Today we talk about mental toughness. Many people understand the concept of mental toughness, but they have a hard time using it in their everyday business practice. Many sports,  especially boxing, are metaphors for what we are discussing today. Having an involvement with that sort of activity can teach you about mental toughness, but we’re going a lot deeper than that today.

Mental toughness is closely related to being stoic. Many business owners mistake harsh words or brutal behavior for toughness, but in reality their emotions are plainly displayed and possibly making a bad situation worse. One of the best skill sets a business owner can learn is how to process setbacks and move on with business as usual.

Today’s points are:

What is mental toughness

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Hiten Shah:  Hi, I’m Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:  And this is Steli Efti. And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about mental toughness. So, here’s why I want to talk about that. I mean we’re both fascinated by I think the mental and emotional side of life in general in specific of business and entrepreneurship. One thing that I—the reason why I’ve started thinking more recently more about mental toughness is because I’ve started doing more martial arts, right? And we’ve talked about this in a few episodes that I really got passionate about MMA and, you know, kickboxing, Thai boxing and all that—

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, hurt yourself in all kinds of stuff. Yeah.

Steli Efti:  Pain and everything.

Hiten Shah:  Steli, the go-getter.

Steli Efti:  Yes. Well—one really interesting thing that I’ve noticed as I’m doing this—as I’m doing something that’s physically very challenging when I’m not used to doing that, being physically as challenged, is that there are situations where you are slightly handicapped. And when you are in combat with somebody even sparring, when it’s not just like I’m playing basketball and I’m gassed out, maybe I will slow down a little bit or I’ll pass the ball more often, I’ll just like fall back a little bit. That’s challenging but it’s kind of somewhat easier to deal with, but if you are let’s say boxing with somebody and you feel exhausted because you’re sick or you just got—you just feel some sudden pain somewhere. The mental challenge of dealing with that handicap while somebody is charging at you and punching you in the face is on a completely different level.

Recently, what I just—what happened during the same day was that I watched a big championship fight where one of the guy that ended up winning the championship fight, it turned out that when you watched him fight very early on, he seems to be exhausted even in the first round and he still went on to fight a really good fight and win and take the belt—he was not the champion—take the belt. And then afterwards in the press conference, he basically explained that he had a staph infection 2 weeks prior to the fight. Had to take antibiotics for 2 weeks all the way like 24 hours leading up to t...