Mental Toughness
OVERVIEW
Developing and maintaining mental toughness is an important part of staying effective in a demanding first responder career. Mental toughness refers to one’s capacity to consistently perform at a high level regardless of the situational demands. Mental toughness involves a sense of renewed commitment to excellent performance after experiencing a difficult setback. It involves identifying mistakes or errors in one’s performance, and using this knowledge to improve future performance. Being mentally tough does not mean being unaffected by the distressing situations you may encounter, such as when people are harmed. However, mental toughness involves responding to these situations in ways that allow you to continue to be effective and emotionally healthy.
SEVEN KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF MENTAL TOUGHNESS
Here are seven of the key characteristics associated with people who possess a high degree of mental toughness:
Persistence
Mentally tough people stick with their responsibilities and with their training and preparation even when they don’t feel like it. They don’t give up.
High Self-Expectations
Mental toughness only grows when you test the bounds of your comfort zone. Mentally tough people set high standards for their performance, and consistently aim to meet these standards.
Support-Seeking
Becoming mentally tough involves recognizing when you may lack a piece of information, or a skill that is needed to perform at a high level, and being willing to ask others who can provide the information or guidance to improve performance. This can also involve seeking guidance in effectively handling difficult emotions that might interfere with performance, or directly seeking emotional support.
Key Point: The purpose of support-seeking in mental toughness is to be willing to ask for whatever help may be needed in order to maintain high standards of performance.
Personal Responsibility
This includes recognizing what you need to do to perform at your best, and taking active steps to remain fit and focused. It also involves being proactive in identifying skills or abilities you may need, or problems that may be developing in the workplace, so that you can quickly address them without allowing them to interfere with job performance.
Self-Belief and Optimistic Thinking
Developing mental toughness involves strengthening your belief in your own capabilities. It also involves expecting positive outcomes, and, when things don’t go as planned, taking action to improve the situation, rather than giving up.
Self-belief and optimism can be developed with practice, such as making a realistic list of your strengths and skills, and reviewing these daily. A more optimistic view can be developed by identifying situations when you feel discouraged or frustrated, and then notice whether your thoughts may be inaccurately negative. You can then identify more accurate and helpful ways of thinking about the situation, and can practice using these new ways of thinking.
Heightened Emotional Awareness
Being mentally tough requires understanding yourself well enough to anticipate what situations will trigger which emotions, and learning how to effectively manage your emotions so that they do not interfere with your effectiveness in difficult situations. This heightened emotional awareness also gives you an opportunity to understand the behavior of other people, allowing you to interact more effectively with them.
Experience in Overcoming Hardship
Mental toughness increases when the right mindset encounters a challenging obstacle. For athletes, this may involve difficult rehabilitation after an injury. For first responders, this may include getting back to work after making an error on the job, or after working at a scene involving fatalities. Mental toughness involves being fully aware of difficult emotions, and skillfully managing these emotions so that you can take effective actions and make sound decisions on the job. Each time hardships are encountered, you can learn more clearly how you tend to react, and what helps you to manage your emotions and behaviors appropriately. By practicing self-awareness, you can become more effective in handling difficult situations, and increase your mental toughness.
THREE STEPS TO INCREASE MENTAL TOUGHNESS
Key Point: Mental toughness includes commitment, a particular mindset about yourself and your actions, increased awareness, and skills for managing emotions and making good choices. Although mental toughness may seem to come more naturally to some people, you can increase your mental toughness through deliberate practice.
STEP ONE: Getting Started
You can start to increase mental toughness by first taking stock accurately of your current strengths; this could be your ability to get along with others, physical agility, or technical knowledge. You can refer to these strengths regularly as a reminder of abilities you already possess. Next, list two or three areas where you have had some difficulties, like getting angry too easily at work, or worrying over and over about something you might have done differently. Next, review some of the concepts described above, and see how they might be useful. Are there negative thoughts that occur regularly that you could start to challenge, and replace with more accurate, helpful ways of thinking? When you start to have strong emotions that are interfering, could you become more aware of them, and list one or two useful actions you could take to manage the emotions? For example, you might notice that your heart starts beating faster and your jaw clenches when you become angry. You can rehearse in advance what adaptive steps you could take if this happens in the future, such as stepping briefly away from the situation, or practicing in advance a reminder to yourself to speak quietly and calmly.
STEP TWO: Strengthening Mental Toughness
After identifying your current strengths and selecting areas you would like to strengthen, start tracking your target behaviors systematically. Keep a daily record of situations in which you were challenged to demonstrate mental toughness in ways that have been difficult for you, and rate yourself in terms of how well you handled the situation. Just as importantly, identify and write down in your tracking notes at least two effective ways of handling similar situations in the future. For example, if you found that you criticized yourself or became discouraged after a difficult situation, you can identify ways of thinking about the situation that you would find supportive and that would help you view the situation as a learning experience and keep your thinking positive and optimistic. After you identify effective ways of thinking or responding that would work well for you in the future, write these down in your tracking form, and review them briefly each day.
STEP THREE: Maintaining Mental Toughness
Once you have developed the habits of mental toughness, be sure to regularly tend to these habits to ensure that you keep them. Take a few minutes every few weeks to review and reflect on the characteristics of mental toughness, and see how closely your recent thoughts and actions have been aligned with the characteristics of mental toughness. If you find that some of these habits have weakened with time, it can be useful to review notes you may have kept as you worked toward developing mental toughness.
Key Point: Finally, in keeping with the very first mental toughness concept: Persist! Keep at these efforts to increase your mental toughness, even if you have setbacks, or don’t live up to your expectations. Learn from what doesn’t work, and use it as a way to try new strategies that will work. Developing greater mental toughness will help you to be less negatively affected by difficult situations, and will help you to be more effective on the job and at home.
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