Mindful Tips To Train Your Mind Endurance and Focus
Remember the time when you had a job interview in just a few minutes? You were so confident, calm, and prepared that you didn’t even budge at the thought of sitting in front of the panel trying to defend why you are the perfect candidate for the job. And just a moment later, you had your appointment letter in your hand. Compare it to the one that you had before the successful one. You were still the perfect candidate for the job and yet, it was beyond your control to stop sweating and being extremely nervous. What do you remember to be the outcome of this one? In one word, “disappointment”. What do you think was the primary difference between the aforementioned two interviews? Simply put, it was your brain.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of us realize the importance and even practice training our bodies throughout the week, and yet we fail to realize the importance of doing the same favor for your mind. For the most part, it wouldn’t even dawn on you that your physical performance is premised on two distinct features namely the physical training as well as the mental training. Being a part of the competitive generation, the high-pressure scenarios which require the best of your cognitive capacities or perhaps your physical performance are destined to be plenty throughout your life. Under such circumstances, you can either choose to be the one who fails to unleash his true potential due to a nervous breakdown, or you can start working on your mental endurance to prepare you better and increase your chances of success.
If you have chosen the latter, congratulation on being the wiser one. Your journey begins with the top strategies which are known to be effective in enhancing your mental endurance. Read along and find out these tips which can accomplish the task for you.
A Surge Of Positivity
Believe it or not, self-fulfilling prophecies do exist. [restrict] The point is, your mind is a powerful place and whatever it is that you are feeding into it has the power to affect you in a powerful way. Think about it, if you look at your face in the mirror every morning and tell yourself that you will never be great, it is almost given that you will never be great. Not because you are not, but only because hate has a way of murdering your faith.
Therefore, in order to improve your mental endurance and make sure that your mind doesn’t bail on you in a stressful or high-pressure scenario, it is important to feed it with a surge of positivity. For instance, if you are going for an interview this morning, sit with yourself in a peaceful environment and repeat a personal mantra in your head that reassures that you are indeed the perfect candidate. Tell yourself repeatedly that you’ve got this. Remind yourself that you have what it takes to win over the job. Do it the next time you are confronted with such a situation and see for yourself the way it dramatically changes your mental capacity to handle the pressure.
Clear Up Your Head
Let’s revisit the reason why you can’t handle pressure and fail to perform up to your potential under such circumstances. More often than not, it is a lack of mental clarity. The moment negativity starts to consume you and fill your head with all of these troubling and disturbing thoughts is the moment when you will find yourself sweating about the anticipation of what is yet to come.
As evident, the simplest strategy to enhance your mental endurance, therefore, is to clear up your head. You must learn to show such thoughts a way out of your mind. To accomplish that, the ancient Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness can help a great deal. 5-minutes of meditation before a high-pressure event can relieve you of all the stress and anxiety to activate your A-game. It enables you to bring the best version of yourself to the foreground and push all of the doubts and fears way back into the background. Is there a more productive way that you can think of to get the most out of your time?
Planning Is Important
Here’s the thing; there’s a difference between being mentally strong and being overconfident. You could be an expert at something and yet it won’t shield you from having what can only be termed as a “bad day”. If Roger Federer can lose to Kevin Anderson, if Sachin Tendulkar can be sent back to the pavilion on the first ball, if Zhang Jike can lose some 100 places in his international ranking, mishaps can then surely happen with you as well.
For mental endurance, it is important to have a fallback plan. What is it that you plan on doing if things went south? How would you learn from such an experience and improve in the long run? How would you find your focus back to remind yourself that one failure is not the end of the world? Planning for setbacks enables you to re-center yourself that is a prerequisite of boosting your mental endurance.
Similarly, spontaneity plays a crucial role as well. There is a good chance that pressure will mount despite all of your efforts to keep it under control. Having a strategy in place to tackle it in the very moment can pave the road to mental endurance under such circumstances. Your strategy could very well be something as simple as repeating a personal mantra, deep breathing, progressive muscle contraction, or mindful listening/visualization as mentioned before.
The Vicious Cycle Of Lack Of Sleep
Did you know that your mental endurance has a lot to do with your sleep patterns? The dilemma, however, is that every time you are anticipating a high-pressure event, the first thing that you are likely to lose is your sleep. It’s like a chain of events. You are nervous about an interview in the morning, you lost sleep over it, your mental endurance takes a hit, you fail to perform up to your potential in the interview and end up losing the potential job.
A good night’s sleep is imperative to promote your mental endurance for a high-pressure scenario. In the example stated above, even if you are currently feeling calm and poised about it during the day, leave some room for finding it hard to fall asleep in the night. Go to bed earlier than you usually do so even if you take your time in falling asleep, you would still be able to get sufficient hours of sleep to wake up with a recharged mind that is prepared to endure what comes its way.
Practice Makes Perfect
Lastly, the more you practice, the better are your chances of accomplishing the goal of improving your mental endurance. Despite being powerful, your mind works on simple principles. When it is confronted with something new and novel, something that hasn’t been experienced before, it starts to shy away. On the other hand, with greater exposure to any given kind of a scenario, it manages to retain and endure the event.
As evident, practicing can help a great deal in strengthening your mental endurance. But how exactly do you practice being confronted with a high-pressure situation unless it finds its way to you itself, right? Wrong. There are simple techniques that you can use to practice mental endurance. For instance, you can find the “Timed” analytical quizzes on the internet to serve the purpose. While the analytical part of it will strengthen the cognitive component of your mind, the “Timed” part will actually build endurance. It’s a win-win; a comprehensive strategy that covers all crucial elements of impeccable mental performance.
Conclusion
Be it your cognitive performance, your physical performance, productivity, or creativity, all of it relies greatly on your mental endurance. This is perhaps the very difference between “great” and “ordinary”. An average person can perform optimally in a generic scenario. But it is only the great who manages to do the same under pressure. If you are someone who would like to be great, therefore, and destine yourself for success in all domains of your life, investing your time and effort into giving a boost to your mental endurance would be a commendable idea.
We have put all the information that you needed at your disposal so now you really don’t have any excuse to not work on enhancing your mental endurance. The best part is that the tips we have mentioned are fairly easy to follow and practice that rules out the requirement of having a coach. You can practice these all by yourself at any time, anywhere, any place. Start small; spend a few minutes of your time every day on building your mental endurance. Once you begin to see the results, the motivation and inspiration to continue will surely follow. All you have to do is give it a go, to see for yourself. [/restrict]
