In the latest episode of Transform Your Workplace, expert Scott Mautz reveals the secret to exceptional leadership: mental strength. Mautz, an award-winning, best-selling author and dynamic speaker, teaches about the six core mental muscles that all leaders must develop and shares practical insights from his book, The Mentally Strong Leader. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this episode offers valuable takeaways on cultivating the habits needed for mental strength and achieving peak performance. Tune in to discover how you can harness this leadership superpower to elevate your workplace and inspire your team.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Scott Mautz is an award-winning, best-selling author and dynamic speaker renowned for boosting peak performance and fostering employee engagement. He serves as faculty at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education and, as an instructor on LinkedIn Learning, Mautz’s courses have been taken over 1.5 million times. He is the author of The Mentally Strong Leader, where he delves into the crucial role of mental strength in effective leadership.
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A LEADERSHIP SUPERPOWER
In the realm of leadership, there’s a distinct line separating those who merely hold leadership titles from those who truly embody exceptional leadership. Scott Mautz, a renowned leadership expert, says that mental strength is what makes that distinction. But what exactly is mental strength, and why is it so crucial for effective leadership?
Mautz defines mental strength as “the ability to regulate your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors so that it’s a productive outcome.” This regulation is critical, especially in the face of adversity. “It’s managing internally so you could lead externally,” he explains. This internal management is not just about knowing the importance of regulating emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, but about the challenge of consistency in these areas.
In a study involving over 3,000 executives, our guest discovered a compelling insight. “Thinking of the highest achieving organizations you’ve ever been a part of that overcame the most obstacles, what were the attributes of the key leaders in that organization at that time?” he asked. Remarkably, over 91 percent of participants described the same profile: leaders who were mentally strong — even though the respondents may not always have been aware they were characterizing mental strength. Here, we can see that mental strength is not just a desirable trait but a critical one for leadership success, or as Mautz calls it: “the leadership superpower of our time.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Six Mental Muscles
“Mental strength is made up of six core mental muscles. In that massive study I conducted, when people were describing the most excellent leaders who achieved in the face of adversity, they were describing leaders flexing six core mental muscles, which are fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision-making, goal-focused, and the ability to message in a positive manner. […] And we have seen over time that the good thing is that the opposite of ‘mentally strong’ is not ‘mentally weak.’ You can become mentally stronger by building on the baseline of strength that you already have. You just have to know which one of those core mental muscles to work out.”
Where to Start
“In the book, [there is] a Mental Strength Self-Assessment — 50 questions — that you can take that will help you discern your overall mental strength score. […] You can discern which muscle is right for you. So to your question, the area that’s right to work on is what may not come naturally to you, and even if you take this assessment and you score at the top level tier, […] that doesn’t mean you can stop working out those muscles, right? If you just stopped going to the gym, you would become flabby. So you have to keep going back to the gym and, in general, it’s good to keep a balance across all of them to your question. But most importantly, it’s important you develop your own customized mental strength training program to work on those mental muscles that are right for you that may not come as naturally to you as an individual.”
Building Good Habits
“You can’t strengthen much of anything without habits, right? […] First of all, habit-building science teaches us that if you want to build a habit, you need repetition. […] Point number two: […] You can’t build a habit if you don’t know how to get started, and many habits never form because people don’t take the right first small step in generating momentum to move along that path towards changing their behavior. In The Mentally Strong Leader, the 50+ tools are in there to build a variety of mental muscles. They all have a section called ‘Your First Small Step,’ so you know exactly the first step to take. The third point of habit-building science is built into the book, which is what you do in moments of weakness.”
Self-Acceptance and Confidence
“On one end, you’ve got self-acceptance. On the other end, you’ve got the Imposter Syndrome where you don’t feel like you belong. You don’t feel like what you’ve earned is really something that you deserve. Your confidence arose, and then in between, there’s this whole chasm of things that can happen to us. We can start to seek approval. We can begin to chase approval instead of authenticity. We can focus on winning love rather than giving love. Negative inner chatter can start to dive in and erode us slowly. We can begin to think like we’re not enough. And in The Mentally Strong Leader, I encourage you to think about the following statement: […] ‘You are enough, and you don’t have to take on everything by yourself.’ And when we allow these little wisps of lack of self-acceptance to eke in, […] our confidence has no choice but to exit stage left.”
Rolling the Dice
“People aren’t bold because they don’t understand the rules of risk-taking. So some of the best leaders that I see are the boldest. One of the ways they flex that mental muscle is by establishing the rules of risk-taking for their organization. They lay out right up front, here’s what a good risk looks like, here’s what a bad risk looks like. This is what happens when you succeed with one, when you fail with one. Here’s who needs to approve what level of risk and so on and so on and so on. If you can spell out the rules of risk-taking, you’re sending the right signals that risk-taking is welcome — just do it according to these rules. And when people understand the rules, they’ll step up and roll the dice.”
The Mental Spotlight
“Think about a spotlight hitting the stage, and at the top of that spotlight — where the beam is at its narrowest — that is where the focus is narrow because you’re deciding what you need to focus on. And most of us don’t have a problem with focusing per se. We have a problem with deciding what to focus on. In a theater, when there’s a spotlight, the environment around you is usually dark, so you have to start with that. That dark theater environment represents the fact that you have to stop multitasking.”
“And the thing you need to focus on is that narrow beam of light that’s up at the top. you have to give yourself some permission to bounce within that beam. […] If you catch yourself not focusing on the thing you’re supposed to be focusing on — being outside that beam of light — that’s okay. Just pull yourself right back into that beam of light until you ride the beam of light all the way down, maintaining the intensity and the sharpness of focus, forgiving yourself for when you bounce back and forth within the beam until you get to the point of the stage where it’s at its roundest. This is where you’re surrounding your work, completely engrossed in a state of flow.”
LEARN MORE
Get access to Scott Mautz’s free self-assessment by clicking here. Find out where you stand on mental strength and get a series of questions and prompts that will help you get the most out of the book, The Mentally Strong Leader.