Never confuse strong personalities or strong physical strength with mental toughness.
A man can have both a strong personality and tremendous physical strength but be weak minded at the same time.
You will find plenty of definitions of mental toughness but in my book mental toughness boils down to a man’s ability to focus on facts without emotion and how he uses his his unemotional mindset to navigate the world as a masculine man of character and poise.
Mental toughness comes from a man’s decision to not view the world as others do but instead to view the world as it is.
When a man deals with the world with an emotionless capacity to take action based on reality, he builds mental toughness each and every day of his life.
That’s how we get mentally tough. We see things the way they are, not the way we feel they should be. This allows us to make practical decisions as opposed to emotional ones.
When we are mentally tough we can use our reality based thinking to do difficult things that others avoid. Things like saying what needs to be said, doing what needs to be done, and standing by our convictions with strength and dignity.
That’s how we get mental toughness but how do we keep it.
Keeping our mental toughness comes from our ability to refuse to allow ourselves to label and judge things. If we can avoid emotional labels and judgments we can remain emotionally absent from decisions which is required to stay mentally tough.
We only keep our mental toughness when we stay true to our commitment to never use labels that are based on emotional responses to circumstances.
When we start labeling things as “bad”, “stressful”, “worrisome”, “frightening” and the like, we are at an immediate disadvantage because we start off our search for a solution with an emotional response to the event.
When we avoid the label or judgment completely, we start off our problem solving from a stronger position of indifference. The circumstance is neither good or bad….it simply is.
From this position of strength we are clear minded and therefore able to think quickly and strategically.
Stay on course by avoiding labels and judgments and you will remain mentally tough forever.
Onward!
