Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience

Executive Education launched the first offering of the Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience program in 2018. After a successful first cohort that took a deep dive into self awareness, the program is next scheduled for a Spring 2019 launch. The Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience Lunch and Learn session, hosted on January 25 with Sloane Dugan, offered a glimpse of  how you can strengthen your mental toughness as a leader. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, developing personal leadership practices to navigate the more cognitively and behaviourally complex leadership challenges is critical to future success.

Sloane began the session with exploring a few basic questions – ‘what is your story, can you tell your story?’ And ‘what is this chapter of your life; when did this chapter start and when will it end?’ Sloane emphasizes the importance of the these questions, when linked with mental toughness, because learning to tell your story and identifying which chapter you are on is the first step to strengthening your mental toughness. 

Sloane reflected on his own journey of mental toughness, when he talked about his childhood where he was raised in a family where everything was considered a project – with a beginning and an end. Sloane states that his professional and academic career progressed keeping the ‘project management’ approach in mind, however, a life-changing trip in 2013 that took Sloane on a pilgrimage in western Tibet around Mt. Kailash, was the turning point to this approach. Despite having prepared for it physically, Sloane did not take into account his mental preparedness and the fear of finishing last. This experience, along with his next trip to Spain and research around athletes who were mentally tough, encouraged Sloane to further investigate a framework for mental toughness. He has since used this framework at an undergraduate level, graduate MBA level, in his private coaching programs as well as the course he has built for Executive Education - Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience.

While referencing Harvard Business Review’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) tool, Sloane aims to legitimize certain notions in the environment. He states that when VUCA conditions occur, we often think that things have gotten ‘out of control’ in the environment, when however, things have gotten out of control internally within ourselves. This further legitimizes that the world and business is volatile and complex, where increasingly you are given/choose to take on new projects and responsibilities and it is not unusual to experience VUCA conditions. Sloane reaffirms that, “It is important to feel these conditions as an example of a misalignment between how you are seeing the world and how you function in the world. The more you ask and engage in stretch goals, the more you would experience anxiety and the conditions of VUCA – and that is the paradox. Pain can often be an indicator of what is going on and what you really want to do.”

The Mental Toughness Framework© highlights a more systemic, integrated approach to strengthening your existing level of mental toughness.  The six components of the Mental Toughness Framework are interdependent among themselves and includes elements such as:

1. Establishing your set point (your values and beliefs)
2. Engaging with your supportive network (learning from each other)
3. Visioning your purpose and meaning (identifying your purpose)

Answering a question from a pre-event survey on ‘the connection between time-management and mental toughness’, Sloane states that time-management may be an inefficient way to gain mental toughness. Instead, he recommends ‘energy management’ or a sense of ‘purpose management’. According to Sloane, almost 95% of people have a finite amount of ‘psychic energy’ and where we put that energy depends on our ‘purpose and value statement’. The more senior position you hold, or the more power or money you have, the more people would want a piece of your energy. Sloane states that, “If you really do the highest level of mental toughness, there is no limit on energy.”

Sloane concludes that there are conditions of VUCA in the world and if you feel out of sync or alignment with what is going on, it is part of the human condition in the 21st century. 

The Haskayne Executive Education Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience program provides a more in-depth exploration of each of these components of the Mental Toughness Framework.  The program runs April to June, 2019. To register for the program, click here. 

Also, if you are interested in receiving a copy of Sloane Dugan’s Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience Workbook shared during the workshop, please click on the link below and provide us with your contact info; a member of our team will send you a copy. Receive your copy of Strengthening Mental Toughness and Resilience Workbook by clicking here.