02.01.2025

The Discipline of Success: 5 Steps to Build Mental Toughness to Ensure You Stay in the Fast Lane of Business Growth

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When I started coaching back in 2018, mental health was just becoming a ‘thing’. I’d decided that year to take my ‘side hustle,’ which was personal training, online – helping busy executives with their weight and primarily physical health.

Over the years, as I started to understand more about mindset and the psychology behind long lasting behavioural change, it was a natural step for me to broaden out the scope of my practice. But in those early days, a number of the guys I was coaching weren’t used to talking about their own mental health. There was still a stigma amongst many men that airing your thoughts or feelings somehow made you weaker, or less competent.  And therefore the ‘manly’ thing to do was to cover them up, have a stiff upper lip and crack on.

Only thing is, one thing I learnt was that the emotions themselves, they don’t go anywhere…

A 2014 study of 701 people from across Europe and East Asia mapped emotions being felt, ‘stored’ in some cases in different parts of the body.  Interestingly, people from across continents reported feeling the same emotions in the same areas, despite differing cultures and geographic locations.

Fast forward a few years and something significant started to happen.

The mainstream media began to ‘normalise’ mental health, particularly in men.

Guys started feeling more comfortable and less isolated talking about their feelings. The men I was coaching were no exception and I found my coaching more and more shifting into real depth. I began talking to guys about issues at home, problems in work, anxiety, depression, and relationships… some even started opening up to me talking about their sex lives, suicide attempts and darker subjects.

I took a distance psychology degree and took a number of mental health courses. But nothing helped my own development of being able to help guys in this space as being in the trenches actually coaching them. For me, helping these guys get healthy, now extended far beyond just exercise and looking at basic physical health markers. Each year I moved deeper and deeper into the mental and emotional side of health.

And so I started to divorce from perhaps the mainstream and approach mental health with perhaps a different outlook than some.

For me mental health wasn’t about just sitting around talking about your feelings.

I wasn’t a councillor and the increasingly senior and successful guys I was working with needed more than to just not feel as ‘anxious’ or ‘depressed.’ They needed to forge mental toughness. So with a polarising combination of strength and empathy, where I would ensure guys felt heard, understood and put a metaphorical arm around the shoulder. I would then often, where necessary, tell them to ‘f*cking pull their socks up’ and drop their victim mentality. These guys were facing increasing and consistent levels of responsibility and stress without an appropriate mental toolkit to cope.

It’s not that they needed to bury their deepest thoughts or feelings and equally ‘just’ sitting around talking about them wasn’t something that I saw people benefit from either. They needed effective strategies to fast track processing on their own terms.

So with that in mind, here’s 5 strategies I’ve used over the past 6 years to help coach mental toughness for high-performing men.

The aim for many has been to remain balanced, perform at your peak and stay in the fast-lane for business and career growth.

Build a Multi-Layered Support System

Men, in my opinion, need other men to talk to about stuff. But they need to feel that they have support and a depth of connection with their spouse or partner. My position as a coach formed a third layer.

By building up a multi-layered support system like this, so that you have various outlets, these guys were able to more readily discuss and process their thoughts and emotions.

Reframe Your Mindset for High Performance

When I use the term mindset, what I’m really talking about is the cognitive thought that drives behaviour or your inner most predominant narrative.

Essentially what is the voice in your head saying?

Take imposter syndrome for example. Imposter syndrome is sometimes something that happens to people.

The reframe here is embracing a high performer mindset. I defined that with one client as “making accelerated decisions, having the courage to drive through transformative change (sometimes with healthy tension), being able to readily say ‘no’ and the ability to delegate anything that was non-critical to his role as CEO.

Through consistent reflection, application and focus – over time this CEO was able to build additional layers of mental toughness and all but banish imposter syndrome.

Develop Emotional Resilience Through Controlled Challenge

If thoughts are the language of the mind, emotions are the language of the body. And so mental toughness and emotional resilience go hand in hand in my opinion.

The way I approached this was through controlled doses of suffering…

(Bear with me here for a moment!)

Being able to conquer your emotions in a 3 degree ice bath and remain in there for 10 mins has in my coaching experience an element of transferability to being able to keep a cool head when you’re presenting to the board and being grilled on the validity of your newest strategic approach.

I helped some clients put this on steroids by layering in a physical or mental challenge, with the same philosophy. Clients I’ve coached have completed their first marathon, pushed up to ultra distance, 200 mile cycles, climbing mountains and white collar boxing matches. Some have balanced MBAs with a C-Suite role and a young family.

All of these require focus, balance and an element of suffering, which breeds emotional resilience in the longer term. Essentially suffering in controlled situations, makes ‘normal’ life easier.

Clarify Your Vision and Align with Core Values

Dr. J. Demartini states in his research conducted for the last 40 years that an organisations productivity is directly proportional to the collective clarity of its vision.

But from a personal perspective the more unclear you are on where you are going in life and your career and the less conscious your are of your values (what is important to you and why) the lower your mental toughness in my experience having coached 120+ people from all over the UK and US.

I’ve found a number of effective tools here, from building mind movies, to a daily journaling vision based exercise and my favourite – The Walk of Wants – a guided visualisation exercise to map out the next 3 years of your life.

Celebrate Small Wins and Reflect on Growth

The curse of the high performer is that they can focus on the 1 time they failed, rather than the 9 times they succeeded.  This can lead to burnout and lower self esteem.

Celebrating the small wins along the journey and looking back at what has been achieved along the way builds mental toughness because it builds in a success mentality and allows you to analyse areas for improvement, but in such a way that it’s based around continual growth and development and not binary success or failure.

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