How to Develop Mental Toughness

Time after time you see a promising athlete come out of college and go into the pros only to bomb out. He or she had the best athletic ability, yet could not cut it at the professional level. Others might not have great athletic ability, get picked late in the draft and go onto become super stars. Tom Brady comes to mind as someone who wasn’t particularly outstanding in college who has gone on to be a probable first time inductee into the NFL Hall of Fame.

Personally I have seen the same. I spent many years in the US Army Special Forces. We would have tryouts who while in the best physical shape just could not make the grade to be a Green Beret. Others, who would seem to be nondescript, would pass the Special Forces Qualification course with flying colors and go onto to be an outstanding soldier.

You are probably asking yourself by now what is the difference? What do you need to perform at the highest levels, which is even more important than physical ability?

Mental toughness is what separates the superstar from the merely good. It separates the musicians that play small party gigs from the rock stars. Someone without mental toughness can have all the natural talents or ability and not make it as far as someone with mental toughness with average ability.

The key to mental toughness is applying consistently the traits of self motivation, positive attitude, emotional self control, calmness under fire, and being energetic and ready for action. Consistency is important. Through applying these traits day in and day out, you will be able to reach new heights in whatever endeavors you seek whether it be a sport, playing a musical instrument, coding a computer application or writing a novel.

Let’s look at each of the traits of mental toughness:

While some sports are team sports and other pursuits are done in conjunction with others life is pretty much played alone. Your motivation must come from within. The intensity of your motivation is determined by how badly you want to perform well.

Motivation can be strengthened many ways. Think back to a failure. That feeling can provide the motivation to keep going, keep practicing. A time of victory can also provide the motivation to reclaim that winning feeling. Use time as a motivator. While others relax you can be gaining on them increasing your skills.

You are not going to be able to do everything. In Special Forces we always looked for what someone was good at and focused on that. By focusing on strengths, you gain confidence and inspiration from them. You can create your own positive attitude. For example, smaller pro basketball players do not try to go head to head with others over seven feet tall, they focus on their speed and ball handling skills. Focus on what your natural strengths are.

People who are not in control of their emotions get upset when the something doesn’t go as expected. They alienate spouses, co-workers, teammates by petty, childish behavior. Mentally tough people have tough skins and don’t let outside circumstances affect them. There will be many times whether in a game or in life that things happen outside your control. A mentally tough person keeps their emotions in check and keeps on with the game plan they had in mind from the beginning.

Anything worth going for is going to be high pressure one time or another. Mentally tough people are at their best under pressure. Calmness under fire isn’t something you just switch on. The key here is to seek out pressure situations working up from low pressure to medium pressure to high pressure situations. Perform in front of larger and larger groups. Seek out better and better opponents, games top participate in. What seemed like high pressure before will become the new normal for you.

Mentally tough people get themselves fire up and ready to go for the battle, performance, game or whatever it may be. It might be the middle of the night, you might have played two other performances the same day or you might be under the weather. The pride you get from doing your best in less than optimal circumstances makes it that much easier to succeed in all circumstances. The third performance of the day might not be your best ever, but it should be the best you can possibly give. The next time when conditions are better you will play better for times you pushed yourself to give it all.

The great thing about mental toughness is that you are not born with it. You don’t have to learn it at a young age. Mental toughness comes simply from the decision to consistently apply the traits I have talked about. You can start today and reach levels of your game, relationships, and success that you never thought possible. Outstanding athletic prowess, superior intellect, musical talent will take someone so far. Without mental toughness they will not reach their full potential.

For 20 years, Michael Martel was a Green Beret in the US Army. He now works with people to put Special Forces like effectiveness into their lives and businesses.  Go to Achieve The Green Beret Way and learn about his book Get ER Done: The Green Beret Guide to Productivity and other tools for achieving outstanding results.

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Grief, mental illness and psychiatry’s sad refrain

Scientific American covers a coming shake-up in how grief is defined in relation to mental illness as the forthcoming DSM-5 diagnostic manual aims to radically redefine how mourning is treated by mental health professionals.

It’s worth saying that the DSM-5 has yet to be finalised and will not appear until 2013 but the changes to how grief is classified seem quite drastic.

Two proposed changes in the “bible” of psychiatric disorders—­the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—­aim to answer that question when the book’s fifth edition comes out in 2013. One change expected to appear in the DSM-5 reflects a growing consensus in the mental health field; the other has provoked great controversy.

In the less controversial change, the manual would add a new category: Complicated Grief Disorder, also known as traumatic or prolonged grief. The new diagnosis refers to a situation in which many of grief’s common symptoms—such as powerful pining for the deceased, great difficulty moving on, a sense that life is meaningless, and bitterness or anger about the loss—­last longer than six months. The controversial change focuses on the other end of the time spectrum: it allows medical treatment for depression in the first few weeks after a death. Currently the DSM specifically bars a bereaved person from being diagnosed with full-blown depression until at least two months have elapsed from the start of mourning.

It is particularly striking that normal grief could be classified as a mental illness under the new proposals as this brings into question how we define mental illness itself.

Contrary to popular belief, there is not one ‘standard way’ of grieving and people’s response vary widely in response to losing a loved one. However, it’s true to say that being sad and withdrawn is certainly common enough for it to count as a normal reaction to loss.

This brings to mind psychologist Richard Bentall’s tongue-in-cheek proposal to classify happiness as a mental disorder due to the fact that it is “statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system”.

Perhaps we can also look forward to simmering anger, dashed hopes and unrequited love disorders for the DSM-6?

Link to SciAm article ‘Shades of Grief’.

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Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness

Keep Your Brain Alive No more punch lines that just slipped away. No more names on the tip of your tongue. No more senior moments Drawing on cuttingedge neurological research, how to keep your brain alive 83 neurobic exercises brings help to everyone whose memory is starting to slip. Devised by Dr. Lawrence Katz, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, and Manning Rubin, author of 60 Ways to Relieve Stress in 60 Seconds, here is a regimen of mental crosstraining that can be done anywhere, by anyone, at any time of day. The premise is simple When you exercise the brain, you release natural growth factors called neurotrophins, which in turn enhance the brains level of fitness. And nothing so easily stimulates the brain as breaking routines and using the five senses in new and unexpected ways. So if youre righthanded, wake up tomorrow and brush your teeth with your left hand. Or close your eyes before you get into the car and then get the key into the ignition. Every time you open a new circuit in your brain, its like doing a round of mental situps, without the pain. 

Price: $8.95

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A mental map of city street drugs

Urbanite has a fascinating article on researchers who are attempting to map drug users’ minds onto the city streets.

They are giving addicts GPS-enabled PDAs that ask the participants to rate their psychological state as they move around Baltimore.

By using pre-existing maps of the city that chart things like neighbourhood poverty and local drug availability it’s possible to see how the mental state of users changes as they move through the different physical and social environments of the city.

To make the patterns of movement meaningful, the researchers have to understand the various city “environments” that the drug users move through. This job fell to Craig, the biostatistician and a Baltimore native. To create maps of the urban landscape, Craig started with Census indices, which include race, income, and other socioeconomic metrics. To those he added a system developed by Dr. Debra Furr-Holden at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who sent teams out to score city blocks based on physical characteristics (broken windows, shell casings, street memorials for recent killings) and on people’s behavior (clearly intoxicated adults, unsupervised children, and so on). “Her data are like nothing else I’ve ever seen,” says Epstein.

On these maps, Craig plots the paths of drug users as they move through the city, weaving in the information they’ve plugged into their PDAs. The result is a detailed rendering of how addiction is lived in space and time, opening a new window on the experience of tens of thousands of city residents. “Their work is novel,” says Yale University’s Rajita Sinha, professor of psychiatry and child study and director of the Yale Stress Center. This research “allows us to understand the social context in which drug use takes place and to evaluate that context,” says Sinha, who is internationally known for her pioneering research on the mechanisms linking stress to addiction.

The technique is called ‘ecological momentary assessment’ – although it is similar to a closely related method called ‘experience sampling’ that also involves giving participants an electronic device that requires they record their mental state at various points in their daily life.

These techniques have been around since the early 90s but the new aspect is the incorporation of GPS to map these responses into physical space.

One of the pioneers of this technique has been, not a scientist, but the artist Christian Nold, who has been making emotion maps of cities for many years to beautiful effect.

The Urbanite article covers how a team from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse are attempting perhaps the most ambitious and data-rich version of this approach to date which truly attempts to blend both inner and outer worlds.

Link to article ‘On the Trail of Addiction’.

View the original article here

Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness

Keep Your Brain Alive No more punch lines that just slipped away. No more names on the tip of your tongue. No more senior moments Drawing on cuttingedge neurological research, how to keep your brain alive 83 neurobic exercises brings help to everyone whose memory is starting to slip. Devised by Dr. Lawrence Katz, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, and Manning Rubin, author of 60 Ways to Relieve Stress in 60 Seconds, here is a regimen of mental crosstraining that can be done anywhere, by anyone, at any time of day. The premise is simple When you exercise the brain, you release natural growth factors called neurotrophins, which in turn enhance the brains level of fitness. And nothing so easily stimulates the brain as breaking routines and using the five senses in new and unexpected ways. So if youre righthanded, wake up tomorrow and brush your teeth with your left hand. Or close your eyes before you get into the car and then get the key into the ignition. Every time you open a new circuit in your brain, its like doing a round of mental situps, without the pain. 

Price: $8.95

Click here to buy from Amazon