Five Tips to Develop Mental Strength

Sun Tzu noted that “victorious warriors win first” in the mind before going to battle. Our society prizes physical strength while neglecting the significance of mental strength and its role in our happiness and success in our careers and in our relationships with others.

In addition to your physical health, pay attention to your mental health and strength by implementing the following practices.

Be clear on your purpose. What is your “why”? What gets you up in the morning and motivates you? To be mentally healthy it is crucial to have a strong and clear sense of what you bring to the world and how you can use your strengths and skills to make the world a better place. This will give you focus as you consider career options and enables you to keep your purpose in mind when going through the inevitable difficult times.

Train your thoughts. We all have negative thoughts and it’s impossible to completely banish them but mentally strong people have developed strategies for dealing with them when encountered. These strategies can include a daily meditation practice, time spent in prayer, or the repetition of an affirming mantra. Training your thoughts also means to “win first” by visualizing events, such as that big speech or presentation at work, and working through a positive outcome in your mind , anticipating challenges and meeting them successfully.

Step into discomfort and tackle difficult tasks. Hug the monster. Embrace hard and scary things. Volunteer to lead the project or agree to give that speech. Make the phone call that makes you nervous. Start your morning with a cold shower. Walk instead of driving. Try something new and make mistakes.

Take full responsibility. This can be difficult and is an underappreciated aspect of mental strength. However, mentally strong people do not blame others for their failures or struggles. They take ownership of their lives and use failure as a motivation to learn more and work harder and smarter.

Surround yourself with mentally strong people. To develop mental strength, you need mentally strong people in your life. This might not be the people who are physically present in your life on a daily basis. You might need to seek out a mentor or adviser to meet with regularly, or find podcasts or audio books by wise men and women. Of course, read books and essays that build your mental strength. There are many creative ways to discover and surround ourselves with the counsel of a mentally strong community.

Implement these five practices to build mental strength and you will begin to see positive changes in your life and career.

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: Job Interviewing Tips and Dealing with Difficulty

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

© Bellemedia | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

• Dealing with Difficult Times: "Set small, simple daily goals ... every day and work to achieve them."


• 6 Bad Reasons to Change Jobs: "Feeling unfulfilled in your current role might make you want to take the first opportunity that comes along, but it might not be right for you."


• Things to Stop Doing in 2015: "Stop procrastinating, saving work for tomorrow, and waiting to be inspired to work."


• 6 Ways to be More Likable in the Job Interview: "Think of your interview as a time when you model the behavior you will exhibit after you are hired."


• Questions for the Receptionist While Awaiting the Job Interview: "The time you spend sitting in the waiting room waiting for the interview is a great opportunity to gather up some intel."

Eliminating the 'Easy' in Your Career

A well-known office supply chain offers its customers the ability to make things 'easy' by pressing a button. Easy...what a loaded word. When things are easy, they aren't difficult. Tasks are performed knowledgeably and quickly, and the outcome is almost always certain and to your liking. We naturally gravitate toward the easy, and-for the most part-we want things in our careers to be easy: customers to come back, supervisors to like our work, work to be completed on-time and with little difficulty. Easy is the way to go, right?

But here's the rub: excellence is hard. Learning important life-lessons is difficult. And oftentimes our best work was created under strenuous circumstances.

If we want to get what we want in our careers, we need to be prepared to abandon the easy and embrace the difficult. Think back to the greatest lessons you learned in your career life, and I'm willing to bet that most-if not all-of them had nothing to do with things that were easy. The hours you put in studying to achieve the grades you desired. The strenuous practice to prepare for the work presentation of your career. The time conditioning your body so you can be the athlete you want to be. When circumstances are difficult, we strive to meet the challenge; when they become easy, we stay stagnant and stuck in a rut.

Use the following questions to guide in determining where you need to make things more difficult for the sake of your career:

Where in my career life am I feeling intimidated or do I need to apply more pressure to myself?

In what aspects of my career life do I feel that I have been 'coasting' or have I already mastered?

How would my career be better if I could push myself in these areas?

What am I willing to do, and what am I not willing to do?

What will I do today that will move me in the direction that I want to move in?

Circumstances don't make you; they reveal you. Push yourself in your career to be the professional that you want to be.