To excel in life, to be the best in your chosen field, to fulfill your dreams and goals, to be happy, it takes more than hard work. Being mentally and emotionally strong, especially when hardships, challenges, and obstacles come your way, is what will help you obtain happiness, success and greatness.

1. Be Grateful

Each morning before your feet hit the floor, state three things you are grateful for, and every day it should be something different.

2. Be Willing To Change

The definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

If what you’re doing isn’t working, stop doing it and make the necessary changes. However, you must recognize that nothing stays the same, so the way you have always done things may have to be altered to get a different result. If you’re trying to lose weight and you do the same exercise routine for months, your body will get used to that routine and you will stop dropping pounds. Change the routine and keep the body guessing.

     3. Be Mindful

Before you look at any electronic devices, e.g. cellphone, laptop, to check out your social media pages or TV for the news or weather of the day, take 30 minutes to watch motivational and empowerment videos or mediate, do yoga or a light workout, or read a book.
These alternate choices will prepare you mentally to take on the world and be able to deal with what comes your way during the day.

     4. Believe In Yourself

“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—you’re right.” – Henry Ford

The whole world, including your family and loved ones, may not believe in you, but who cares. As long as you believe in yourself that’s all that matters. Forget people who talk bad about you or who doubt your skills or talent. What other people think isn’t important. It’s what you tell yourself that matters most. Despite the challenges you may face on a daily basis, it is your firm belief in your dreams and goals that will help you get through and achieve.

Several celebrities and millionaire business people started off at rock bottom, but they believed in themselves despite what others said or what was going on around them.

Tyler Perry became homeless as he launched his first play and paid out of pocket for production. Not many folks showed up. For the next six years, he lived in his car or in run down motels, who had mainly crackheads for guests. Today, he is a TV and movie entertainment mogul and most famous for his “Madea” movies. However, Perry is also a successful businessman. He is the only African-American to own a movie and TV studio which rests on 330 acres of land in Atlanta, GA.
When Ed Sheeran was getting started as a singer he started on the street corners singing for money. After he lost his place to live and had to bum around on friends’ or strangers’ couches. When things got really bad he had to sleep on the Central Line train in London or outside Buckingham Palace. Now, Sheeran is a Grammy award winning singer, who recently made a cameo on the hugely popular TV show “Game of Thrones.”

Even though both of them have stated in interviews that there were times when they wanted to quit because things seem hopeless and they got tired of struggling every day, the bottom line is they believed in themselves and kept pushing forward to success.

5. Take Responsibility

It is imperative that you take 100% responsibility for the successes and failures in your life. Stop blaming the world and everyone else for your life and crap that has happened to you. Mentally strong people look at what they did to cause their life to be what it is. What choices or decisions, even if they’re bad ones, did you do, and then take responsibility. If you stayed in a toxic, unhealthy relationship for years, which caused you not to fulfill your dreams and goals that was your choice. If you stayed at that job you hate, the one that was so stressful you got physically sick, that was your choice. If you never went to college, or back to college, so you could get a better job or change career paths, that’s your choice. If you had a kid and you weren’t ready financially and now you’re struggling, that’s your choice. You make decisions every day of your life, make better ones and own up to the times when your choices, behaviors or decisions sucked. Don’t beat yourself up about it, just make better choices in the future.

  6. Be A Student Of Learning

Each day is an opportunity for you to learn something new. Whether you read books, look at motivational and empowerment videos online, take classes or go to lectures, seminars or workshops, mentally strong people, who are striving for greatness, are always seeking an opportunity to learn because they view it as an essential part of continued growth.

    7. Be Positive

Are you the half glass empty or the half glass full type of person? Do you view the world, and your life, as if everything is going to hell in a handbasket or do you find joy even when life gets tough? Adopting the mentality of being positive will help you have an optimistic attitude, which is important for your mental and emotional health.  Being negative, whining, bitching, and moaning not only affects you mentally, which can cause depression, but physically. It creates stress in your body, which makes you sick, weakens your immune system for colds, panic attacks, strokes, or heart attacks.   To help you reduce stress take up a hobby you love – swimming, yoga, painting, dancing. Anything to help you relax and unwind.

8. Forgive and Don’t Hold Grudges

If you are a mentally tough person you know you don’t have time to waste time, and that means you don’t bother with holding grudges, which will drain you mentally and emotionally. When you forgive someone who has done you wrong, you do it for you, not them. All that anger and toxic energy inside you will only rot your body and mind, but it will cause you stress. Not saying you should forget when people have done you wrong, nor are you condoning their actions, but forgive them in order to have joy and peace in your life. Obviously, if this person, or people, has done things to hurt or harm you in anyway, you may need to cut them from your life.

Also, mentally strong people know that if they are the one who screwed up and hurt someone else they need to be the first to say, “I’m sorry, please forgive me.”

9. Cultivate Strong Relationships

The five people you spend the most time with are a reflection of you and you will eventually become like those people. If all your friends smoke, and you don’t, eventually you will. If your friends don’t exercise, you won’t either. If your friends want to hang at the clubs every weekend, you’ll be right there with them drinking and eating bad foods.  The closest people you interact with on a daily basis influence your actions and behaviors. You must weed out toxic and negative individuals who are holding you back, who add little value to your dreams and goals, and who hurt you by pulling you backwards. It’s okay when you’ve outgrown people and you might have to let them go.
Surround yourself with go-getters, innovators, people who dream big, individuals who are living a physically healthy life, and people who can help you learn and grow.

Now there are exceptions to this rule. A person can be around positive, healthy, and influential people and he still never gets his act together. But what that means is this person’s friends will eventually stop being their friend and will move on to other like-minded people.

A side note – friends, can also mean family members.

10. Don’t Waste Time Having Pity Parties

Everybody has lived through pain in their lives. No one is immune to shit happening to them. So, you are not special. Stop wallowing in self-pity, don’t keep count of who did you wrong and all they did to hurt you. Stop tripping that you’ve had the worst life ever, because believe this - there are other people who’ve had it much worse than you. When you stay in that self-pity mode and relive the pain over and over each day, it weakens your mind and body. That mental frame of mind also limits your ability to solve problems and see positive solutions. See Rule #7.

It’s futile to wallow in your problems, exaggerate your misfortune and keep score of how many hardships you’ve endured. Whether you’re struggling to pay your bills or experiencing a serious health problem, throwing a pity party only makes things worse. Self-pity keeps you focused on the problem and prevents you from developing a solution.

Hardships and sorrow are inevitable, but feeling sorry for yourself is a choice. Even when you can’t solve the problem, you can choose to control your attitude. This goes back to Rule #1.
Each person has roughly 70,000 thoughts a day. The ultimate goal is to transform your way of thinking in order to become a little better each day with a strong mind and emotions that are healthy and positive.

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