13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success

by Amy Morin

Wishing that other people lacked talent won’t improve your talent.

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Don’t allow yourself to assume that someone who has gained wealth, fame, or whatever else you may envy is somehow evil.

Stop emphasizing your weaknesses. If you focus on all the things you don’t have or can’t do, you may set yourself up to resent the people who do possess those things. Focus on your strengths, skills, and abilities.

Quit magnifying other people’s strengths. Resentment often derives from exaggerating how great other people are doing and focusing on everything that they have. Remember that each person also has weaknesses, insecurities, and problems—even those who are successful.

But the more time you devote to thinking about who is “deserving” of success and who isn’t, the less time you’ll have to devote to something productive.

When you’re able to be happy about other people’s accomplishments, you’ll attract—rather than repel—successful people.

When people say, “I have everything I ever wanted, but I’m still not happy,” it’s often because they don’t really have everything they ever wanted. They’re living according to someone else’s definition of success instead of being true to themselves.

“Write your own book instead of reading someone else’s book about success,”

Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success. —robert t. kiyosaki

Giving up after the first failure can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Each time you quit, you reinforce the idea that failure is bad, which in turn will prevent you from trying again; thus your fear of failure inhibits your ability to learn.

Failure can build character by challenging you in new ways. It can help you identify areas in your life that need work as well as hidden strengths you’ve never before recognized.

All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. —blaise pascal

Parents place kids in time-outs when they misbehave, which sends the message that being alone is a punishment.

Loneliness is about perceiving that no one is there for you. But solitude is about making a choice to be alone with your thoughts.

This incident certainly opened Alicia’s eyes to the importance of taking care of herself. She says that in the past, she used to wake up thinking about all the things she “had” to get done and she spent her days rushing to get through her to-do list. Now, she slows down and takes time to enjoy each day by doing things like walking her dog and working in her yard.

In addition to squeezing in a few minutes of alone time every day, schedule a date with yourself at least once a month.

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Just make sure you don’t bury your nose in a book or spend the time text messaging someone. The point of a date with yourself is to be alone with your thoughts.

Consciously Observe—Find an everyday object you have lying around the house, like a pen or a cup. Hold the object in your hands and focus all your attention onto it. Observe how it looks and how it feels in your hands without passing any assessments or judgments. Instead, try to focus on the here and now.

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Looking at your to-do list and judging each day’s progress by how many things you’ve accomplished

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An entitlement mentality prevents you from earning things based on merit. You’ll be less likely to work hard when you’re busy complaining that you’re not getting what you’re owed.

You won’t be able to accept responsibility for your behavior when you’re focused on trying to stake your claim over what you think the world owes you.

You can decide to deal with problems, circumstances, or tragedies that come your way without developing a victim mentality.

She could have attributed any shortcomings she experienced to the fact that she had been so sick as a child, or that as an African American woman she faced racism, or that she grew up in poverty in an inner city. But Rudolph didn’t think the world owed her anything. Rudolph once said, “It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s all a matter of discipline. I was determined to discover what life held for me beyond the inner-city streets.”

There is often folklore about these businesses that suggests they became overnight successes, but that’s because people are looking at the end result and not at all the work it took to get there.