Mental strength at work “The only easy day was yesterday”
“The only easy day was yesterday!” This is a motto of the American Navy Seals, and it has a double meaning. Firstly: Today will not be an easy day, but I will master it. Secondly, when I get up tomorrow, today’s effort will be yesterday’s walk.
During Navy Seal training in the USA, I experienced for myself what mental strength can achieve. The Seals believe that when everything inside you is screaming for you to stop, you have only reached 40 percent of your potential.
During one of their exercises on the first day, the group did push-ups. After six minutes, the first knees touched the ground. On the seventh day, it took 40 minutes for this to happen. Had our muscles or our strength increased sixfold? No.
We had learned to replace the “can’t” in our heads with a mental focus that allowed us to surpass ourselves.
During this training, I learned on both a physical and mental level that extraordinary results require extraordinary performance.
Success only begins when we move from comfort to pain.
Many managers are not aware of this, or they do not live by it. It is therefore not surprising that their employees prefer to watch from their comfort zone as others pull the chestnuts out of the fire. To understand that progress only comes about by consciously accepting discomfort, you don’t necessarily need the Navy Seals charter. Sports training experience is all you need. Strength, endurance and willpower only get stronger through targeted overload.
For this reason, I think most team-building events are a waste of money and time. Just because you like each other more after therapeutic archery doesn’t make you work much harder or more productively together. Because the nicer you are to each other, the less you challenge each other and also want to protect the others from the necessary pain.
What really welds people together is actually overcoming real boundaries that previously seemed almost overwhelming. This doesn’t have to be fun – and it often isn’t – but it will generate pride. To do this, we have to have great confidence in ourselves and know how to mentally turn almost superhuman challenges into opportunities and divide them into stages that are just about bearable.
In terms of organizations, my experiences, in which I had to push my physical and mental
limits, have shown me less new things than what I had previously assumed. In management, too, it is always emotions that either drive us forward or hold us back. It is part of the maturing process of every person, every team and every organization to develop mental strength that will greatly advance the individual, the team or the organization.
We can only do this if we consciously choose discomfort over the comfort zone and welcome, rather than avoid, the growing pains that inevitably come with proudly reaching new levels of performance.
The will to mature – the basis of extraordinary achievements
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: If you don’t have a clear “why”, i.e. no clear reason, no deeper meaning as to why you should deliberately make yourself uncomfortable, you don’t even have to take part! In Navy Seal training, a good third of participants dropped out after just four hours. After 18 hours it was half and after 24 hours three quarters. The reason was not their physical condition, it was their attitude, their lack of conviction and their lack of will.
This will requires a deep conviction. Why am I doing this? What is my mission? Clarify
this for yourself, your team and your organization: What is the purpose behind our actions? This is the only way to develop the mental strength that is essential for
exceptional performance,
- to overcome one’s own often narrow-minded and pain-avoiding ego.
- not to react with a “can’t”, but to see: What success is there and how
can I help to achieve it? - to criticize concretely and constructively – courage.
- to rationally and emotionally turn a threat into an opportunity.
- to face challenges with full discipline while you are still able to act, instead of running away from the hunter like a headless deer in a competition until your strength runs out.
I’m sure you can think of even more examples. In addition to mental strength, true maturity requires clarity of one’s own values, which give the energy generated meaning, orientation and a power that connects people.
Progress
