Becoming Tough

If you're going to be tough, you can't let disappointing news or a negative comment ruin your day. If every little challenge makes you feel as though you're coming undone, you won't have energy left over for making strong choices regarding bigger issues.

The Science of Developing Mental Toughness in Your Health, Work, and Life

Work on developing a thicker skin. Worrying excessively about other people's judgments is a waste of your time. It's a given that people will disagree with you and judge your choices sometimes; that's their problem. As long as what you're doing isn't hurting other people, you're fine. Don't be a hothead. Traffic jams, lines at the post office, and other annoyances are not worth losing your temper.

If you can't handle mailing a package without having a meltdown, how are you going to handle a real problem? Follow through with your goals. Everyone sets goals, but following through with them is another matter entirely. Most goals worth setting require hours of monotonous hard work to achieve them. If you want to be tough, be willing to put in the time and effort it takes to accomplish goals. Break your goals down into manageable steps and set a schedule for completing them.

How to Be Tough: 15 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow

This way you'll know exactly what needs to be done in order to get to the finish line. If you give up before you've met your goal, you're letting yourself down. Don't allow yourself to lose interest or get tired of working hard. Pick yourself up after making a mistake. Making mistakes is an inevitable part of life. Tough people use their mistakes as tools for learning how to do better next time. If you tend to let your mistakes get the better of you, or worse, blame someone else every time something goes wrong, try taking a different approach to your mistakes.

Admit when you've done something wrong. It's a misconception that in order to be tough, you've got to act like you're always right. In fact, the opposite is true: Have an optimistic outlook. You don't have to be sunny and cheerful all the time, but having a generally optimistic point of view goes hand in hand with being tough.

People who complain a lot and feel cynical about the future aren't able to cope as well in the face of disaster or despair. Don't attempt to evade difficult situations by running away or pretending they aren't happening.

The ability face reality head-on will help you make practical decisions that will ultimately lead to positive change. If you bury your head in the sand, your problems will just keep festering. Resist the temptation to ignore your problems by indulging in escapist behaviors. Using drugs and alcohol, watching too much TV, staying up all night online, gambling and other similar behaviors will make it harder to clearly see reality.

Consider your options carefully. With every situation you encounter, you have a choice to make. It's up to you to decide how you'll react and what actions you should take. Sometimes the right choice is obvious, and other times right and wrong seem impossible to distinguish from one another. Taking the time to think things through clearly will help you choose correctly. Let's say you get a piece of bad news: What are the possible paths you can take from here?

Is there a wrong way to react?

What's the right way? Get advice from wise people. It's not weak to admit you could use some advice. Other people's opinions can be valuable when you're faced with a situation that you haven't encountered before. Ask people you trust what they would do in your position. Remember, though, that only you can ultimately determine the best course. Other people's opinions are secondary to your own values. Trusted friends and family members are good people to confide in when you have a big decision to make. Take their advice with a grain of salt, though, since people who know you, even if they love you very much, might have their own personal stake in the decision you make.

For example, your mom would prefer you didn't move to a different town, her advice about what college you should choose might be loaded with her emotions. Going to a therapist or counselor is a great idea when you feel a professional opinion could be useful. Let your conscience be your guide. That little inner voice telling you what choice to make will become louder and stronger as you gain experience and wisdom.

After examining a situation from all angles and getting a few outside opinions, it's time to act on your values. Being tough means acting with honor and courage, no matter how scary it might be to do so. Don't back down unless you should. Once you've made your decision, follow through with it and stay true to your values. The tough decision to make is often the least popular, so there will be times when it seems like other people are against you. Stay strong when others try to tear you down for doing what you believe is right. Lend a listening ear. Recycle, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Do what you can do. Be your own change--but don't try to make everyone else change. Easier said than done? It depends on your perspective. When something bad happens to you, see it as an opportunity to learn something you didn't know. When another person makes a mistake, don't just learn from it--see it as an opportunity to be kind, forgiving, and understanding. The past is just training; it doesn't define you.

Think about what went wrong but only in terms of how you will make sure that next time, you and the people around you will know how to make sure it goes right. Many people--I guarantee you know at least a few--see success as a zero-sum game: There's only so much to go around. When someone else shines, they think that diminishes the light from their stars.

When a friend does something awesome, that doesn't preclude you from doing something awesome. In fact, where success is concerned, birds of a feather tend to flock together--so draw your successful friends even closer.

Create and celebrate awesomeness, wherever you find it, and in time you'll find even more of it in yourself. Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems always makes you feel worse, not better.

So if something is wrong, don't waste time complaining. Put that mental energy into making the situation better. Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you'll have to make it better. Only when you embrace change can you find the good in it. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco showed that the more difficulty you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression.

Mentally tough people know that saying no is healthy, and they have the self-esteem and foresight to make their nos clear. The mentally tough also know how to exert self-control by saying no to themselves. They delay gratification and avoid impulsive action that causes harm.

Will it kill you? It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious and gun shy, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This creates the tendency to get right back up every time you fall down.

Mentally tough people embrace failure because they know that the road to success is paved with it. No one ever experienced true success without first embracing failure. Mentally tough people know that where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you focus on actions to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy, which produces positive emotions and improves performance. Mentally tough people distance themselves from their mistakes, but they do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success.

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When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from comparing yourself to others, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. Comparing yourself to other people is limiting.

Instead of wasting your energy on jealousy, funnel that energy into appreciation. When you celebrate the success of other people, you both benefit.

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