Mental Toughness
/As you know, I love the research on self-compassion and the power of being kind to yourself. I based my business on helping people do that. But, I also spend a lot of time with those same clients on developing mental toughness.
When you have self-compassion and mental toughness combined, you are truly unstoppable.
Mental toughness is not beating yourself up - it is coaching yourself to do the thing you are resistant to do. Mental toughness is about personal growth and tapping into inner strength.
My morning workout gives me material every day to help illustrate this. I hear a few voices in my head when the alarm goes off:
you’ve had a hard week, take today off
you will feel better if you get out of bed and go to the gym
it’s cold outside and you can lie here a little longer
get out of bed you lazy piece of…
Mental toughness with self-compassion sounds like this:
Ginger you have a goal and skipping your workout is a form of self-sabotage; we are going to get out of bed right now and stick to our plan; staying in bed keeps you stuck in a failure cycle and you will be mad at yourself later; let’s do this!
Mental toughness recognizes my tendency to avoid discomfort and pushes me out of my comfort zone into the challenge I’m avoiding.
We all prefer to live in our comfort zones, but if we stay there, life gets really small really fast. You have a safe comfortable life, but then feel like you missed something in life.
Mental toughness develops when we can welcome discomfort. I have a client who plays football and he describes that the best coach he ever had would tell him when tackling to “run toward the pain with all you’ve got, you can handle it, don’t fear it!” Overcoming the fear of pain or injury is something many sports psychologists have to work on with their clients.
Psychologist Phil Stutz teaches his clients a three step mantra (something for people to say to themselves when afraid):
Bring it on.
I love pain.
Pain sets me free.
Try it. It feels weird at first, but you can sense in your brain the invitation to live more free. It may sound counter-intuitive to tell yourself those three things, but it works to flip your brain into the pre-frontal cortex and out of the amygdala whose job is to help you avoid pain.
Stutz is helping clients get unstuck and move out of a lifetime of living in a comfort zone. None of us love pain, but if we can embrace it, we can live more free and unafraid. And most people live in fear of pain way more than they actually experience pain. What we think will be painful, often is not as bad as we imagined it would be.
I went skiing last week for the first time in many years. I used this idea of mental toughness to overcome my fear of getting injured. I will admit, at the start of the first day, I used Stutz’s tool, but timidly said “bring it on” and my next phrases were “I don’t want to get hurt, but I want to have fun.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “I love pain” but I kept saying “I want to have fun” over and over again to myself until I noticed the fear was dissipating and fun was truly replacing it. For me, it was mental game of quieting the fear and allowing myself to have fun. And it was super fun.
Try out some mental toughness on something for you that has fear associated with it. See if you can break through the fear-of-pain-barrier to get to the endless possibilities on the other side of fear.
Welcome a little discomfort. Discomfort means you are moving forward and trying something new. Discomfort is a sign of growth.
There is a big fun life out there for you, don’t let a fear of discomfort hold you back. You can handle it!
Bring it on,