You always hear the words mental toughness and mental resilience, sometimes with different tastes, but it feels like they are connected. It feels like these words are two faces of the same coin, but is it? Delving deep into my weird self I decided to look it up and what I found fascinated me, but that’s just me!

Let’s assume you are traveling very early in the morning. You had everything planned out to arrive on time for that meeting at noon. After you pass check-ins and security check you get a text that your flight is delayed for 2 hours, which ultimately means you are missing that meeting. Now before you get mad let us examine the situation.

Think about how you would feel if this happened to you? Name your feeling then think about how would you react? allow yourself to do the wrong thing no one is going to judge you (Except yourself! but that ship will sail on another day). Now examine your reaction to that and how would you do it differently taking into consideration our previous discussions

• 8 common threats to being mentally tough
• 2nd step toward mental toughness: Understand your emotions

Now, since you have done the exercise, let’s go back to our main topic. How would a resilient person react? They would probably have strong negative feelings about that delay but they would ultimately react with positive action. They would try to get another flight or call and reschedule the meeting.

Now how would a mentally tough person react?

• They would embrace the fact that this delay happened as they know that unexpected events/things happen to plans and disrupt them. It is inevitable that such circumstances appear so there is no point dwelling on it and cursing your fate and luck that these things happened to you.
• Then they would take the resilient route and react positively by rescheduling or finding another flight
• finally, they would grab the opportunity that the delay provided and do something else that they might enjoy or catch up on some work.

So as you the difference is subtle but it is simply in a mindset. You should always train your mind to be resilient so you could react, but you should build toughness into all of that so you could grab new opportunities.