MENTAL TOUGHNESS

“Somewhere in your life, there’s going to be a point where you have a decision to make. You’re going to have to choose between taking the easy route and the hard route.  A lot of people take the easy route and they have a good life that way. But, the better life was by taking the hard route. You may have 20 years of pain and suffering to try and get past it, but a lot of us die before truly starting our journey.” – David Goggins

Some of you are all about the easy route and some of you are to scared to even choose a path.   That’s why you are where you are.  You get comfortable and you think you are where you need to be, the truth, you aren’t even close.  You are on a never ending carousal of mediocrity.   That is where mental toughness comes from.  Grit. Determination. Willpower. Fortitude. Do you have what it takes to persist in the face of challenges? To pick yourself up and carry on even when it seems like you have hit a brick wall? Mental toughness is a term used in psychology to refer to the resilience and strength that people possess to soldier through struggles and succeed.  It is this mental toughness that gives some of the world’s athletic superstars the ability to push past exhaustion, opposition, and injury to score and to win. It is the same quality that gives even weekend warriors the strength to finish that last mile and power through that final set of reps.  It’s all of these and more:

1. Unshakeable self-belief in your ability to achieve competition goals(“Mental toughness is about yourself belief and not being shaken from your path. . . . It is producing the goods and having the self-belief in your head to produce the goods”).
2. Ability to bounce back from performance set-backs as a result of an increased determination to succeed (“Yea, we all have them (setbacks), the mentally tough performer doesn’t let them affect him, he uses them”).
3. Unshakeable self-belief that you possess unique qualities and abilities that make you better than your competition(“I am better than everyone else by a long way because I have something that sets me apart from other performers”).
4. Insatiable desire and internalized motives to succeed(“You’ve really got to want it, but you’ve also got to want to do it for yourself. Once you start doing it for anyone else . . . you’re in trouble. You’ve also got to really understand why you’re in it . . . and constantly reminding yourself is vital”).
5. Remaining fully focused on the task at hand in the face of competition-specific distractions (“There are inevitable distractions and you just have to be able to focus on what you need to focus on”).
6. Regaining psychological control following unexpected, uncontrollable events (competition-specific) (“It’s definitely about not getting unsettled by things you didn’t expect or can’t control. You’ve got to be able to switch back into control mode”).
7. Remaining fully focused in the face of personal life distractions (“Once you’re in the game, you cannot let you mind wander to other things”; and, “it doesn’t matter what has happened to you, you can’t bring the problem into your business”). 

“You’re not going to find greatness by looking in a book or by listening to me. I may give you the spark, but you’ve got to go inside yourself to find it.” – David Goggins

Get off your ass and go accomplish something.  Anything.  Just stop wasting your time and go be great. Be the version of yourself that you put on social media.  That person is great even though its fake as fuck, we know the truth.  It doesn’t mean you can’t be that person.  It’s up to you to prove it.  It has always been up to you.