3 Reasons why Entrepreneurs owe it to themselves to Build their Mental Toughness

These last 12 months have shown me that being an entrepreneur is challenging. Since resigning from my full-time job last August I would sometimes feel anxious about the future. After digging into the realities of entrepreneurs I realised I was not left alone. What helped me was cultivating an internal resilience which I label as mental toughness.

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A Definition

Mental Toughness is one’s ability to get through life’s guaranteed challenges. As an entrepreneur this trait is essential. It’s not about being stoic and burying one’s emotions, but instead learning to be resilient despite the stress that comes with entrepreneurship.

I’ll now go into the 3 reasons why I believe entrepreneurs owe it to themselves to build their mental toughness.

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Helps You to Avoid Breaking Point

Using material engineering terms, the opposite of tough is fragile (don’t quote me on that). A mentally fragile entrepreneur is more susceptible to reaching their breaking point. Everyone has a breaking point. If we define someone's “breaking point” as an irreversible state of poor mental wellbeing, then we should try our best to not reach this. However, I don’t believe breaking points are fixed as like someone’s business revenue, they both can increase with focussed efforts.

As a full-time entrepreneur over these last 12 months, I’ve realized that in order to increase my breaking point I’ve had to build my mental toughness. This has allowed me to have a healthy gap between my mental wellbeing and a potential breaking point. Acquiring new customers, managing a community and strategising bootstrapped marketing campaigns can be stressful.

Ensuring my mental toughness is increasing has helped me to cope with such stresses and I’m sure it can help you as well.

Helps You to Become a Better Leader

Entrepreneurship is leadership. These last 12 months have really taught me that if you cannot lead (either yourself, a team or a vision) then you have no chance of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Leading yourself can be difficult because sometimes we can be lazy (talking to myself as well). Leading others can be painful because people are unpredictable and often don’t fit into the expectations we put on them. Leading your vision can be tiring because you are fixated on the day to day tasks you get put off focusing on the future. By building my mental toughness, I’ve been able to better lead myself to self-discipline in the absence of motivation. By building my mental toughness, I’ve been able to better lead others by not taking to heart the missed expectations from others. By building my mental toughness, I’ve been able to better lead my vision by strategizing on long term business goals even if the short term feels unpurposeful.

Helps You to Get Things Done

At the end of the day execution is essential in entrepreneurship. You can brainstorm all you want but if you don’t build that website, speak to your audience, start that podcast or order those sample products nothing will get done.

At The Mental Savage Club we believe “mindset comes before execution”. This is not to say one is better than the other because they are both fundamental. However, in terms of the order of fruition businesses start in the mind before they become a tangible reality.

By building your mindset e.g. your mental toughness you benefit from building the self-confidence which you need in order to physically create the individual components needed for your business.

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For me building mental toughness over the last 12 months hasn’t just been a business idea, but reality. It hasn’t just been a lifestyle, but a lifeline. Through The Mental Savage Club I’ve been able to curate a community of aspiring and early stage entrepreneurs who are challenged each month to build mental toughness. As we’re all in the same boat, we are able to relate with the stresses of entrepreneurship and help each other through them. Click the link if you want to join our community because you want to build your mental toughness.