Strength of mind. 9 ways to strengthen it

Strength of mind. If you observe nature, you can be surprised every day. A duck is building a nest, a blade of grass is breaking through the asphalt, ants are scurrying around underfoot. Everyone is working at full capacity. This strength - fortitude - is an innate quality of living organisms . We must live, we must develop, we must improve our “anthill” - this is the motto of all nature. Or almost all of it.

Man, you see, is a “biosocial” being, the crown of the universe. We can lie around and scroll through the news instead of doing productive work. In modern society we do not have a spark that pushes us towards development. We become weak, our body overpowers us.

For a normal person, this goes against conscience (spirit, nature), so depression occurs and self-esteem decreases. We are losing control over life, we are controlled by desires, fashion and simply stronger people.

To regain power and become the sole owner of your life, in this article we will look at 4 areas of activity. You will learn how to develop steely fortitude and “squeeze” maximum results out of it.

Pain

Strength is generated only through pain . In the gym, in life – it doesn’t matter. It’s as if you are fighting with yourself, forcing yourself to do something or resist. This is a standard growth indicator that all athletes strive for. They understand that pain is a sieve through which the weak are eliminated and the strong rise.

Pain appears due to the fault of the brain. It is difficult for him to break an ingrained habit and choose the difficult path instead of the easy one. This causes dissonance, a state of reluctance and apathy.

accept this state like a champion and learn to use it for development. Below we will look at 3 ways to cause and overcome pain in yourself.

1 Act without sparing yourself

When you feel sorry for yourself, you reinforce the habit of giving up. Your body acquires power, you indulge its desires. The next time you have a choice - to do or not to do - you will be guided by past behavior. This means that your piggy bank will gradually be replenished with negative experiences and excuses. The feeling of guilt will dull accordingly, you will allow yourself to be a rag and will not give your best.

“Okay, I’m not ready yet...”
“Oh, weakling, it didn’t work out again. Okay, this is all because of......"
“It’s okay, it’ll work out next time”

Don't feel sorry for yourself, fight habits. Love the process of overcoming. The more often you act in accordance with your inner voice (conscience, soul), the more you develop fortitude. Remember that you are only as happy with yourself as you can control your life.

2 Run into problems

Instead of a shameful and negative experience, it is better to put your victories . You can overcome habits and develop as much as possible, or you can artificially create discomfort. This way you will quickly start moving and develop arguments to increase your self-esteem.

If you have accumulated anger and no longer have the strength to tolerate your weaknesses, this is the ideal way to release energy. Place yourself in extreme conditions, start doing at least something. As soon as you move, strength will come, and the desire to live and develop will return.

You can try for example:

Start with the little things. Watch your posture, stop “carrying pieces,” and clean up your speech.
Continue with average. Read 4 books in a month (1 per week), go to the gym for six months, meet ten people.
Extreme. Sit on a fast, get up at 6 am, run 3 km every evening, open your own business.

After such feats, you will be able to focus on your victories . They will give you the confidence to further develop your fortitude.

3 Start over with a clean slate

Sometimes you just don't have the courage to take a decisive step. You seem to understand the destructiveness of the problem, but any endeavors quickly end. Little energy, little torque to get moving.

In such cases, you need to make a small revolution with yourself. Ruthlessly break down everything old and start building something new in its place. In this way, you will instantly burst into real life and feel the pleasant pain of change.

If you do it conscientiously, it will be painful and difficult. But there are a number of advantages:

Massiveness of changes
Instant release of energy and anger towards yourself
Feeling full of life
Increasing confidence in your abilities
Feeding changes from each other (for example, running in the morning - getting up at 6:00)

Don't wait for the moment , live here and now, as the Pepsi advertisement says.
Your life is not a rehearsal for something important, so don’t be afraid to change and release your reserves of strength. It is at such moments that strength of spirit and strength of character are trained.

How to develop discipline

How to develop discipline while strengthening willpower and fortitude? Everything will have to be done at the same time, since it will not be possible to do such things separately. There is no way to strengthen willpower without discipline.

Discipline underlies diet, giving up bad habits, playing sports, attitude to work, and decision-making. If you control yourself and take responsibility for your appearance, health, and standard of living, you will definitely develop willpower.

The only disadvantage of the situation is that it cannot be achieved once and fixed for life. If a person has lost weight but stopped following the regime, he will gain back the lost kilograms with interest. If you quit smoking but decide to try again, the habit is likely to return.

Willpower must be trained daily and constantly. Monitoring behavior, nutrition, habits, thoughts, controlling everything and doing what needs to be done - these are the main conditions for the presence and existence of willpower.

Breakdowns, abandoning something started halfway, returning to the past are signs of a lack of willpower due to a lack of self-discipline.

Goals

To develop fortitude, you must have a motive . Without a strong reason, you will use only willpower, at some point you will break down and reproach yourself more than before. Therefore, the first priority will be to set goals.

We hear about this from every word, but we write them reluctantly. A piece of paper with goals lies in some nightstand for months and forgets what its owner looks like. But this is bad: we are like an airplane that flies as long as there is kerosene, and does not know its direction. Someday the kerosene (motivation) will run out and it will fall down.

At least now write again why you need all the changes . This small investment of time will help you “lock in” the desired result so that there is no opportunity to slip away. When you write down what you want, you will receive documented evidence of your real priorities. It will “tell” how to direct events so as not to succumb to them as before.

Transparency

It’s paradoxical, but true: for normal work, it is important for most people to understand not only the essence of the work, but also its purpose. A modern director cannot be a mysterious figure descending from a mountain with tablets and hope that everyone will immediately carry out his instructions.

The more you tell employees about the processes and clearly explain the cause-and-effect relationships, the better it is for the team. Hold regular meetings to exchange information, explain the reasons for your instructions, and you will ultimately get the best out of your employees. They will understand the impact of their daily work on processes and the company as a whole.

Internal mood

Strength of spirit is an internal state. If earlier we looked at how to develop it through outside intervention, now we will look at how to synthesize it spiritually. The connection between external and internal influences will quadratically strengthen our inner core.

1 Principles

You don't have to appear super-confident, try to please everyone and be a leader. It is enough to have a firm position in life. When you act in accordance with it, you feel your “backbone”, the presence of character.

To be independent and like yourself you need:

Be able to say NO (Why should you be afraid of another person’s judgment? Why should you care about his opinion?)
Be able to refuse
Be able to defend your positions if they are correct
Be able to resist the leaders - the “authorities” of your environment
Be able to take responsibility
Stick to your views, don’t change your point of view with the breeze

To develop a firm position in life, you need to find your principles. To do this, you need to dig into your head and understand what you would like to do always and what you would never want to do . You can also analyze current behavior and take a couple of examples from there. For example, for me it's:

I strive to achieve my goal with all my might.
I don’t get lost or embarrassed in front of others
I don't touch if they don't touch me
I don’t make fun of friends to gain another person’s authority.
Other

Find your principles for yourself. They will become a framework for your behavior, a guide for your decisions. They will help you gain understanding of yourself, thereby strengthening your fortitude.

2 Cleansing

Nothing is worthy of your worries. No fear, no emotion should oppress your life. Today you are alive - tomorrow you are not, all this is empty.

While you live, you must give yourself to the fullest, because for infinity it makes no difference whether you die in a day or in 1000 years. Everything will be forgotten, everything will go nowhere. Compared to the Universe, your fear is a small thing, it will not change anything and will not contribute anything. You alone amuse yourself with it at the everyday level, when so many amazing and beautiful things are happening around you.

Get rid of all grievances, forgive, forget about the past. Become a new person who lets go of all the petty issues. Of course, in life it won’t turn out as beautiful as in the text, but at least ease your soul a little . After all, what is inside you will be the material for building strength.

3 Material for construction

As history shows, strength must be based on goodness . All sorts of Hitlers and Mussolinis were convinced of this by their own example. Their fascism could not last long enough and sank into oblivion.

It's the same in our lives. You must become a kind, pleasant and positive person, only then can you fully develop fortitude. Those around you will feel your warmth and dedication and this will help you grow faster. By filling yourself with love for the world, you will provide yourself with the building blocks of a powerful and pleasant character.

A small disclaimer: you don’t have to be gentle to be kind. Be strict, don't let others take advantage of your kindness. Let them know that you know how to give, but only of your own free will.

4 Live life to the fullest

Live the way they show in the movies. Position yourself like superman. Give it your all now.

A weak person locks himself in his closet and lives according to a schedule, when a strong-willed person gives everything he has to achieve results. If there is a Ferrari in the world, then you need to ride it. If there is Paris, then you need to visit it. You were born into this world with a 1 in 400,000,000,000,000,000 chance, and if there is something worthwhile here, you should try it.

When you work at full capacity, self-belief, confidence, and success come. The whole body is excited by the busy rhythm of life, character is tempered by endless problems, and strength of spirit increases from their solutions. Feed your soul with action and strength will come as a side effect.

To become a fully-living person you need:

Never give up
Work to the maximum everywhere (training, work)
Don't be afraid of risk
Concentrate on your desires, do not look or listen to others
Know what you want
Never be afraid of anything
Find a source of energy - books, a loved one, authority

Act as if you have already gained mental strength. Don’t try to develop it - it takes a long time, try to immediately plunge into the transformation. By changing something today, you will see results faster. Of the 100 people who read the article, be the one who doesn’t just waste time reading, but radically changes their life.

How to train willpower

It is possible to train willpower, scientists have proven this more than a dozen times. And there are a lot of people who were able to become stronger.

Discipline and self-control must take the lead in this training, otherwise a person will not be a winner. Only constant control over thoughts, actions, and monitoring of results can lead a person to the chosen goal and train willpower.

When there is an understanding of the goal and an intermediate result, the development of willpower is more productive. A person has the opportunity to focus on the changes that have already occurred and receives hope that if he continues on the chosen path, he will achieve his goal.

When there is no result for a long time, motivation disappears, and it becomes increasingly difficult for a person to cultivate willpower. At this stage, many break down, give up what they started and return to their previous behavior and previous life.

If you don’t learn to make a choice between what you should do and what you want to do, willpower will never be developed, no matter how sad it may sound. When someone losing weight doesn’t know how to negotiate with themselves and eats what they shouldn’t, they don’t lose weight. There is no willpower. When you really want to eat something, but a person stops himself, the level of willpower increases, and the level of weight decreases.

Elephant

“It’s better to eat a big elephant in pieces” (c). Daily work without visible results depresses the team. When you work with large projects and processes, the results of which will take months or even years to arrive, it is natural that employee motivation decreases. To cope with this problem there is a simple solution - divide the process into stages. Let the transition to each new stage be a small victory for your team.

Communicate this fact to every employee. Use SMART techniques and identify steps on the ladder that lead to higher goals. It may be a long way from trunk to tail, but let it be strewn with medals.

Royal chambers

The work environment has a major impact on your mood. Don't go to the extremes of Silicon Valley, where local billionaires build offices that look like kindergartens. As studies have shown, such “creative spaces” are perceived ambiguously. But sitting in a concrete basement with plastic panels is also an unpleasant experience.

Try transforming your offices into places where people actually want to spend time. Many new but conventional offices are beginning to resemble homes, with the kitchen becoming the center of office life. To create a homely atmosphere, you can set aside time and involve the team in arranging workplaces and creating some things with your own hands.

Polundra

This is a specific technique specifically for Russian conditions. The point is to periodically test your strength, that is, set goals and objectives that are much more difficult than the standard routine. Reducing deadlines significantly, delivering projects three weeks ahead of schedule, adding the most complex factors. For most companies in other countries this leads to stress and disruption, in Russia it leads to a surge in ingenuity, productivity, energy and ambition.

Employees get a chance to go beyond limits and show an unexpected side of themselves. Of course, all this will be accompanied by demonstrative complaints and discontent, but upon successful completion, an unprecedented surge of adrenaline and a rise in self-esteem are guaranteed.

Spiritual weakness

By nature, man is weak. This is described in most religious treatises. For example, according to the Bible, the flesh had an effect on man: he sinned, for which he was expelled from paradise.

As a result of a person’s spiritual weakness, not only he himself suffers. Those who are connected with him in any way have to experience mental and physical torment: family, love, industrial ties.

Weakness of spirit can include anything that harms a person and interferes with his internal development. For example, a state of irritation is a common reason for making wrong decisions. An irritated person judges other people more often than usual, is dissatisfied with circumstances and does not think about his true state, which prompts him to such behavior. As a result, he first walks in a circle and then falls down.

Triumph

“A kind word also pleases the cat” (c). Every person needs public recognition. And it’s doubly nice if the gratitude comes from a person higher up the career ladder. Correct and effective actions, timely and smart proposals, achievement of good performance - all this should be celebrated to raise the self-esteem of employees. At least in words, it’s a little better to encourage publicly, it’s a good idea to even issue written thanks.

NB: we are a business, not a collective farm, so gratitude only complements the bonus part, and does not replace it!

Zen

Lack of confidence in the future of the company, in the prospects for gradual promotion, is what causes a feeling of permanent anxiety. People always strive for a feeling of security and permanence. If you want maximum efficiency and a healthy atmosphere, then the key factors should be stability, consistency, ensured growth, predictable risks, and the availability of backup plans.

The more workers become wary of the future, the less time they have for the present. Even if you yourself begin to panic, do it quietly and unnoticed. And if everything goes well, then radiate confidence even more. Employees should periodically immerse themselves in a state of catharsis; this benefits everyone.

Upgrade

100% of your smartest and most advanced employees have their own clear career goals, and self-development is not just an empty word for them. To keep them in your company longer and motivate them to work more efficiently, always meet them halfway. Communicate with them about careers, find out their aspirations and expectations, and show them options where their personal interests and the needs of the company coincide.

Yes, many Russian employees are in no hurry to share plans due to a number of irrational prejudices, but if you try, you can find tools for additional motivation: encouragement, a new project or career growth, permission to experiment and take reasonable risks, etc. If all this leads to increased efficiency and development of the skills of a gifted employee, then this is a huge bonus for the entire company.

Confidence

Within a clear organization with clear rules, people begin to value autonomy even more. In such conditions, the lack of constant control is evidence of trust and confidence in the employee. We all want to feel in control of our own time and energy, so with processes in place, gradually loosening supervision is a sure way to provide your best employees with an increased level of comfort.

Be sure to set up a constant feedback channel to receive notifications or requests in case of difficult and unusual situations, and a platform for regular discussions. Establish general work rules, but don't hold your employees' hands all the time. Not small.

Code

Even Hammurabi realized that subordinates needed a fair, consistent and progressive disciplinary system. This is not only the organizational, but also the psychological basis of any organization. From childhood we are taught to follow rules. So if you want to build a normal business, voice these rules clearly and clearly, starting from day one.

Most employees are not at all opposed to oversight from above, as long as that oversight remains clear, consistent, and fair. Only a small part of people are ready to go against the system; for everyone else, its presence adds confidence in the future.

Why is all this needed?

The development of a person’s will necessarily forces him to pay attention to certain energy-consuming conditions. Having discovered the emergence of self-pity due to deprivation or fatigue, it is easy to notice how much time and effort is spent on this feeling. By replacing it with satisfaction from fulfilling a decision, a person increases self-esteem.

Trying to avoid unpleasant actions, it is impossible to solve the problem. In some cases, it can get worse (for example, a bad tooth). But cultivating the will, as a victory over one’s own fears, allows one to carry out these actions without much strain, solve the existing problem and enjoy the result.

Often a feeling of pride and personal exclusivity interferes with open communication. Developed fortitude, which makes it possible to adequately evaluate others, allows you to adequately relate to both their strength and their weaknesses. As a result, a strong personality gains the ability to constantly remain in a calm and confident state, without blaming others for their own failures and miscalculations. But these are precisely the traits that are characteristic of a successful individual who knows how to achieve success.