You can also connect with us on:
Leadership Solutions: Executive Coaching and Leadership Development specializing in Strategy Development and Implementation
  • Home
  • About
  • Coaching
    • Coaching Offer!
    • How I work and why you should work with me
    • The Benefits of Coaching
    • Effective Teams
    • Executive Coaching
    • Coaching and Mentoring: Developing Managers as Coaches & Mentors
    • Difficult Team Conversations
    • Choosing a Coach
  • Strategy
    • What is Strategy? >
      • What it takes to make a good Strategy
      • Diagnosing the internal environment
      • Figuring Out How to Reach the Promised Land
      • Strategy: External Analysis
      • The Competitive Environment
      • Defining the Challenge and Creating the Guiding Policy
      • WIGs, Scoreboards and Tracking Progress
    • Strategic Leadership >
      • Strategic Thinking
      • Strategic Thinking (cont.)
      • Strategic Acting
      • Strategic Acting (cont.)
      • Strategic Acting (cont.)
      • Strategic Influencing
      • Strategic Influencing (cont.)
      • Strategic Influencing (cont.)
      • Strategic Leadership Teams
      • Strategy as a Learnining Process
      • Summing Up Strategic Leadership
    • Strategic Thinking >
      • What is Strategic Thinking?
      • Strategic Thinking as a Discipline
      • Where to Play and How to Win
      • Bucking an Industry Norm
      • Replicating Pockets of Excellence
      • Questions about Strategic Thinking
  • Leadership
    • Developing Business Leaders
    • Personality and Business
    • Self-Leadership >
      • Selling when you are not a Sales Person
      • Meetings! Bloody Meetings! Be Mindful
      • Resilience. How Resilient are You?
      • Resilience: Build your Own
      • Build Your Team's Resilience
    • Leadership >
      • #UselessLosers
      • Leadership is Exercised One Conversation at a Time
      • Presenteeism - Doing more harm than good
      • 5 Steps to Develop your Leadership Skills
    • Culture Change
  • Clients
    • What Our Clients Say >
      • What a Massive Shift
      • Our small part in the fight against Corruption
  • Articles
  • Contact

Resilience, Grit and Mental Toughness - An Introduction

4/12/2022

0 Comments

 
The last couple of years have been difficult for most of us, and this has resulted in widespread mental health problems and a great deal of unhappiness. I happen to think that, while we collectively dealt with the challenges of a pandemic, the notion of life being difficult is ubiquitous. Life is difficult for different people in different ways and to differing degrees at different times. Yet some people rise above these challenges and others don’t do so well. This article is a continuation of a series that starts here.

Characteristics that are typically used in relation to being able to prevail in the face of challenges include Resilience, Grit and Mental Toughness. They are not all the same thing and not all people who do ok despite life’s difficulties have all of these characteristics. In this article, I explain the concepts and why they are important. In future articles I will talk about how to develop these characteristics. Here are some useful definitions:

1. Resilience
Wikipedia: Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally or emotionally with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.[1] Resilience exists when the person uses "mental processes and behaviors in promoting personal assets and protecting self from the potential negative effects of stressors".[2] In simpler terms, psychological resilience exists in people who develop psychological and behavioral capabilities that allow them to remain calm during crises/chaos and to move on from the incident without long-term negative consequences.
Everydayhealth.com: Resilience is typically defined as the capacity to recover from difficult life events.
American Psychological Association: Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. As much as resilience involves “bouncing back” from these difficult experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth.
Positivepsychology.com: Resilience can be defined as the ability – and tendency – to “bounce back.” “Bouncing back” is what we do when we face disappointment, defeat, and failure, but instead of wallowing or letting things keep us down, we get back up and continue on with our lives.

The common thread in these definitions is that resilience is what enables us to ride out the struggle and recover from negative life events. It does not shield us from experiencing pain – we experience the pain of these life experiences as one might expect – but it gives us the strength to get through it and rise again without breaking down or falling apart. Resilient people are not afraid of the pain because they know they will be fine, no matter what happens.

We need resilience because life is just damn difficult – and we need to be able ride out the tough experiences and bounce back from setbacks and tragedy. In the next article, I will discuss the life choices and actions that build resilience and how to put these in place.

2. Grit
Wikipedia: In psychology, grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's perseverance of effort combined with the passion for a particular long-term goal or end state (a powerful motivation to achieve an objective). This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie on the path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization.
South African College of Applied Psychology: Angela Lee Duckworth is quoted: “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.”
Psychology Today: If you're gritty, you attain success through endurance, perseverance, resilience, passion, hard work, and practice, practice, practice. If you persist and face all the obstacles, you may just win. It involves finding your passion (which involves a sense of purpose) and persevering.
New Harbinger Publications: It is the ability to persist in something you feel passionate about and persevere when you face obstacles. This kind of passion is not about intense emotions or infatuation. It’s about having direction and commitment. When you have this kind of passion, you can stay committed to a task that may be difficult or boring.  

As you can see, the essence of grit is a sense of purpose – big goals that you feel passionate about – and the perseverance to stick with it until the goal is achieved, no matter what obstacles you might face.

Without Grit, one cannot get the big goals achieved. It is about being driven towards something important and having the determination to see things through. I think that grit requires that one is actually resilient – but not all resilient people also have grit.

3. Mental Toughness
Mental Toughness is a concept that has emerged from the field of sports psychology, but I think it can be applied far more broadly. It is not the same as resilience. Here is my definition:

Mental toughness is the ability to sustain consistent focus and self-belief under difficult circumstances and despite external distractions and challenges. It has four components:
  1. Control: the sense that one has the ability to influence in a situation while keeping one’s emotions in check;
  2. Commitment: the choice to stay deeply involved in pursuing challenging goals despite the difficulties that may arise;
  3. Challenge: seeing potential threats as an opportunity for self-development and continuing to strive despite a constantly changing environment.
  4. Confidence: in one’s capabilities as well as in one’s ability to navigate complex interpersonal settings.
(For more see Frontiers in Psychology).

It is most easily demonstrated in the world of sport:
  • The tennis player who makes no errors despite a hostile crowd and an opponent who is relentless. Rafael Nadal springs to mind;
  • The rugby player who will practice kicking for posts for hours at a time, even without the presence of the coach, like Jonny Wilkinson;
  • The golfer who is able to sustain focus over 2 or 3 days despite searing heat or howling wind. Ernie Els is a great example.
It would appear that mental toughness is about the ability to “mind your mind” despite relentless pressure. In the world of work, it is demonstrated by the CEO who stays calm, focused and continues making good decisions and communicating well despite constant surprises and curved balls. I think Andre de Ruyter, Eskom CEO, is a great example of a business leader who is mentally tough.

Once again, mental toughness is only possible in the presence of resilience – but being resilient does not necessarily make one mentally tough.

In the next few articles, I am going to explore each of these concepts and examine whether and how they can be developed or learned. So stay with me.
​
Contact Me
If you are in a chapter of your life where success requires that you are resilient, gritty or mentally tough, the support of a coach is very powerful. If this is you, why don’t you email me on [email protected] and let’s discuss your coaching programme.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    20Plenty
    Accountability & Responsibility
    Adaptability
    Authentic Conversations
    Belinda Davies
    Celebrate Success
    Change
    Coach
    Coaching
    #coaching
    Conversation
    CPD (Continuing Professional Development)
    Culture
    Culture Change
    Decision Quality
    Diversity
    Emotional Regulation
    Empathy
    Empathy Is Not Intuition
    Employeeengagement
    Employee Engagement
    Employee Survey
    Endurance
    Engagement
    Ethics & Ethical Dilemmas
    Focus
    #goals
    Gratitude
    Grit
    Health
    Influence
    Inspiration
    Inspirational Leadership
    Inspiring Others
    Leaders As Coaches
    Leadership
    #leadership
    Leadership Development
    Leadership Skills
    Leadership Solutions
    Life Is Difficult
    Management
    #management
    Managers
    Managers As Coaches
    Managers-as-coaches
    Mental Health
    Mental Toughness
    Motivation
    New Beginnings
    Optimism
    People Who Thrive
    Performance
    Performance Under Pressure
    Personal Leadership
    Planning
    Professional Supervision
    Reinvent Yourself
    Relationships
    Relationships Matter
    Resilience
    Rules Of Engagement
    Self-acceptance
    Self Awareness
    Self-awareness
    Self Care
    Self Leadership
    Self-Leadership
    Self-love
    Self Mastery
    Self-mastery
    Self-worth
    Servant Leadership
    Staying The Course
    Strategic Leadership
    #success
    Team_resilience
    Teams
    The Discipline Of Leadership
    Thrive
    Trust & Trustworthiness
    Values
    Victimhood
    Victim Mentality
    Victim Mindset
    Vision
    Winning Mindset

    Archives

    March 2024
    February 2024
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    February 2018
    April 2017
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015

    RSS Feed

Whats Next?

Leadership Development
Executive Coaching
Business Strategy

What my clients say

Articles
    Work We've Done
    Self-leadership
    Strategic Leadership
    Strategic Thinking
    Strategy

Call me! 082 5519504
Picture
Picture
Picture

    What improvements or changes do you seek?

Submit