Just how easy is it to develop mental toughness?
Developing mental toughness is not necessarily easy, otherwise everyone would be mentally tough and you would not be reading this! This book has described how you can become more mentally tough following a structured approach to enhancing each of the four pillars. This process does not always involve continual forward progress. None of the people described in the Chris Andy Scott Emma Studies in the earlier chapters found their development straightforward and easy. For a couple of them, they may actually have taken a step backwards before they made any significant progress. The process sometimes involved delving deep within to raise their awareness and understanding of what was happening to them and how they needed to change their thoughts, attitudes and behaviours. This sometimes caused confusion as they sought answers that were not obvious. They progressed through a series of stages, shown in Figure 8.1, that first of all involved acceptance of the need to become mentally tough. They
