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My Path to Developing Mental Toughness
On May 4th, 2011, I almost died.
That experience, which I’ve written about in another post, opened up a emotional and mental can of worms. I became an anxious, traumatized, tense, fearful person. The aspects of my personality that I’d shoved down deep inside of me welled to the surface, and I was unequipped to deal with them and their consequences.
To begin with, I tried everything I could think of to get my Pandora’s box closed again. I wanted desperately to shove my anxiety, anger and distraction back into the shadows of my mind. But they wouldn’t go. Unfortunately, the only tool I had to deal with these problems was to shove them further down into the box, and when the box disappeared, I was left with a problem for which I knew no solution.
How do you make uncomfortable emotions go away when you don’t have a box to shove them into?
What I want to do in this article is to share my experience with becoming a more mentally tough and resilient person, and hopefully help others who may be in the same boat.
Some people seem to be, by nature, mentally tough. They seem to be unflappable in the face of adversity. I’m not talking about people who exhibit no emotions, or people who give off the facade of toughness while secretly crumbling under the weight of repressed feelings inside…
