Mental strength is the most important quality any entrepreneur, businessman, or human being for that matter, can possess. Without it everything is difficult, happiness is evasive and life is mostly confusing.

Your capacity to view things in a way that allows you to be positive and enthusiastic, regardless of your setbacks or the challenges you face, can be the defining characteristic between merely getting by in life and achieving true success.

I am a firm believer that anything in life worth having can be obtained through specific and direct effort towards its attainment, and creating mental strength is no exception. Building mental strength will be vital to your success. Below, I have listed a few ways to develop your mental strength.

Here are 8 tips for creating mental strength:

1. Find the positive within every situation

Say you’re twelve months into your first start up. You’ve poured all of your savings into this venture and worked tirelessly day and night in an attempt to build your business and work towards making a profit. Unfortunately things haven’t gone to plan. Your product isn’t selling as well as expected and your consumers just aren’t taking to it as well as you’d hoped.

Right now you have two choices: You could get angry at your customers for not taking to the fantastic product you’ve created, and tell yourself that things just aren’t going to work out for you and your business or you could seek the positive in the situation by using it as an opportunity to learn what your consumers dislike about your product and how you can improve it to better suit their needs.

Seeking to uncover the good amongst the bad in your life is an important and necessary skill to have when developing your mental capacity, and not to mention you’ll be more content and happy when you do.

2. Read books. Lots of them

What better way to learn to enhance your mental strength than to learn from the experiences of mentally strong people. If you want to accelerate your progress, read, read and read some more. Why bother spending your whole life figuring things out through trial and error when you can learn lessons from those who have travelled before you?

Here are 5 great books for improving your mental strength:

• How Successful People Think – John C Maxwell
• Unbeatable Mind – Forging Resiliency and Mental Toughness – Mark Divine
• Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude – Napoleon Hill
• Elite Minds – Stan Beecham
• Relentless – From Good To Great To Unstoppable – Tim Grover

3. View failure as a prerequisite to success

Failure is merely an opportunity to learn so that you can do better the next time. Nobody is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and you will fail at many things before you die. Being mentally strong means viewing failure not as the end, but merely a stepping stone on the way to achieving your goals. When you fail, learn the lesson and move on.

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.” – Franklin D Roosevelt

4. Learn to be present

Most people spend the majority of their lives either reflecting on the past or fearing what the future might hold. Being in this mental state is dangerous as we’re rarely satisfied with what we’ve achieved or where our lives are at currently. This forces us to dwell on the past and live within our dreams for what we want tomorrow, instead of focusing on living our lives today.

Try taking up Yoga, learning to meditate and simply try and focus on the ‘now’ and restrain your mind from wandering from the task at hand. This means staying off your phone while having a conversation with someone, and focusing intently on your duties throughout the day.

5. Take responsibility for everything that happens to you

We all know of the salesmen who blames the economy, his environment, his employer and anything but his own work output for not achieving his targets. The under developed mind has a tendency to look elsewhere when things go wrong, instead of looking inside for the reason for it’s failure.

One of the most important steps when working towards creating mental strength is to take responsibility for every outcome in your life. Don’t blame anyone or anything. Work out what you could have done better, learn from it, and make better decisions in the future. It is not until we learn to accept complete responsibility for the outcomes in our life that we can expect to come close to achieving our mental potential.

6. Realize that regardless of where you’re at in your life, you can always learn something new

To develop a strong mind, you have to have an open mind. Regardless of your position or experience you can always learn something new. Make an effort to network and meet new people, and seek to learn everything you can from whom you come into contact with. Never be so confident in your own knowledge that you are ignorant to learning new things or understanding different perspectives and points of view.

Make an effort to ask questions to whom you come into contact with, seek to view the world from their point of view, and be open to new perspectives. An open mind and a fierce desire for continuous education is a prerequisite to building mental strength.

7. Exercise and eat well

Creating a peak metal state is impossible without caring for your physical self. Your brain’s capacity is greatly increased when you exercise regularly and consume nutrient dense, high quality foods.

Mild dehydration or simple nutrient deficiencies developed through not consuming the foods your brain and body requires can lead to headaches, poor attention and ‘cloudy brain’, just to name a few. Not the characteristics you’re looking for when striving to develop mental strength. Think of it like this – do you think a high performance motor vehicle is going to perform to its capacity when it’s filled with poor quality fuel? I think you get the picture.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” – Jim Rohn

8. Learn the art of resilience

Without a resilient mental fortitude, huge success stories such as Starbucks, Harry Potter and Disney would be non existent. You’ll find it common practice for those who achieve great things to suffer through adversity, failure and setbacks in order to become successful. Your ability to be resilient and to never give up, regardless of the obstacle or challenge in your way is not only important, it is absolutely necessary to build your mental strength and achieve anything worthwhile in your life.

Instead of viewing failure and adversity as a hindrance to your efforts, expect it, plan for it, and make the best of every situation.

Which one of these do you think is most important and why? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!