Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

You experience a moment of weakness when you feel pain, fear, fatigue, boredom, temptation, adversity, or trauma. It’s in these moments when you are most susceptible to forming bad habits. Therefore, if you can learn to manage these moments, you can prevent yourself from letting a moment of weakness turn into a moment of regret. Furthermore, if you can learn to master these moments, you can propel yourself to achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible.

So, what does it take to manage and master moments of weakness? MENTAL TOUGHNESS!

Mental toughness is not something that happens by accident. It’s a character trait one must earn by successfully completing activities that require mental toughness. In the process of completing these types of activities, one develops their mental toughness by learning the behaviors that support discipline, self-control, and the ability to act courageously in a moment of weakness.

Over time, these behaviors then become habits in your mental muscle memory. What’s more, if you must continuously think about how you “should” act with mental toughness, you aren’t mentally tough yet. You may be on your way there. However, once you are truly mentally tough you don’t think about how you “should” behave.

By definition, thinking “I should” is not an act of mental toughness. Instead, mental toughness comes from saying “I can”, “I will”, “I must” and “I did”. In fact, the “I should” mentality is the first thing one must eliminate on the path to mental toughness. It’s a limiting belief and mentally tough people replace limiting beliefs with neutral, if not positive thoughts of themselves as well as their present, past and future.

This is what it means to have mental toughness. Mental toughness is the ability to continue to have neutral and/or positive thoughts in moments of weakness and then use those thoughts to guide behavior. It’s not that mentally tough people don’t have moments of weakness. Instead, mentally tough people behave with discipline, self-control, and courage in those moments.

How to Practice Discipline, Self-control, and Courage to Prepare for a Moment of Weakness

To behave with discipline, self-control, and courage you must be proactive. This means you must intentionally put yourself in situations that cause you to exercise these traits for practice. To take this proactive approach, I suggest using the “4Cs of mental toughness” as a framework.

1. Challenge: Proactively seek out challenges and look for opportunities that will require you to overcome pain, adversity, fear, etc. For example, you could push yourself to train for and then run a marathon.
2. Commitment: Proactively put yourself in situations where people depend on you keeping your promises and staying consistent over long periods of time. For example, volunteer for something long-term in which people in need depend on you.
3. Control: Proactively immerse yourself in high pressure situations that cause your emotions to run high and then practice staying under control in those situations. For example, you could do improv or standup comedy in front of a live audience.
4. Confidence: Proactively develop your confidence by seeking opportunities to prove that you can perform under pressure and influence how others perceive you being “clutch”. For example, you could host dinner parties ( or some other type of event) at the last minute. You could also use improv or standup to practice this as in the previous suggestion.