Mental Toughness: The Definitive Guide to Developing the Differentiating Edge

In life, most people want a variant of the following:

• Excellent physical health
• A great social life
• Amazing interpersonal and romantic relationships
• Varying degrees of financial stability and independence
• Doing productive and mentally stimulating work
• A life of meaning/having an impact on the world

However, many people don’t have these things.

Because here’s the reality:

The people who achieve these things and those who don’t have the same goals.

The goals don’t separate winners and losers, actions do. And many a time, these actions are fueled by “mental toughness”.

If you want to succeed in life, you must develop some degree of mental toughness.

This article is going to give you a definitive guide to developing and improving mental toughness in your own life. It’s also going to give you:

• What mental toughness exactly is
• The components of mental toughness
• What the psychology says about grit and mental toughness
• Navigating the mental game of life

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What is Mental Toughness?

Mental toughness, mental resilience, grit, perseverance, “inner fire”, etc. is known by many names and shows up in many different cultures, time periods, and societies across the globe.

It is an intangible quality possessed by those who were/are considered legends and heroes.

Even in modern society, with all of our conveniences and comforts – it is impossible to achieve anything worth mentioning without some degree of mental toughness.

Without grit and mental toughness, you’ll lack the edge you need to go toe-to-toe in our highly competitive society.

Mental Toughness and Masculinity

Even though Unstoppable Rise is a resource for all people, it takes a masculine slant to most issues. As such, it’s worth touching upon why mental toughness is important if you’re a man.

As a man, you will be looked upon to have this mental toughness in varying degrees. Even in our relatively egalitarian society, you will be held to a different standard as a man by your peers and your family.

You’ll be a de facto leader, expected to “take point” in various situations. For example, when something goes “bump” in the night, who’s expected to go check it out? The man or the woman?

When the family is going through a tough time, who’s expected to be “the rock” of the family? The man or the woman?

Many men think mental toughness is just about being a “solid rock” but instead, think of mental toughness as a multipurpose Swiss army knife in your back pocket with “defend” and “attack” aspects.

Mental toughness is useful when things happen to you (defend):

• Your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere
• You get laid off from your job
• You get physically injured

Mental toughness is also useful when you want to happen to things (attack):

• Learning a new instrument
• Asking out that cute girl
• Giving a pitch to a board of investors for a new product (think Shark Tank)

So now that we’ve touched upon this aspect of grit/mental toughness, let’s move on to more tangible psychological findings.

Mental Toughness, Grit, and Psychology: What the Research Says

If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better. – Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Even though mental toughness is an intangible quality, it has been quantitatively studied by in the area of performance psychology.

In various studies, mental toughness has been shown to have a marked effect on someone’s performance in any event across a wide dimension of fields and disciplines.

According to an article in Frontiers in Psychology, mental toughness is required for peak performance:

Negative life events, crises, challenges, and stressful situations constitute a large aspect of human experience and are often unavoidable… Mental toughness (MT) has been studied as an important individual difference factor that allows individuals to deal effectively with challenges and to persist under pressure. MT has its highest profile in sport, but its impact is now recognized in a wide range of other domains…

The review indicates that MT is a vital trait across various contexts such as education, the workplace, and the military. Emotionally, mentally tough individuals are able to maintain greater levels of control and confidence under stressful situations, which might lead to better psychological well-being. Cognitively, they exhibit greater inhibition which allows them to commit to current tasks…These associations suggest that MT carries substantial implications for learning, academic results, work performance as well as a range of other achievement outcomes.

Digging into the Mental Game of Grit

The most recent piece of research-heavy performance psychology to hit mainstream awareness is Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perserverance.

Angela Duckworth set out to answer the perplexing question of why seemingly talented people are outpaced by their less talented peers.

The result? The less talented people had more “grittiness” and put forth the effort to become excellent at the field or activity in question.

This is her response to when someone asks on how to develop valuable skills:

“…there are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine….you’ve got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people….Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it…it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.”

The Relationship Between Grit and Life Outcomes

If you want to achieve success, you’ll have to provide value to others. The only way to provide value is to develop a skill in something.

If you want to provide extraordinary value, you’ll need to be in the upper echelons for that skill.

The journey between bottom-rung novice and enlightened master involves triumph and milestones but a staggering degree of frustration, losses, and long periods of seemingly no progress.

You’ll need grit and mental toughness to make it through.

Why?

Because grit and mental toughness create the capacity for sustained effort.

And according to Angela Duckworth, effort counts twice:

“Talent x Effort = Skills
Skills x Effort = Achievement

Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them. […] Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.”

Everyone has a base level of talent. This can be explained by genetic differences, but without getting too much in the weeds, this manifests in things such as “inclinations”.

The saying “he has a knack for it” or “he’s naturally gifted” explain this.

How you expand upon that talent is largely up to you. It’s possible to receive coaching and exposure, but your level of practice (effort) will largely determine how much skill you will build.

In Duckworth’s model, someone who has half the natural talent of someone else will have to put 4x the effort to build the same level of skill.

However, real life isn’t so cut and dry and there’s no real way to tangibly measure base level of talent in most areas (such as chess acumen, social intelligence, and leadership).

Picasso or Mozart could have been exposed to a paintbrush or piano respectively, but if they did not put the effort to develop their skills, their base level of talent means nothing.

1000 x 0 is still 0.

Once you’ve put in the effort to develop skills, you still need to put effort again to achieve a concrete objective.

You don’t win Wimbledon in tennis or get on the New York Times bestseller list by just being “good at tennis” or “good at writing”. No… you need hard, disciplined work to achieve these things.

You need to put forth the effort to be better than others and mostly importantly, your previous self in to come even remotely close anything resembling to achievement.

How to Develop (and Improve) Your Mental Toughness and Grit

Mental toughness and grit aren’t things that intrinsically known to us in a skill development sense.

If we want to become mentally resilient and “superhuman” these are things we have to develop.

Here’s some quick ways to quilt mental toughness into the patchwork of your life philosophy.

Mentally tough people do hard things.

This is the “attack” aspect of mental toughness.

People who exemplify this aspect stretch their comfort zone every day and aggressively seek out improvement.

Being mentally tough inherently involves the risk of getting hurt in some form or fashion and mentally tough people aren’t afraid of a wounded ego or damaged self-image as long as it serves some higher goal or purpose.

They are willing to experience temporary physical, emotional, or mental pain, embarrassment, judgment, and all sorts of negative emotions in order to attain and press on towards an ideal that may not even currently exist in a concrete form.

If you want to become mentally tougher, you’ll need to stack up the wins in this area.

A good way to do that is to keep a notebook or a journal of things you made progress in each day.

Ask yourself: “how did I battle against the tendency to remain comfortable today?”

Here’s a podcast episode talking about progressing and moving out of your comfort zone:

Mentally tough people “do it anyway”.

It’s easy to show up for an hour, a day, or even a week, but how does your performance in an area look over the span of months or even years?

There will be days where you don’t feel like doing X, Y, or Z.

What do you do?

Do you show up anyway? Do you still do it?

If you do, then you’re displaying an element of mental toughness.

Everyone who is seen as great had many days where they just didn’t feel like putting in the effort to increase their skills or achieve things.

Putting forth the effort despite the resistance is what separates a professional from an amateur.

Mentally tough people go the extra mile.

Showing up to work when you “don’t feel like it” is not an example of mental toughness.

Work is required as a standard of survival, so you don’t get a pat on the back from just doing the standard

If you go above on a beyond a project at work or do a project every day outside of work in addition to your survival responsibilities, that’s when you get your pat on the back.

The more you go the extra mile, the more you display and attain mental toughness.

Mentally tough people have an abundance mentality.

Depending on how your mind is programmed, you will see abundance or scarcity in the world.

The default of human biological programming is towards negativity and to see lack but you can transcend this programming and develop an abundance mentality.

This will not happen on its own. An abundance mentality is hand in hand with optimism/positivity bias and it’s something that must be developed.

Developing this abundance mentality to see silver linings, opportunities, and other good things does take work. The work to develop that is one indicator of mental toughness.

Mentally tough people are self-reliant.

Self-reliance is the act of leaning on yourself to accomplish key objectives and goals instead of waiting around for others to come and do it for you.

Self-reliance is at the cornerstone of mental toughness and is impossible to develop without it.

Developing some form of self-reliance will allow you to push through the dry and boring periods of skill development and allow you to further increase your abilities, which will make you more mentally tough. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.

Mentally tough people use negative motivation to their advantage.

“Negative motivation” is exactly what it sounds like. It is using some form of negative stimuli to start the wheels in motion towards action.

Negative motivation almost always involves pain or discomfort of some kind and can tip towards shutting down action in the absence of individual grit.

Those who have grit and mental toughness are able to use negative motivation to their advantage, instead of their detriment, further tightening their ability to be mentally resilient,

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

As a descendant of the most resilient and hardy human beings in history, mental toughness is your birthright.

You are being cheated out of it by the inherent ease in modern day society and the pervading belief that you don’t need to put forth effort to achieve things.

It’s all about “luck”, it’s all about “talent”. Wherever you are in life is wherever you are in life and there’s not much you can do about that.

I’d recommend tuning that out.

There isn’t a situation where less productive effort in a direction would be preferable to more and everyone knows this on an intuitive level.

Develop the mindset of giving everything you do a solid effort.

Even if you come up short, it won’t be because of your lack of effort or mental toughness.

Now, I want to hear from you. How has mental toughness helped you in your life? How can you develop more of it? Let me know in the comments: