Mental Toughness – American Trait

A hardworking, young conservative in her 20s remarked recently that the problem with her peer group was an “absence of mental toughness.” She got me thinking.

What is mental toughness? Why is it less common today? Historically, we valued being independent-minded, self-reliant, making no excuses, solving problems for ourselves, “standing on our own two feet,” earning things, not having them given.

True, life has become far easier, government bigger, less hardship, but is there more to the missing element – to our softness, the absence of mental toughness?

Americans, from our earliest days through the 1800s, the early 1900s, the Depression, two World Wars, and waves of internal division, admired each other’s grit and mental toughness. We worked to cultivate these in ourselves, an ability to push through.

Going back, George Washington echoed others of that time, who had fought a war for freedom, sculpted a republic from the wilderness: “The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people is found in the right education of youth.”

So, it begins with valuing manliness, virtue, and education, a certain integrity of self. It starts in youth, training by example, modeling hard work, not coddling, and then expecting big things of our youth, until they expect them of themselves.

What else? In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his “Essay on Self-Reliance.” “True North” hardly gets clearer than his advice to rely on yourself, learn to trust yourself, in this process become stronger, resilient, confident, a beacon for others.

Emerson, in his pithy way, wrote: “Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to the iron string.” Nor should you let others do your thinking. “Nothing is at last sacred than the integrity of your own mind.”

To Emerson, if your values were intact, or as Shakespeare wrote for Henry V, “if your mind is in the trim,” anything is possible. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

So, what Emerson would think of our current cultural mess, our long slide toward mediocrity, conformity, consensual self-censorship, and gutlessness. He would think us weak, soft of mind, witless herds of sheep, intellectual and moral cowards.

He would think, as the young conservative said, we have lost our “mental toughness.” He would talk to us of education, continuing to learn – and to teach – all our lives, never giving up, even when older, even when pressed, especially then.

In one short swath, he wrote: “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse… that no kernel of corn can come to him but through his toil…bestowed on that plot…which is given to him to till…None but he knows what…he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

So, there it is: We must be tough enough on ourselves, look ourselves in the mirror and ask, what can you do, what is expected of you by you, and how will you know if you do not try? This was the key to America’s early success, always has been.

We thrive only when we resolve to try, which invariably involves failing, getting back up, restoring our compass, summoning courage, effort, and the will to prevail.

By the early 1900s, America was being led by President Theodore Roosevelt, an intrepid, unalterably optimistic, insatiably daring fellow who learned life lessons in Maine’s backwoods and never forgot them.

Here, too, were lessons in mental toughness, not learned from a book or listening to others, but by doing, daring, nearly dying, always trying. His life themes recur over and over – in books, how he led, how he lived.

“Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Does it get plainer than that? Let no moment go by, nor assume something better happens without effort.

Again, how is that done? What is missing today? He would say: “With self-discipline, most anything is possible…It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed…Believe you can and you are halfway there.”

What else? Engage with people, work at it, understand them even if misunderstood, never give up on them, pray, work at it, engage. Why? Because success is not just dependent on you, but on engaging with others.

Wrote TR: Beyond keeping your courage and integrity, “the most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”

Why? If success is about daring, engaging, so is life. “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” Be your best, then give it. 

So, why do we suffer an absence of “mental toughness?” We undervalue it. We have forgotten its importance to ourselves and to our kids. They deserve to know we do value “mental toughness.” If we show it, they will.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!