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Kindle Notes & Highlights
No matter where you are in your life, no matter what struggles you’re currently experiencing, you can improve your circumstances.
Success is probably more likely than your inner critic insinuates.
Fear of the unknown is one of the most common obstacles to our achieving our potential.
Every mistake become a lesson from which to acquire insight. Every perceived slight becomes an opportunity to nurture valued relationships. Every regrettable decision becomes a chance to reexamine your intentions and ensure they align with your values.
Top 7 Traits of Mentally Tough People
Trait #1: Ability to Disentangle Themselves from Things They Can’t Influence
Trait #2: Flexibility in Handling Unanticipated Events
Trait #3: Strong Self-Awareness
Mentally strong people are hyper self-aware.
Mentally tough people achieve it by purposefully investigating their psyches and developing compensatory strategies that help them deal with adversity.
Trait #4: Willingness to Face Uncertain Circumstances
As Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Chief of Staff of the Prussian army in the 1800s said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Trait #5: Ability to Bounce Back from Disappointments
Mentally strong people have a different perspective. Like all of us, they acknowledge that disappointments, big and small, are inevitable.
Trait #6: Emotional Mastery
Trait #7: Practical Optimism
mental toughness is usually found in those who have a positive attitude.
8 Sworn Enemies of Mental Toughness
Enemy #1: Self-Pity
Enemy #2: Self-Doubt
Insecurity breeds inaction, which is a much larger threat to your success.
Enemy #3: Your Inner Critic
Enemy #4: Fear
Enemy #5: Laziness
Enemy #6: Perfectionism
Enemy #7: Emotionalism
Enemy #8: Self-Limiting Beliefs
It’s about developing the cognitive mettle to press forward when things fail to go according to your plans. That requires courage, self-confidence, and mental fortitude.
Emotions that stem from distress, disappointment, and anxiety hamper us. They slow us down and can even cause us to abandon our intentions when things go wrong. This makes emotion management a requisite skill.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from unforeseen complications. It’s the ability to adapt.
Mental toughness is a mindset. It not only reflects our ability to bounce back from unforeseen complications, but also demonstrates a positive outlook during the experience. It’s not just the ability to handle stressful situations. It reflects how we handle them.
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.
we can handle any challenge we encounter, even defeat.
sisu can be roughly described as grim courage in the face of certain failure.
refuse to let your circumstances overwhelm you.
commit to taking action.
understand your circumstances before responding to them,
practice emotional resilience every day.
anticipate problems.
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.
exerting self-restraint is a skill you can learn and hone.
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.
5 Quick Tips for Delaying Gratification
Tip #1: Clarify your values.
Tip #2: Understand why you’d like to achieve your goal(s).
Tip #3: Create an action plan.
Tip #5: Give yourself a reward for resisting temptation.
When we adopt good habits, our actions and decisions become more consistent. We become less susceptible to our impulses.
