Chris Pierce By now you’ve already heard a little bit about mental toughness and what it means for sales reps. But do you know how mentally tough you are? The best path to improvement is to know where you’re starting, so we’ve made a foolproof 20 question quiz to help you find out your current level of mental toughness, what it means, and ways to change it.
What is mental toughness?
As a quick recap, mental toughness is the ability to control yourself, your skillset, and your success even under difficult and stressful circumstances. For a more complete guide to mental toughness, check out our overview blog on it now.
How do mental toughness and sales work together?
Your skillset is limited to your ability to control yourself. People don’t rise to the occasion, they fall to their level of training. This is why it is so common to see professional athletes perform at surprisingly low levels when they’re capable of more. It’s not because they don’t have the skillset, it’s simply because they have lost control of themselves for a moment. The same is true in sales. Reps learn the steps. They practice and train for a wide variety of situations, but lose control of their thoughts, emotions and ultimately their skillset, when things don’t go exactly to plan thus defaulting them to their lowest level of training.
Why mental toughness matters for you
It’s important to understand, mental toughness isn’t a personality type. Mental toughness is a set of skills used strategically to enhance your ability to consistently perform. This means that wherever your mental toughness is currently at, you can enhance it. Just like your biceps, the more you exercise them, the stronger they get.
Before you dive right in to building your mental toughness, you’ve got to know where you’re starting from. Mental toughness consists of 4 major categories that we’re going to assess. And we’ll use the acronym MACE to help you remember them.
- Motivation
- Attention
- Confidence
- Energy
Understanding your level of control and alignment in each of these areas will help you to know where to start.
Here’s how it’s going to work, answer each one of our 20 questions and then add your answers and compare them to the categories listed below. If there is a certain area that you are lacking, you will know where to begin.
Answer each question by rating yourself, 1-5.
1 = Not at all. 3 = Sometimes. 5 = Always.
Total your score:
- 20-40 = Not mentally tough. Needs immediate help.
- 41-60 = Low Mental Toughness. Needs improvement.
- 61-80 = Average Mental Toughness. Do you really want to be average?
- 80-100 = High Mental Toughness. Keep it up.
At the end of the day, if you are not reaching your potential, then you need to build your mental toughness. If you are currently executing all that you need to in order to reach your goals, then don’t fix what’s not broken. Keep on keeping on. But if you’re not doing all that you can to reach your potential, then reach out and let’s start building your mental toughness.
If you scored low in a certain category, here are some simple strategies for improvement:
#1 Motivation:
If your motivation or discipline is low or driven in the wrong direction, you need to first get crystal clear on what you want, why you want it and what you must do to get it. Then set up your environment to ensure that you do those things. Motivation without discipline and a supporting environment will soon be dead.
#2 Attention:
If you struggle to focus on what is most important or struggle to maintain your attention and get distracted easily, you have 2 options, and I suggest you do both: Eliminate distractions when you need to focus (if you have an iphone, use the focus tools) and develop a system/practice for shifting your focus back to where it needs to be. It’s ok to drift so long as you have an effective strategy for bringing your attention back.
#3 Confidence:
The belief in your ability to complete a task. Most people over complicate confidence and heavily connect it to the outcomes they are working toward. Bad outcomes, low confidence. Good outcomes, high confidence. It doesn’t have to be this way! Confidence should be connected to your efforts and identity, not your outcomes.
#4 Energy:
There are 2 ways to think of your energy: 1. Like a battery or 2. Style. Both have the power to destroy or enhance your effectiveness and consistency. You have the power to control both the amount of and style of energy that you have, but many people allow their energy to dictate their mood, actions and efforts. Which is backwards. Learning to channel and control your energy is a key indicator of mental toughness.
If you want to build real and lasting mental toughness you’ve got to start with knowing where you’re at right now.
Let’s keep in touch
After taking that quiz and reading my tips about ways to improve, hopefully you’ve already thought of some new goals to start building up your mental toughness. But if you still feel like you’re looking for more answers or would like additional help, don’t hesitate to reach out. Shoot me a DM on Instagram @chris_pierce and look out for the next exciting blog we’re releasing about mental toughness in sales.
