We go to the gyms and outdoors to build our physical strenths. But what do we do to build our mental toughness? Not much.
More often than not, when we fail to live up to our potential or even suffer mental drawdowns, it’s not because of our poor physical health, but mostly our lagging mental toughness or resilience. The US Army Resilience Directorate (ARD) defines resilience as “the mental, physical, emotional and behavioral ability to face and cope with adversity, adapt to change, recover, learn and grow from setbacks.”
While we can’t control when and what adversity comes our way, our response to them, however, can be and should be trained. From our studies of numerous successful people, one of the main trademarks is their ability to recover, learn, and grow from their failure and setbacks. Mental toughness training is also the best preventative measure for mental illness. The Positive Psychology Center in the University of Pennsylvania (under Dr. Martin Seligman) built the Master Resilience Training program for the US Army in the aftermath of PTSD after the wars in the Middle East.
Our model for building mental toughness has the following three components:
Resilience Experiment
- short term simulation to handle fear of rejection, embarassment, pain, isolation & loss of control
- Self-focused
- Rely on repetative exposure to desensitize
- For more details, go here
Failure Lab
- Mid to long term project with focused effort
- Focused on others and end results
- Setbacks are real and can be costly
- Learn to accept failure as a best teacher
- For more details, go here
Growth
- Holistic Resilience Training by Positive Psychology Center in University of Pennsylvania
- Focus on optimism, strength building, relationships, empathy, gratitude, self-regulation, & emotional awareness
- For more details, go here