Self-monitoring is a valuable personality trait that helps people inform their behaviors and actions appropriately in any given environment. While this trait can help people “fit in” to the current surroundings more naturally, it can also be an excellent way to fortify your mental toughness.
What Is Mental Toughness?
According to Mental Toughness Inc., “Mental toughness is the ability to resist, manage and overcome doubts, worries, concerns and circumstances that prevent you from succeeding, or excelling at a task or towards an objective or a performance outcome that you set out to achieve."
Self-monitoring and then acting in a way that may go against your natural instincts is challenging and requires notable mental toughness to achieve.
What is self-monitoring?
According to the psychology experts at VeryWellMind, “self-monitoring is a personality trait that involves the ability to monitor and regulate self-presentations, emotions, and behaviors in response to social environments and situations.”
When you are self-monitoring, you are paying close attention to how you are behaving and responding to what is happening around you in a socially appropriate way.
Sometimes, self-monitoring can feel easy and natural. For example, when you are in a quiet, fine dining restaurant, you likely feel the urge to keep your voice calm and low. On the contrary, if you’re in an amusement park with friends, you probably feel the urge to laugh and talk loudly. In each of these very different scenarios, you are gathering environmental information to inform your actions – and then using that information to make personal decisions about how you’re going to speak, act, and behave.
In other situations, self-monitoring can be difficult. If you are having an argument with a friend, you may feel tempted to immediately release your frustrations by yelling at them. However, your self-monitoring skills may remind you that yelling isn’t going to solve the problem – in this case, it is better to take some deep breaths, remain calm, and keep your voice steady.
When you exercise self-monitoring in this way, it is a true sign of mental toughness. Going against your natural instincts can be challenging!
If you struggle with self-monitoring, what are some strategies you can use to get better at using it?
If self-monitoring doesn’t come easy for you, it is possible to improve these skills. Consider employing the following strategies to get started:
1. Practice using your observational skills.
Spend more time listening and observing during interactions and conversations with others rather than trying to respond. You can learn a lot about your surroundings and the people around you this way. With this valuable information, you can begin self-monitoring your own behaviors and choices to match what is happening around you more closely.
2. Engage in stepping away from situations so you can process what is happening before reacting.
In many situations, particularly shocking or surprising ones, you may feel an immediate urge to react in a certain way. However, you can engage in some self-monitoring practice by choosing to step away from the situation momentarily. This gives you a few private moments to calm down, assess the situation, and then decide a plan of action.
3. Pay close attention to yourself, especially in different social situations.
Whenever you find yourself in varying social situations, such as out with friends, in a meeting at work, hanging out at the community park, and anywhere else you find yourself on a regular basis, pay close attention to how you act when you’re there.
Taking note of specific patterns in your own behavior can help you improve your own self-monitoring. For example, you may notice that people seem surprised by the volume of your voice when you actually pay close attention – this can help you determine a course of action to modify this behavior in future situations.
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