I get a huge buzz from working with individuals and teams to develop their resilience and mental toughness and reframe the challenges in their lives to see them as opportunities for growth.
I loved this article from fellow Mental Toughness Practitioner, Paul Lyons as he takes us through our opportunity to enable our personal decision making.
Making better decisions is the key performance measure for us all.
Better decisions in our personal and professional lives produce more effective outcomes which enable us to feel consistently healthier and happier. This in turn helps us to create a sound platform on which to make more better decisions.
This circular effect also happens where you make a series of poor decisions with negative consequences that feed a weaker mindset and potentially more negative decisions.
So where does a mentally tough mindset come into the mix?
Being mentally tough (which is being more resilient and more positive) increases the likelihood of you making better decisions with beneficial outcomes because you are generally thinking, and so behaving, in a more consistently systematic and logical manner.
This mindset and approach enables you to take control of your conscious brain and higher order thinking and so lessen the likelihood of making more emotional, more impulsive and less objective decisions which can often lead to poorer quality outcomes.
Whilst you still want to recognise and remain receptive to your emotions you want for the most part to be able to manage and control them rather than the other way around.
Developing a more resilient and positive mentally tough mindset will help you do this and here are ten suggestions to help you. The first six are around resilience -creating psychological safety through more certain and consistent operating conditions -and the other four are developing a more positive and growth orientated mindset to generate more opportunities.
Know Yourself Better
Being mindful of who you are and how you respond in different situations, better understanding your strengths and aptitudes, your fears and foibles gives you a distinct advantage when it comes to making better decisions.
By achieving clarity on your identity, you invariably feel mentally stronger.
Have A Plan
A plan gives your life more structure and so helps you manage your thoughts and emotions to better fit within your plan. Having a vision of what you want to achieve and why, what your principles to manage your life are, and again why, helps enormously with your decision making because you have more familiar reference points. You can then break your life’s purpose into smaller chunks so that each month, week and day and ‘right now’ you have goals and targets to achieve that guide more and better decisions.
Control What You Can Control
One of the challenges of being wholly emotive is that it can lead to you feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the world within you and around you and then reacting impulsively accordingly. By learning to focus only on what you can control, and influence, reduces or removes this sense of overwhelm and if you can then make better decisions, you’re more likely to feel mentally stronger. Most of us need at least some control over the direction of our lives. If we don’t, we can easily feel the victim of circumstance which is often a difficult and unhappy place to be.
Build Good Routines
Building consistent and effective routines and habits that fit within your plan and enable you to achieve more control will usually lead to you making better decisions and so feeling mentally stronger.
One easy example is your early morning routine that sets you up mentally and physically for the day.
Get up every day at the same time and for 30-60 mins run through the same routine which may include exercise, visualization of the day ahead, mindfulness and eating a healthy breakfast.
Exercise Sleep, Diet feature heavily in most good morning routines as they provide a consistent and certain runway for a good day.
Keep Moving Forwards
This strategy like many of the above are interconnected. In difficult times when you may feel overwhelmed, there is a strong temptation to avoid making decisions in case they are bad ones which often bring more challenging outcomes.
No matter how difficult the day becomes, just do what you can do to make decisions that allow you at least achieve some progress which in turn helps
To build your mental strength.
Find Your Tribe
One of the challenges with the Covid 19 pandemic for many people, was being alone and vulnerable which led to negative emotion infiltrating their mindset and preventing good decision making.
Staying connected with those people that matter to you helps you maintain a sense of perspective and gives you reference points on making decisions
Being resilient is about forming and holding your structure and the the above suggestions help you build a stronger more secure mindset structure to enable consistently better decision making.
Your positive mindset helps you make progress beyond your current structure by extending your comfort zone and learning to have the confidence to make decisions with less information than you would normally like.
Much of resilience is about process but adopting a positive -glass half full – mindset is about training your mind to think more positively most of the time.
Ready For Anything
Recognising that change is constant and that you are mentally ready to embrace the adversity or opportunity that tomorrow’s change brings, over time will build your confidence, especially where you successfully negotiate that change. You begin to feel less vulnerable and more positive that whatever happens you can deal with it.
Create Opportunities from Challenges
There are always challenges and obstacles in life and sometimes they are immense. However, in every challenge there are opportunities and one tip is to quantify the size of the situation and all its associated threats and then identify a similar number of opportunities arising from the same situation. This forces you to look through a more positive lens.
Be More Positive
You can choose whether you interpret life through a positive or a negative frame. Learning to be realistically optimistic helps you make decisions that with a negative frame may appear impossibly difficult but which with a positive mindset become more achievable. There are many different ways to develop your confidence but they all require you to run a positive “you can do this “ internal commentary.
Replenish Your Wellbeing
One of the important aspects of a resilient and positive mindset is having the energy and mental resources to manage the stress and pressure you encounter during the day so that it doesn't fatigue you and negatively affect your decision making ability .Find some time each day to replenish your energy reserves so you can better manage the stress and pressure as it arises. The Big Three Resources tend to be Sleep, Exercise, Diet but everyone is different so find out what you can do to bring you joy and energy each day.
For most people the above will be useful strategies to help make better decisions. However, since we all have a unique mental profile it’s likely that each person may have a different combination of strategies that work.
Want to develop your Mental Toughness? Ask me how. Send me an email at michelle@bakjacconsulting.com to enquire about coaching to build your personal strategies.
Michelle Bakjac is an experienced Psychologist, Organisational Consultant, Coach, Speaker and Facilitator. As Director of Bakjac Consulting, she is a credentialed Coach with the International Coach Federation (ICF) and a member of Mental Toughness Partners and an MTQ48 accredited Mental Toughness practitioner. Michelle assists individuals and organisations to develop their Mental Toughness to improve performance, leadership, behaviour and wellbeing. You can find her at www.bakjacconsulting.com or michelle@bakjacconsulting.com
