MENTAL STRENGTH – A PRICELESS POSSESSION

 

 

Cristiano Ronaldo has all the silverwares in his cupboard except the FIFA World Cup and even though he is 41 he is back to give it a last try. His contemporary and the Argentine superstar Lionel Messi is 39, has won the last World Cup, has battled several injuries, but is back again for one more time. Vaibhav Suryavanshi, the 15 years old boy wonder from Bihar, blazed the recently concluded IPL with mind boggling strike rate and an all time record number of sixes against the best bowlers of the world. What do all these three have in common? They have enormous mental strength. It is not that they don’t fail, they treat their failure as yet another stepping stone towards success, a success that never satisfies them. Despite physical pain and hardship they return to practice and to their big game because of their mental strength.

 

Mental toughness or emotional resilience, is the capacity to handle life’s pressures, setbacks, and challenges effectively while maintaining wellbeing and pursuing goals. In moments of weakness and crisis, after our body has exhausted all its forces, the only thing we have left that can give us the last push we need is our mental strength. We all have mental power at some level or another, and the question is not just how strong it is in general, but how powerful it is in relation to our goals. A person who tries to lose weight and doesn’t give up for a long time is a person of great mental strength. Who doesn’t like to sleep an extra hour in the morning, but to force oneself out of bed and go out for a morning run needs mental strength.

 

The reverse is far more common. So many people try to lose weight and stop or give up after a few months with excuses, although they have not yet reached their goal, These people suffers from weak mental strength. Mental strength is like a muscle that can be trained and strengthened.

Let us see how:

 

1. Be honest with yourself

One in every 4 calories we put into our body is designed to give energy to the brain. When we lie, whether for ourself or for others, some of the brain must remember the truth, while other parts must remember the lie. In order to keep these two memories, we have to feed our brain with 2 times the calories to provide the energy needed for the double action. If we are honest with ourself 100% of the time, we will be less concerned and our brain can operate more efficiently and calmly, which will help improve our mental strength at the moments we need it.

 

2. Think of others more than yourself

Tony Robbins, a writer and personal consultant who has written two books on psychology and self-help, claims that in order to succeed, you have to serve as many people as possible. Someone who is mentally strong always tries to help solve other’s problems and seeks ways to make life easier for others. The best example is our Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. At 75 he can work tirelessly with just four hours of sleep because he is working for others, for his country and his party. If you want to be mentally stronger, think less of yourself and see how you can use your knowledge and abilities to help others. Once you understand that you are not at the center of the universe and that you can help others feel that they are, the mental strength and success will come on their own.

 

3. Read books

This unfortunately is a trend we are losing. Social media has reduced our attention span. Reading books is a priceless habit because we live only once, and in one lifetime we can accumulate only that much of experience. However, when we read a book, we are sucked into the lives of others for several days, weeks, or months, and we experience it together with them knowing that in the end all with be resolved. We return to our lives after learning from their mistakes and experiences, and of course a little about ourselves, and that's how we get stronger with each book we read.

 

4. Cultivate healthy relationships

Around every successful person, there are a number of close friends who make them who they are. In fact, many of the most successful billionaires, outstanding athletes, great scientists and talented artists in the world claim that each of us is the average of the five people with whom we spend most of our time. Every successful person in the world surrounds themselves with people who love them, support them, and help him think of and come up with ideas. Surround yourself with the right people who will build you up and not tear you down. Befriend people smarter than you, and develop your own circle of genius around you. They will add to your mental strength.

 

5. Be curious

The only way to learn how things work is through curiosity and asking questions. We are born curious, we broke the radio in childhood to see who was speaking from inside. But, while growing up we lost that curiousness. We were disciplined to conform to a ‘good boy/girl’ type. Now, at this stage of life, find people who inspire your curiosity and from whom you’d like to learn the most. The dumber you think your question is, the faster you need to ask it. There is no stupid question in a field you aren’t familiar with and people with knowledge in the same field will be happy to share it with you. If you are ashamed to ask a question, challenge yourself to ask 2 questions. Shy people don’t make much progress in life and the only reason is that they prevent it from themselves. Curiosity is like an appetite, and you have to feed it as long as it is hungry so you can get the nutrients that your brain needs to get stronger.

 

6. Take care of your health

The type of food we eat also affects the brain's activity and our mental strength. It is hard to be strong and creative and to carry out our ideas when we are ill in bed, or even when our bodies prefer to lie on the couch than to run. You don’t have to lift weights and build muscle to feel healthy, sticking to a healthy diet is enough. Walking at least half an hour every day and 8 hours of sleep each night will allow your brain to work best.

 

7. Learn and repeat what you have learned

Many studies show that students in schools and universities forget almost everything they heard during a lecture 45 minutes after leaving the classroom. To keep information that has just entered your mind for the first time, it is strongly recommended that you write it down or use it in conversation during the hour after the lesson has finished. The next day, repeat the material learned through conversation, so you can make sure it stays in your head for a long time. The best way to instill new knowledge in your mind is to teach it to someone else, so it is strongly recommended that you share with others what you learn. This is something which we practiced in our residency days in King George’s Medical College, and the stuff I taught as a resident to my juniors, is still fresh in my mind.

 

8. Don’t limit yourself

People with mental strength give themselves permission to do things that they haven’t tried before and experience new things. In addition, they give themselves permission to come up with bad ideas, take risks, slip and fall and try again. If you don’t give yourself permission to re-create your world, no one else will give it to you, and it will limit you to the world you know, which will prevent growth and progress toward new things that will improve your quality of life and give you personal satisfaction from what you have achieved in life. Impossible can be made possible only by trying, modifying, and trying again but differently.

 

9. “Ideas” are priceless, keep them coming  

Today, the strongest "currency" in the global economy is ideas. In order to profit from ideas, one must first come up with them, and it is recommended that they be good. To improve your ability to come up with good ideas that will help you fulfill your ambitions, adopt a practice where you write 10 ideas a day on a variety of topics on a piece of paper. It works just like weight lifting - at first, it’ll be difficult, but over time your "muscle of ideas" will grow and strengthen. In the end, you’ll find that you have an almost supernatural ability to come up with a creative solution to any problem that life throws at you. Taking the beaten track is easy, but it cannot lead to a new place. To discover the new, you need a new idea.

 

10. Be present in the moment

Whenever you feel remorse about the past, or you are anxious about the future, you create a journey in time that takes you from the moment you are in and puts you somewhere else that has already passed or has not yet arrived and doesn’t exist. People with mental strength, who find themselves conducting such a journey in time, do so to learn from past mistakes, and plan for future success. Instead of messing with their troubles, which they can’t solve, they think about how they can help others solve their troubles. Miraculously, when this is done, life becomes less stressed, and the success and motivation we achieve in this way usually leads to other successes that guide the future to where we want to go.

 

 

Mental strength is like a muscle - we have to train it to strengthen it so we can use it during the difficult moments when we need it most. With mental strength we can overcome all our fears and all the moments when we feel we want to give up, throw up our hands and settle for what we’ve achieved so far, which usually isn’t the ultimate goal.