The Mental Toughness Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Facing Life's Challenges, Managing Negative Emotions, and Overcoming Adversity with Courage and Poise

by Damon Zahariades

While resilient individuals will grudgingly adapt to unanticipated setbacks, mentally tough individuals remain open to experiencing such setbacks. They may wish to avoid them, but they realize setbacks are inevitable and ultimately perceive them as challenges to overcome rather than infuriating problems.

It’s important to appreciate this difference in mindset. Mental resilience is a useful tool for coping with adversity. It gives us the cognitive fortitude to press onward when we confront difficulties. Mental toughness is what allows us to perceive difficulties as opportunities. It gives us the confidence and presence of mind we need to use such opportunities to our advantage.

It’s easy to develop the habit of catastrophic thinking. If we fail to prepare psychologically for the challenges we’re sure to face each day, our minds will slowly perceive every obstacle to be more consequential than is true. We’ll begin to see setbacks, regardless of their impact and seriousness, as veritable crises.

To become mentally strong, we must guard our minds against this tendency. We must immediately “push back” when our minds entertain worst-case scenarios. Otherwise, we risk being seduced by catastrophic thinking, indulging in unreasonable, imagined outcomes. This frame of mind is wholly incompatible with our ability to recover from setbacks and adapt with purposeful, confident action and a positive outlook.

Because failing to accomplish something implies that we’re less than we expected, we rush to give an account for our lack of success. Oftentimes, these accounts are fallacious, a state of affairs we intuitively rationalize in our haste to camouflage the fact that we’ve somehow fallen short.

To become mentally tough, we must change how we perceive failure. Rather than dread it, cover it up, and redirect blame, we should embrace it. Failure will never feel pleasant. But we can train ourselves to accept it with the same temperament as we accept success.

Both failure and success are merely outcomes of our decisions and actions. Rather than perceiving the former as “bad” a...

recognize both as feedback. By doing so, we can more easily identify how our decisions and actions are linked to our results. This in turn gives us an opportunity to adjust our expectations and identify deficits in our skills and d...

Perceiving failure as feedback and responding with purposeful action gives us more confidence in our abilities. As we become more confident, we naturally become less apprehensive of unanticipated setbacks. We intuitively know that we can handle any challenge we encounter, even defeat. This awareness allows us to advance beyond mere mental resilien...

adversity strengthens us. Our mental resilience is toughened just as tempering steel with extreme heat toughens its alloys. But in order to take full advantage of this taxing and frustrating process, we must greet adversity with confidence, courage, and composure.

This isn’t about willpower. Willpower is a severely limited resource. It gets used up too quickly to rely upon when times get tough. Instead, this is about character. Mental toughness requires that we’re consistently honest with ourselves, clear about our commitments and convictions, and willing to face difficult situations with a positive mindset.

We can accept the challenges we encounter, prepare ourselves to deal with them, and commit to overcoming them. And we can maintain courage and positivity even when the odds are stacked against us.

First, refuse to let your circumstances overwhelm you.

if you can manage to take back control of your mind when you feel overburdened, you’ll be better able to address the obstacles standing in your way.

Second, commit to taking action. It’s important to understand your circumstances before responding to them, of course. That requires reflection and contemplation. But eventually, you must act. Even though life is unpredictable and the outcome of your actions and decisions are uncertain, you must adopt an action mindset. This mindset instills courages, enabling you to confront challenges without being paralyzed by your limitations.

Third, practice emotional resilien...

If we practice emotional resilience whenever we experience misfortune, we’ll reinforce our determination and tenacity.

Fourth, anticipate problems. This not only gives us an opportunity to prepare for them, but allows us to do so with confidence in our ability to overcome them.

By anticipating these difficulties, along with their attendant disadvantages, you can take purposeful, confident action to improve your odds.

Studies show we’re more likely to succeed if we habitually practice self-control. If we delay gratification by way of habit, we stand a much better chance of experiencing success.

Let’s clarify what it means to delay gratification. It’s the decision to resist enjoying something we crave in the present for something we crave even more down the road.

Overcoming setbacks and achieving our goals when we face adversity requires patience. This patience allows us to endure hardships and withstand the emotional and psychological pressure that accompany misfortune. It strengthens our resolve. It increases our grit and tenacity. In encourages us to persist, even when the odds are not in our favor.

When we practice self-restraint, we learn to tolerate discomfort. We train our minds to put up with present unpleasantness for the purpose of achieving our greater goals. In doing so, we inculcate our minds with the idea that we need not satisfy our cravings in the moment. We can resist the impulse to do so.

This improves are cognitive resilience. When we consistently delay gratification, we build our tolerance for discomfort. We grow accustomed to it. This tolerance helps us to persever...

Delaying gratification also improves our ability to ignore distractions.

Controlling the impulse to indulge in present pleasure also ingrains within us an important lesson regarding the relationship between effort and reward. When we repeatedly indulge in immediate gratification, we train our minds to associate low effort with high reward. This conditions our expectations. We become more inclined to surrender to our short-term desires rather than endure discomfort in order to achieve our longer term goals.

When we repeatedly delay gratification, we form a connection in our minds between self-restraint, effort, and reward. We begin to intuitively recognize that we must exert effort, and in the process control our impulses, to attain what we want.

5 Quick Tips for Delaying Gratification

Tip #1: Clarify your values. When you recognize what truly matters to you, it becomes easier to prioritize things you’d like to accomplish. That simplifies the decision-making process. It also juxtaposes the importance of your long-term goals with the fleeting pleasure of your short-term desires.

Tip #2: Understand why you’d like to achieve your goal(s). It’s important to have a compelling reason prompting you to take action. Brainstorm that reason for each of your goals.

Tip #3: Create an action plan. Using your clarified values and motives, brainstorm a plan that’ll guide you through the process of delaying immediate gratification.

Tip #4: Find a productive alternative to a compulsive desire. Some temptations are more difficult to resist than others. Simple willpower isn’t enough. In such cases, brainstorm another reward to take its place, preferably one with productive value.

Tip #5: Give yourself a reward for resisting temptation. Your goal isn’t to completely steer clear of pleasurable things. That would be a dismal way to live. Rather, aspire to develop a habit of delaying gratification. The most effective way to develop any good habit is to do so by taking small steps. Each step you successfully take deserves a small reward. The reward trains your brain to repeat the rewarded action.

Our habits sustain us during difficult, challenging times. When life deviates from our plans and we encounter unexpected setbacks, our habits and routines help us to stay on track. They influence our behavior, spurring us forward, practically on autopilot, when we’re beset with difficulties and under pressure. When we adopt good habits, our actions and decisions become more consistent. We become less susceptible to our impulses. The longer our habits have been in place, the more deeply ingrained they are and the more confidence we can have in them. The challenge is in forming them and making them stick.

Our habits signify what is important to us. They reflect our values and priorities.

take baby steps.

This first step is likewise important when developing habits that strengthen your tenacity and resolve.

The next step is to make slow, incremental progress. There’s no need to grow your new habit by leaps and bounds. This isn’t a race. In fact, striving to progress quickly is likely to do more harm than good. For many people, doing so is a recipe for failure. Take small steps forward.

The final step in developing a new habit is to design cues that trigger your desired response. It’s easy to do. The key is to be consistent.

You control these cues. You get to design them. That means you run the show whenever you decide to adopt a new habit.

5 Daily Habits That Will Improve Your Mental Strength

Habit #1: View your past as training for overcoming future adversity.

Your past is merely instruction that provides you with insight into how best to respond down the road.

Habit #2: Evaluate negative emotions immediately when they arise.

You don’t want to suppress negative emotions. But it’s important to develop the habit of investigating them the moment they surface.

Habit #3: Build your self-confidence.

Self-confidence is essential to developing mental toughness. After all, it’s only possible to press onward during adversity and overcome the fear of unc...

Habit #4: Practice gratitude.

Maintaining a positive mindset is pivotal to facing adversity with courage. Each morning, reflect on things that have gone right for you. Each afternoon, think about everything you have for which to be thankful. Each evening, before you go to bed, contemplate the small victories you enjoyed throughout the day. Practice gratitude daily.

Habit #5: Build a tolerance for change.