Mental Toughness for Men: How to Build It Daily
Mental toughness for men is a trained habit. Build it daily with 1 uncomfortable thing on purpose, small promises you keep to yourself and getting back up after every loss.
By Your Bro · · Self Improvement
Remember Rudy? The kid is way too small to play college football and doesn't have the grades to get into Notre Dame, and he gets in anyway after getting turned down again and again. Then he walks on to the football team and spends 2 seasons on the practice squad getting flattened by guys twice his size. He never plays a down that counts until the very last game of his senior year. He gets there by getting up off the grass, every single afternoon, long after every reasonable person would have quit and gone home.
So you want to be mentally tougher. Maybe you fold when things get hard at work, or you lose your cool the second the kids start screaming in the back seat. Maybe you start a new plan every January and it's dead by Valentine's Day. A lot of guys figure they just weren't born with the tough gene, and that's a convenient excuse, because it lets you off the hook for good.
Toughness is a habit you train
Nobody hands you mental toughness. You build it the same way you build a bigger bench press, a rep at a time, by putting a little more weight on the bar than you're comfortable with and coming back the next day to do it again. Your Little Bro wrote a guest post here a while back called Mental Fortitude: Turning Your Losses Into Fuel to Win, and his point was that resilience comes from repetition, which is good news for every guy who thinks he's soft. If it's a skill, you can get better at it starting today.
Do 1 uncomfortable thing on purpose every day
Most of us have engineered every bit of discomfort out of our lives. The house is 71 degrees year round, food shows up at the door and the phone is there to kill every boring minute before it can happen. Then something actually hard comes along, like a layoff or a rough patch with your wife, and we've got zero practice handling it. Pick something small that you don't want to do and do it anyway. Finish your shower with 60 seconds of cold water, take the stairs, go for the run when it's raining or sit through the hard conversation instead of changing the subject. Whatever you pick, you're teaching your brain that you can feel bad and keep going anyway.
Keep the promises you make to yourself
Every time you tell yourself you'll get up at 5:30 and then hit snooze, you're teaching yourself that your word to yourself is garbage. Do that enough and you stop believing anything you say about your own life. Flip it around. Make smaller promises and keep every one of them. If 5:30 is a stretch, make it 6:15 and never miss. A man who keeps small promises for a month walks around different, because he knows he's somebody who follows through. That's a big chunk of what toughness is.
Watch what you let rattle around in your head
A tough guy and a fragile guy can have the exact same bad day. The difference is what each one tells himself on the drive home. If you spend the whole ride rehearsing how it's all going to fall apart, you'll walk in the door already beaten. I wrote a Bro Chat about this called Your Brain Is Practicing What You Fear, and the gist is that your brain gets good at whatever you repeat. Catch yourself spiraling and ask a better question, like what's the next thing you can actually do about it tonight?
Take the hit and get back up
You're going to lose sometimes. You'll blow a deal or say the wrong thing to somebody you love. The tough guy gets knocked down just as often as everybody else, he just doesn't stay down there feeling sorry for himself. Look at Joe Louis, who lost to Max Schmeling in 1936 and came back 2 years later to knock him out in the first round. I broke that fight down in Rocky 4 and Joe Louis: Life Lessons for Men, and if you need a reminder of what a comeback looks like, give it a read. Then go back to Keep Resolutions Like Rocky for the daily grind part, because the montage only works if you show up for it.
Start with 7 days
If you want a simple way to start stacking these reps this week, grab the free 7-Day Strong Man Reset. It gives you 1 small, hard thing to do every day for a week, which is exactly how Rudy got onto that field. You won't feel like a different man on day 2, but by day 7 you'll have proof that you can do hard things when you don't feel like it.