, organisational and societal transformations you are involved in, do not hesitate to contact me at boblarcher@boblarcher.com
I help people to develop their interpersonal skills, usually within a leadership or teamwork context. If you are looking to develop your leadership, I might be able to help. I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years; roughly four thousand days of seminars, workshops, conferences, coaching, offsites, webinars, etc. – put back-to-back that makes almost ten “full” years.