A new, stronger you
How can you become more mentally tough?Toughness. You don’t have to be able to do three ultra-marathons in a week or lift baby elephants to prove you’re made of stern stuff. Even if lifting your own body weight seems like a big ask, or getting up from the sofa, you can still be tough in another way — mentally.
Getting trapped behind an old lady walking slowly for over a mile and not blinking an eye. Not looking at your phone for over 24 hours. Seeing somebody taking the last biscuit you had your eye on without developing a deep, irrational hatred.
People like this walk among us. Who are these super-humans? And what do they have that we don’t?
According to Professor Peter Clough and Doug Strycharczyk, authors of Developing Mental Toughness, they are pretty likely to have the 4 C’s: Control, Confidence, Commitment and Challenge. (Or, as we prefer, Cunning, Composure, Cojones and Chutzpah.)
We caught up with Strycharczyk, who is also the managing director of testing business AQR, to test his own mental toughness with a few tricky questions.
Q. Why now? Isn’t mental toughness less relevant in the modern workplace than ever? We aren’t waking up with a 50% chance of dropping dead from the plague anymore.
A. It’s perhaps true that people in the past were mentally tougher than people now – our living situations are kinder. However, the need for mental toughness only increases in line with the rate of change. Adaptability, resilience, and the ability to rebound from setbacks quickly are all qualities of mental toughness.
Changes are taking place in our society and in our workplaces at an unprecedented pace, so in a world where more and more people display less mental toughness, it becomes more valuable as a trait and sets a person apart from others.
TOUGHNESS TIP #1
Practice tolerating pain. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations until, gradually, they become more manageable. For example, if you don’t like networking, force yourself to talk to one stranger every time you go to a conference.
So in essence, we’re wrong if we think we’re all mentally tough nowadays. For all we’re in love with ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ memorabilia, the idea that we each have stiff upper lips and can happily bury a beloved beagle before breakfast and arrive to work the same go-getter as usual are pretty far off the mark.
In contemporary lives, where the biggest day-to-day tragedy is probably a traffic jam, mental toughness isn’t common currency. Everybody born today is sappy enough to cry during The Lion King.
But whilst it’s still reasonable to believe the average person today is less mentally tough than their grandparents, it’s a mistake to think that they are incapable of change.
TOUGHNESS TIP #2
List your most useful friends. Write down the names of all the people you can call on in a crisis – and what they’d do to help. Remembering that you have these resources can make you less panicky when plans go awry.
Q. So, it’s clear you think mental toughness can be developed. But how can you develop it today without resorting to a camping holiday in Siberia?
A. We can show the more mentally sensitive what a mentally tough person does. This will help them adopt some of the behaviours that generally enable them to cope with challenge and pressure.
Evidence from practitioners in the sports and occupational worlds show that experiential learning is highly effective. The individual needs to learn to develop their mental toughness. The other key factor is purposeful practice. Once a new activity or behaviour is learned, it should be adopted rigorously and regularly so that it becomes a habit.
Most interventions are already well known to the majority of trainers and coaches. They fall under six broad headings: positive thinking; visualisation; anxiety control – the province of many stress management techniques; goal setting – especially how to plan and set milestones; attentional control – how to focus longer and better (this is the area where least attention is often given but is one of the most valuable to develop); and self-awareness.
TOUGHNESS TIP #3
Learn a new language, or to play a new instrument. Practice as often as you can, taking note of your progress as you go. This should remind you that you can develop and improve skills. Consequently, you’ll never be completely at a loss if your situation changes and your current skill set becomes redundant.
So the consensus is that mental toughness can be learned. Nobody is born able to come back from two sets down in a Wimbledon final, but just about everybody can become able to do so through practice.
Q. Why should HR Professionals sit up and pay attention to mental toughness?
A. Research shows that mental toughness is a major factor in performance: it explains up to 25% of the variation in the performance of individuals. Also, there are the benefits of positive behaviour: people who are mentally tough are more engaged and better able to manage change and transition.
There’s wellbeing, too: mental toughness leads to more contentment, better stress management and people being less prone to bullying. Finally, there are aspirations: tough people are more ambitious and prepared to manage more risk.
It’s important in almost all work applications. Studies also show a close link between mental toughness and managerial ability.
Mental toughness also helps to complete the development picture. Most development professionals are focused on personality – what determines our habitual response to events and challenges. Personality broadly describes how we act, how we feel and how we think.
Our mind-set is both a precursor to and a determinant of how we act and how we feel. Whatever our base personality, our mental toughness is a lens through which we perceive events, and so informs our reactions.
If we wish to develop people and organisations, and make that development sustainable, we need to understand not just their behaviour but why they act the way they do.
You can recognise someone who reacts consistently poorly to setbacks and then work to improve how they react in the future.
TOUGHNESS TIP #4
Know your own mind. Pleasing other people is a mug’s game: they tend to change their minds and often denigrate you unfairly. Do what you know is right, and measure your actions against your own, personal set of values.
If there was ever a field where being mentally sensitive could actually be an advantage, it might be HR. But of course, mental toughness is very relevant to much of what your average HR pro does on a daily basis.
And even if you aren’t hurrying to get the equivalent of a cerebellum six-pack, awareness of how it could help those in your organisation can still be extremely useful.
TOUGHNESS TIP #5
Have a long-term life-plan. If you can measure setbacks against a wider perspective, they’re less likely to upset you. For example, what does it matter if you have an argument with your HRD when your overarching life goal is running a nudist café in foothills of the Italian Alps?
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