Protect Your Castle Rule: Creating Mental Toughness

“No one can enter your castle without your permission.”

It’s hard being a manager, you have to hire, fire, have difficult conversations and deal with backlash of making the tough decisions. In the world of selling you can’t control what the prospect is going to say, and that combated with an average day filled with rejection & stresses can make for very mentally draining situations. So, use “your castle” as your safe spot and your identity. No matter what happens in the outside world, no one can effect your self esteem or your self concept without your permission.

Success in this lies between your ears: you can talk yourself in/out of anything. There are three main concepts regarding this:

1. We have to control how the outside world affects us (you have control over this)
2. While you’re out there, wear a spacesuit (if stuff does happen, let it bounce off you!)
3. No after-burn or reach-back. Meaning, once you’re in the castle and you review all the things that happened to you, don’t live in the past & dwell. Look forward, not back – that’s where you need to shift your focus to!

But what if some of that negative self-talk makes its way into the castle? You have to first acknowledge that it’s happening & that it can’t control you. You must then acknowledge and remain aware that behaviour controls attitude – once you start behaving differently, your mind will catch up with you. You just need to tell yourself “I can control this. This is in my sphere of influence, and I’m not going to let anyone else control what I’m doing.” Once you take accountability and are responsible for it, all the ripples disappear. It’s not necessarily about staying positive, but rather realistic, there is a lot of adversity out there & you are going to fail – it’s about how you deal with those failures that counts.