Mental Toughness: The Key To Self-Improvement.

A coworker of mine showed me this podcast all about "Mental Toughness." From my experience, the basic principles are: discipline, resilience, and confidence.

Who doesn't want all of those things? This is something all of us should seek out and develop. Mental Toughness is a major contributor self-love and happiness.

Mental Toughness Definitions:

• Discipline: When motivation fails, discipline steps up - "You will not always be motivated, so you must learn to be disciplined."

• Resilience: Perseverance; sticking with your long-term plans despite distractions and obstacles.

• Confidence: Happy with who you are and not caring what other people think; not being self-conscious.

The podcast puts forth a 75 day challenge that is designed to test and build upon your mental toughness. The challenge - 75Hard - consists of 6 things to do consistently over a period of 75 days with no compromises or substitutions:

1. Follow a diet. This can be the diet of your choice, but it must be a structured plan designed with a physical-improvement end-goal.

2. You must complete two 45-minute workouts a day. One of these MUST take place outside, regardless of weather (obviously don't do this if there's a hurricane, but snow and rain are fair game)!

3. Absolutely NO alcohol or cheat meals.

4. Drink 1 gallon of water a day.

5. Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book a day - audio books don't count. It must be a book geared towards self improvement (personal or professional).

6. Take a progress picture every day.

The designer of this challenge, Andy Frisella, is very adamant that when completing this challenge you can't cheat or compromise in any way. If you do, he says that you need to start over from day 1 to truly complete 75Hard.

I'm going to give this a shot to see if I have "mental toughness," will you join me? Will you challenge yourself? You've got nothing to lose, only a hell of a lot to gain!