10 Top Tips To Achieving Mental Toughness

I am often asked about how to achieve mental toughness in the sales environment.

Here are my top ten tips.

1. CIA (Control Influence Accept). Spend your time and mental energy on aspects of life you can control and influence; show a radical acceptance to the rest. Whatever happens to us we can hit an ‘emotional pause button’ and give a considered response rather than a knee jerk reaction. It’s not what happens to us, it’s how we respond to what happens to us. How we respond is within our control. We can be responsible for how we behave however difficult the situation. We cannot ever be responsible for how others behave.
2. Focus on the key activities that make success (in any area of life) the natural output of the work you put in.
3. Be input focused. Every time you get concerned, anxious or stressed about achieving a goal or target – that thought is the problem! Refocus your time, energy, skill and knowledge on the inputs that cause success to happen.
4. Mindfulness. Spend at least 10 minutes a day meditating in silence.
5. Gratitude. Take time each day to note down the small things in life, which we tend to ignore, that we should be deeply grateful for.
6. Journal. Keep a journal – there is something deeply therapeutic about getting ‘things’ out of our heads and on to paper. Here we can note our successes, our feelings on life situations, our goals and what we are grateful for.
7. A thirst for learning. Those that don’t read are as illiterate as those that can’t. Set time aside for self-development. Every challenge that we face has been experienced and written about by others. We can walk on the shoulders of these giants.
8. Early Morning Club. Join the 5am club, set the alarm for 5am. Dedicate the hour between 5am and 6am for exercise, meditation, keep a journal and self-development.
9. Fixed v Growth mind-set. Adopt a growth mind-set. Whatever our starting point, with self-education and considered practice we can improve in any area of life we choose.
10. Empathy. Seek first to understand before being understood. We can engage with others with a spirit of understanding, suspending our prejudices and judgements. Understanding is not agreement. We can understand another’s perspective but disagree with it. However, the very act of listening builds psychological connections with others and is at the heart of building effective relationships. Dysfunctional relationships at home and at work are a great source of stress.

To find out more about the importance of setting the right mindset and achieving mental toughness in a competitive sales environment please contact me.