What’s up, everyone! 👋🏻

Today’s post was inspired by the show Special Ops I’ve been watching with my family.

Can mental toughness be taught?

The short answer is yes—but only to a point.

I was on a podcast a little while ago and was asked how difficult sales is compared to learning to surf. My opinion? Sales. Always. There’s a constant, unreasonable amount of failure you have to endure as a salesperson. And you have to get comfortable with it if you want to be successful.

Mental toughness, resiliency, grit—whatever you want to call it—can be developed. You can take someone at a level one and get them to a three or four. If someone’s naturally a four, you might be able to push them to a six or seven. But not everyone can reach the highest level, and that’s okay.

Some of this comes down to life experiences. People who’ve been through hard things—whether it’s personal struggles, health challenges, or any other uphill battle—have a reference point they can draw from. When they hit a wall in sales, they think, “Cold calling? This is nothing compared to what I’ve been through.”

But if you don’t have that kind of anchor? It’s much tougher. Not impossible—but tougher.

The Big Mental Shift You Need

One of the hardest parts of sales is separating what you do from who you are.

Sales is personal. You pour your heart into a pitch, give it your best shot–—and then you get rejected. It’s easy to feel like the rejection is about you as a person. But that’s not true. They’re not rejecting you; they’re rejecting the product, the offer, or maybe just the timing.

The faster you can learn to make that mental separation, the better. If you don’t? This career will chew you up and spit you out.

So, How Do You Build Mental Toughness?

Here are some things that have worked for me:

1. Reframe Rejection: Instead of seeing rejection as failure, see it as relief. Every “no” was nobody I needed today.
2. Find Your Anchor: Think about something hard you’ve overcome in life. Hold onto that. Use it as proof that you can do hard things.
3. Get Comfortable with Discomfort: The more you expose yourself to tough situations—whether it’s cold calls, difficult conversations, or big goals—the stronger you’ll get. It’s not pain, it’s simply discomfort; and that is temporary.

Sales isn’t easy. It’s not supposed to be. But if you can learn to embrace the grind, handle the failure, and keep paddling back out, the wins feel that much better when you catch them.

You’ve got this.

— SL