Last October 10th, World Mental Health day, I launched a digital book.Building Mental Toughness: Practical help to be yourself at your best. The book describes 15 Mentally Tough habits and characteristics and gives suggestions on how to develop or improve these. Based on my book, this short post is the 1st part in my series on Building Mental Toughness.
Find meaning
If you find meaning or purpose in what you do, you can overcome any setback or situation. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, found that all survivors of the concentration camps had one thing in common: meaning. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning, and developed logo therapy, a way to help people find meaning. According to Frankl; “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” Meaning gives you additional Mental Toughness to make any circumstance bearable in your life journey.
‘He who has why to live can bear almost any how’ Friedrich Nietzsche
Meaning doesn’t only make us more resilient. According to Martin Seligman, founder of the positive psychology movement, true happiness is found in the meaningful life. Happiness levels are positively correlated with a meaningful life. However, finding meaning isn’t always easy and to find meaning, we sometimes have to perform tasks that don’t make us happy in the moment, but might give us meaning in the longer term. Our chasing of shallow happiness, might even be related to feelings of emptiness, or a life that lacks meaning. But once we find meaning, the commitment to our cause has no limits. Finding meaning, purpose and fulfillment has been described as self-actualization by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his hierarchy of needs. Finding purpose has been further popularised by Simon Sinek in his book Start With Why.
About the author:
Niels is an accredited Mental Tougness coach and founder of MentalToughness.online. He is passionate about making individuals and businesses being themselves at their best. If you want to measure your Mental Toughness and receive a 12 page development report, you can contact him at niels@mentaltoughness.online
