A Starters Guide To Mental Strength
So how do you create the mental strength to stay calm, composed and maintain self esteem in a tough environment? Here are some tips you may to consider as a starter guide to self improvement.
Imagine yourself as a dart board. Everything and everyone else around you may become dart pins, at one point or another. These darts destroy your self-esteem and pull you down in ways you don’t even remember. Don’t let them destroy you, or get the best of you. So which dart pins should you avoid?
Dart Pin #1: Negative Work Environment
Beware of “dog eat dog” theory where everyone else is fighting just to get ahead. This is where non-appreciative people usually thrive. No one will appreciate your contributions even if you miss lunch and dinner, and stay up late. Most of the times you work too much without getting help from people concerned. Stay out of this; it will ruin your self esteem. Competition is at stake anywhere. Be healthy enough to compete, but in a healthy competition that is.
Dart Pin #2: Other People’s Behavior
Whiners, complainers, victims, bullies, brown nosers, gossipmongers, backstabbers, snipers, people walking wounded, controllers, naggers, complainers, exploders, patronizers, sluffers… all these kinds of people will pose bad vibes for your self-esteem, as well as to your self improvement scheme…get away from them now!
Dart Pin #3: Changing Environment
You can’t be a green bug on a brown field. Changes challenge our paradigms. It tests our flexibility, adaptability and alters the way we think. Changes will make life “difficult” for awhile and actually change itself is not difficult, it’s the resistance to change that creates the anxiety and difficulty. The change may cause stress but it will help us find ways to improve our selves. Change will be there forever and to create mental strength one must actively look for and embrace change.
Dart Pin #4: Past Experience
It’s okay to cry and say “ouch!” when we experience pain. But don’t let pain transform itself into fear. It might grab you by the tail and swing you around. Treat each failure and mistake as a lesson. The pain from the past is only kept alive by revisiting it.
Dart Pin #5: Negative World View
Look at what you’re looking at. Don’t wrap yourself up with all the negativities of the world. In building self-esteem, we must learn how to make the best out of worst situations. The world is what you see it to be.
Dart Pin #6: Determination Theory
The way you are and your behavioral traits is said to be a mixed end product of your inherited traits (genetics), your upbringing (psychic), and your environmental surroundings such as your spouse, the company, the economy or your circle of friends. You have your own identity. If your father is a failure, it doesn’t mean you have to be a failure too. Learn from other people’s experience, so you’ll never have to encounter the same mistakes.
Sometimes, you may want to wonder if some people are born leaders or born mentally strong and positive thinkers. NO. Being positive, developing mental strength and staying mentally strong is a choice. Building self esteem and drawing lines for self improvement is a choice, not a rule or a talent. God wouldn’t come down from heaven and tell you – “George, you may now have the permission to build self esteem and improve your self.”
In life, it’s hard to stay mentally strong especially when things and people around you keep pulling you down. When we get to the battlefield, we should choose the right weapons to bring and armor to use, and pick those that are bullet proof. Life’s options give us arrays of more options. Along the battle, we will get hit and bruised. And wearing bullet proof armor ideally means we’re ready for ‘self change.’ This kind of change comes from within…voluntarily. Armor or ‘self change’ changes 3 things: our attitude, our behavior and our way of thinking…this creates the foundation for mental strength.
Building mental strength will eventually lead to self improvement if we start to become responsible for who we are, what we have and what we do. Its like a flame that should gradually spread like a brush fire from inside and out. When we develop self esteem, we take control of our mission, values and discipline. Self esteem brings about self improvement, true assessment, and determination. So how do you start putting up the building blocks of self esteem? Be positive. Be contented and happy. Be appreciative. Never miss an opportunity to compliment. A positive way of living will help you build self esteem, your starter guide to mental strength.
