Mental toughness is a skill like striking a soccer ball, hitting a fastball, or maximizing your sprint technique –the more you practice the better you get. It is often confusing to me how we spend so much time on skill development and so little time on the mental side of training.

Don’t get me wrong, skill trumps most things in athletic endeavors and job performance, but the intangibles of our self-image and whether we see problems or solutions is often what separates the good from the great.

Let’s look at self-image for a moment. Self-image governs how successful any individual becomes because it motivates and shapes our work efforts – notice I said effort! Think of self -image like a thermostat. If you set the thermostat at 72 degrees and the room temperature drops to 70 degrees, the thermostat sends a message to the heater to warm the room. If the room temperature gets warmer than 72 degrees, the thermostat sends a signal to the heater to turn off. All day the thermostat is working to keep the room temperature the same.

We are the same way…… we can neither out-perform nor underperform our thermostat (self- image) for long. This is why it is so important to set our self-image, our personal thermostat, high enough to achieve our life goals. Set your self-image too low and by definition, you will underachieve because your mind won’t call for the motivation to achieve more.

Self-image is viewing yourself to assess what strengths and weaknesses you believe you possess and what you believe you are capable of achieving. Henry Ford said it best… “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right”.

So the question to ask is how is your self-image? When you talk to yourself, are you consistently telling yourself you’ve got what it takes to achieve your potential, or are you dwelling on your mistakes? Are you problem focused or solution focused? It is easier to think about the problems than about the good fortune and abundance we have. Dr. Daniel Amen, a physician who specializes in brain health, describes this as having “ANTs” in our head. These are Automatic Negative Thoughts, and we have to work hard to re-focus so they don’t deteriorate our self-image.

We all need to create the vision for our self-image. Take 30 seconds every day to visualize who you want to be and how you want your life to turn out. This simple step… this simple action…. this simple effort (there’s that word again) will dramatically increase the likelihood of achieving your potential.

In the next article we will talk more about being solution focused vs. problem focused and how this affects our everyday performance.