What is mental endurance? And why do you want it as a talented professional?
Mental endurance is the mental ability around sustaining a difficult effort over time. It also includes knowing tips and tricks for managing the pre- and post-hard effort periods for best results. These include pre-event preparation, understanding how to scale your effort as you grow, and how to evaluate and post-talk yourself into positives after the effort. This type of mental endurance assumes you’ve already got (or are building) the skills you need. You just need the advanced mind game to run with them and take them farther.
For athletes, mental endurance involves the ability to persevere and perform over long, hard events, such as an Ironman triathlon or marathon. For professionals, mental endurance includes the mind game that gives you:
the ability to conceive of something that goes a new distance for you, such as a difficult project;
hanging in there through the most difficult parts, including production or criticism;
understanding the unknown, how to finish and bring it to fruition;
managing the post-event closeout for maximum benefit from the experience (i.e. positive growth).
The advantage to a talented professional is being able, as we’ve said, to eclipse the competition. When you have greater mental endurance, you are better equipped to understand and leverage the inner mechanisms that let you handle larger, more complex, and more ambitious projects.
Mental Endurance Concept #1: Recovery
Advanced mental endurance includes two important aspects. The first is ensuring your mental endurance has a dedicated recovery period. Mental endurance is actually only one half of a cycle that consists of the endurance effort. Its opposite is just as important: relaxed recovery.
Sure, you’re going longer, harder efforts -- but after that you need to retreat into a pressure-off time while all your new gains consolidate.
When you have greater mental endurance, you are well equipped to understand the inner mechanisms that let you handle larger, more complex, and more ambitious projects.
Better mental endurance is NOT about burning the midnight oil every night in some mad dash, staying at your desk until 10 PM each night to prove you only need three hours of sleep and can work the rest. That’s only a great recipe for one thing: burnout.
Rather, you NEED to cycle into relaxation and relief to stay healthy. This gives you perspective, allows integration of the hard effort into your mind and body, and provides the contrast you need to restore yourself. You must give yourself dedicated relaxation and recovery after a long hard session, or you won’t be able to sustain endurance or performance over time, professionally or athletically.
Mental Endurance Concept #2: Maintaining Willingness
A second element of building advanced mental endurance is maintaining willingness. This means placing a premium on keeping your interest and performance keen by managing your work or training sessions wisely.
If you really don’t feel like doing the day's session, try to find an alternative. If you’ve already gone the distance, don’t let your ego try to layer on further effort just to show off (even just to yourself!). Don’t EVER let yourself get sour on a project by repeatedly using brute force or toxic elements such as guilt, shame, blame and punishment to drag yourself into it.
Pay attention so you can learn to distinguish between those times when you just need to focus until you finally get into the flow, and those times when you really are damaging your willingness by forcing the effort. If you find your interest repeatedly flagging, give yourself a deep-dive reflection on why this might be happening (too much? wrong project? someone else's goal, not yours?).
Feel it out carefully and you will soon have a more refined awareness of when to push through it and push onward, and when to stop, do something else, and come back next time with new interest.
Breaking your willingness with too much force and pushing means you just become sour. You start to hate the project and its efforts. It's neither fun, nor productive. It just starts to not be worth it any more. You definitely won't get good performance after that.
Learn It, Use It, Go Farther With It
The more you know about your own top game of mental endurance, the more you can create the ability to go farther with all your skills, knowledge, daily energy and projects. Learn what limits are mental barriers, which you should listen to, and what makes up your real requirements for the natural cycles of rest and recovery between good, focused efforts.
Know that you know better how to go the distance -- how will you take yourself farther today?
Keep Growing,
Katherine Lieber coaches and trains on self-leadership, limitlessness, energy health, inner power, and healing the wounded professional to recover core vision, joy, and high-powered performance in the workplace. She is the founder of TitaniumBlue Leadership. Be limitless - be the hero in a world that needs you.
© 2022 Katherine R. Lieber & TitaniumBlue LLC
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