We All Have Batman’s Utility Belt―Let’s Use it Every Day.

When the fictional superhero Batman fights crime, he usually ends up in a death-defying situation that seems utterly hopeless. Just as Batman appears to run out of logical options, he quickly removes something from his famous utility belt, which then saves his life. The utility belt is a staple in Batman’s crime-fighting efforts. We all would love to have a utility belt. But since we know Batman is an imaginary character, we cannot believe that a “real” utility belt exists. However, it does. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Each of us is equipped with a big-time utility belt. It’s not around our waist but in our minds. It’s called mental toughness.

To join the 12% club of accomplishing our resolutions this year, we need to improve our mental toughness to keep the promises we have made to ourselves. When we get into a difficult situation, we too can become Batman-like allowing the utility belt to save our day. To make our belt the strongest, we must reinforce the muscles that help us enhance our mental toughness. If we practice these four things daily, our mental toughness will become even stronger than Batman’s utility belt.

1. Positive self talk. As soon as we wake up, reinforce the positives in your life. Use the three P’s when obstacles occur. Nothing is permanent; nothing is personal, or pervasive. Reprogram your mind with more positive words. Write down a positive word before the day starts and make that word your word of the day.

2. Focus on doing one project with great detail before taking on something new. When you set your daily goals, never worry about how much you do ― instead focus on how well you do it.

3. Learn to love discomfort. Become comfortable when things become stressful, hard, and uncomfortable. The path towards strengthening your mental toughness means embracing failure. Winston Churchill once asserted, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” When we do this, we become mentally tough.

4. Plan an attack for handling the afternoon fatigue. Never give in to being tired. Vince Lombardi once said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Mental toughness becomes harder to generate as the day comes to a close. Since we know this to be true, we need to understand that after 3 PM, we get tired both mentally and physically. We must set goals for the afternoon. We must make sure to avoid the temptations that prevent us from performing at a high level. We must use positive self-talk while embracing the discomfort to refocus our attention in the afternoon. If we know, we tend to lose our focus as the day progresses, then the harder we work in the afternoon, the stronger our mental toughness becomes.

Be mentally tough in 2020. Mental toughness is the ability to see the bright side of a hopeless situation. Adversity is an experience, not a final act. Let’s all strive to sharpen our mental toughness belts. And like Batman, when we get in challenging situations, reach into your mind, using the best utility belt ever made.

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