5 Qualities of Mentally Tough People

1. They’re emotionally intelligent.

Emotional Intelligence is the cornerstone of mental toughness. You cannot be mentally tough without the ability to fully understand and tolerate strong negative emotions and do something productive with them. Moments that test your mental toughness are ultimately testing your emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include three skills:

1. Emotional awareness, including the ability to identify your own emotions and those of others;

2. The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving;

3. The ability to manage emotions, including the ability to regulate your own emotions, and the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.

2. They’re confident.

"Have confidence!" is one of the most essential pieces of advice you'll receive in life that makes no sense if you've never done it. You know what confident people look like, the advantages they get, and that it's something worth emulating. How do you get there, though?

In the purest sense, confidents is knowing what you're good at, the value you provide, and acting in a way that conveys that to others. Contrast this with arrogance which typically involves believing you are better in a particular area than you are, or low self-esteem which involves believing you're less valuable than you think. The closer your self-assessment is to that reality in the middle, and the more you behave accordingly, the closer you are to displaying healthy confidence.

3. They neutralize toxic people.

Toxic people defy logic. Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people’s buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and worst of all stress.

Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus—an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small “arms” that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons. Stress is a formidable threat to your success—when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer.

4. They embrace change.

When you get your mind wrapped around the concept of embracing change, the first tweak is to just take small steps forward. You are not going to be able to effect a full wholesale change overnight, so just find one small thing that you can do at a time, then do it and then, do another.

If you can start with an end goal, work backward and break your goal into small action steps until you can get to the very first one in the path. This is usually something that you can control or do yourself. Once you accomplish that milestone, then you can tackle another. These small steps make change palatable and easier to accomplish.

5. They say no.

A lot of people ignore this fact but it still is true: you are the person who is going to be mostly affected by the decisions you make in your life.

If you decide to do something and fail to follow through, you’re the one who’s going to be most stressed. If you say yes to a drunken party at 11 in the evening, you’re the one who’s going to have a massive hangover and a horde of angry clients the next day. If you say yes to a lifetime commitment that you’re not really happy about, you’re the one who’s going to suffer terribly in the long run.