What is mental strength? ...and how to get it!

What is mental strength and how to get it

When I talk to people about mental strength, I always get the feeling that everyone has a rough idea of ​​what mental strength is. Then I often ask what you can do particularly well if you are mentally strong. I get a wide variety of answers. Mentally strong people can perform particularly well under pressure, they get things done no matter what gets in their way, they have more confidence in themselves or don't let themselves be distracted by external influences. These are some of the different answers I often get. In this article, I would like to give you my opinion on mental strength and give you tips on how you can become mentally stronger.
While reading this, you may have also asked yourself what skills you have or what you can do better if you are mentally strong. I believe that if you are mentally strong, you can do three things particularly well: be resilient, make decisions and know your values.

Being resilient

For me, resilience means being able to survive difficult life situations without lasting impairment. I want to explain this in more detail using a personal example. In November last year, my girlfriend broke up with me. We lived together in a city where I didn't have many friends. I was devastated. For the first time, I thought she was the person, and then it came quite suddenly. I moved back to my hometown of Munich and luckily found my own apartment quickly so that I no longer had to rely on other people. Resilience does not mean that I just carry on as before after the breakup. Resilience means that I react to this situation as well as possible. I would be lying if I wrote that I worked all day, was active and full of life. Everyone knows what heartbreak feels like and that it sucks. But I tried to react to it flexibly. With the relationship, we had plans for the near and distant future. After the breakup, these evaporated for me and I had to find new plans. For me, resilience means that I remain flexible and react as well as possible. For me, that meant that I wanted to find new plans - not easy with heartbreak, of course. Back then, my plans were different than they are now. Plans (almost) always change.
In a sports setting, this can take on a variety of dimensions. Let's say you're in a workout or competition and your body isn't performing as well as you're used to. Resilience means that you react to it as well as possible. For example, you could slow down a bit and try to get the best result. If you carried on like this, your performance would drop so much that you would end up even slower. Or another situation that I unfortunately experience all too often: you're in pain or injured, you're in a workout or competition and you're struggling with whether to carry on or not. The thoughts and shame of giving up versus the pain or injury in your body. You could react to the situation by carrying on and perhaps injuring yourself more seriously, or by quitting. Unfortunately, from talking to people, I'm increasingly finding that many feel compelled to do the former, i.e. carry on, because that was the original goal. Being resilient means that you remain flexible and react well to the situation. Of course, this has to be assessed on a situation-by-situation basis.

One exercise you can do is very simple. If you have been in a situation like this and noticed that you were not as flexible as you would have liked, then go through the situation in your head afterwards and think about what alternative courses of action there would have been. It is best to write these down so you can see it. There are no limits to your creativity here. This way you learn to deal with such situations more flexibly over time. In the example of the injured athlete from above, whether he should continue or not, there are also several options. He could have done the movements that he can do without pain and left out or replaced the painful movements. If the injury had already been there beforehand, he might not have needed to go to the gym at all. He could have communicated his situation to those in charge and then handed over responsibility for the decision to continue. As you can see, there are no limits to creativity here.

make decisions

Making decisions is pretty self-explanatory. One point I want to mention here is the struggle with decisions. When we are faced with a decision, we have to choose between two or more options, of which we often do not know in advance which is "right" and which is "wrong". In addition, if we choose one option, we do not know what it would be like if we had chosen the other. This can lead to struggle or doubt about the decision. Worrying about it can be self-destructive. Often the option we did not choose is glorified and the option we chose is perceived as the "wrong" decision. Another difficulty is that we often start to ponder the next decision and think about the options for so long that it takes a very long time to make a decision or maybe even no decision at all. When I was back in Munich, I did not know exactly where I wanted to live, as my job allows me to work from anywhere. I was faced with the decision of where to look for an apartment. I had three possible cities. I asked people for advice on which one to choose. And so I decided to stay. The time I spent making the decision naturally pushed my apartment search further and further back. In my opinion, mental strength also clearly includes making wise decisions. I would describe my decision to stay in Munich as the right decision. A sentence I first heard from Andreas Pürzel is that you often only know whether a decision was right or wrong in retrospect. This sentence had a big impact on me. I did a lot to make Munich the right decision. I accepted my decision and made the best of it. Of course, it could have been much nicer in other cities, I can't know that, but I know that I did everything I could to make the decision to stay in Munich the right one.
In CrossFit, we are constantly making decisions. Should I add a little more weight or not? Should I take a longer break? Should I even go to the gym today? I think we have all asked ourselves these questions at some point. We often have a choice, and during training in particular, decisions often have to be made quickly. For example, the question of whether I should take a longer break? Do I go back to the bar and carry on at my own pace, or do I take a longer break and go faster? No matter what your decision is in the moment, you make it simply by carrying on and in hindsight it is the right decision.
An exercise to practice making decisions is easy to implement. We make decisions all the time in our everyday lives. Do I order food or cook myself? Do I eat ice cream or cake? Do I ride a bike or take public transport? Which film do I want to watch? These are decisions that do not have serious consequences, no matter what we decide. Take decisions like these and practice making quick decisions. Think about the options, listen to yourself and decide quickly. By making decisions quickly, you will get better at it, and eventually you will be able to do the same with more and more important decisions. Of course, you do not want to make hasty decisions - some decisions take time. But this exercise can help you make decisions more quickly.

Acting according to values

This is probably the most individual point of mental strength. Our values ​​are the basis for the first two points. If you know your values, you have a compass with which you can make decisions. If you know your values, you know what is important to you and where you can be flexible and therefore resilient. The fact is: If you don't know your values, you can't act according to them. And it is very difficult to know your values, because values ​​are usually more abstract concepts. Fairness, compassion, trust, for example, are all values ​​that are not really tangible. Everyone has to decide for themselves what each value means to them. So far, I have found one value for myself that I orient myself by: love. I want to love everyone, including myself. I have defined this love as the task of creating space so that the other person can be who they want to be. I try to act accordingly. It is also a bit of an answer to the question of my "why". That makes me mentally strong, because I know why I act the way I do. I can justify it.

Back to the first example, where the athlete is in a situation where he is in pain during a workout. Does he continue and risk a major injury, or does he stop? If success is important to him, he will realize pretty quickly that he is continuing and taking the risk of getting more injured. If self-compassion or health is important to him, he will probably decide to stop and not take the risk. There is no right or wrong here. There are just different values ​​that can dictate the direction. And no value is better or worse. Success is just as much a value as love. You have to find out which value makes you feel good and which doesn't.

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy exercise for you here. It takes time to find your values ​​and think them through. It took me 23 years to realize that love in this form is important to me. As an exercise, you can sit down, pick a value and look at it from all sides. You can ask yourself whether you would have made similar or the same decisions in the past with this value. This can be an indicator of what is important to you and what is not. And it just takes time to figure that out.

For me, these three components make up a large part of mental strength. Mentally strong people are resilient, make decisions and act according to their values. If you have any questions or suggestions, please send us a DM at @maxdavidyuma or an email at max@bigperformancecoaching.com .