It is easy to find friends with similar interests – Facebook is full of groups for trail runners, cyclists, ocean rowers and mountaineers. If you take part in a sport, there is a group for you. Look for a like-minded meet-up group near you to train and hang out with. If not, organise one yourself and post on the group and people will come. Be careful about meeting up with strangers one on one, though.

The “five people” saying rings true, though in reality you are influenced by far more people. Finding a team, training group or online friends who are used to pushing themselves will help cultivate the grit attitude.

Develop a growth mindset

You can work under two assumptions – either that we are a static product of our innate abilities or an ever-changing product of our environment and actions. The first is known as a fixed mindset, the latter is a growth mindset.

If you adopt the second assumption, then your possibilities are endless. The benefits to your grit are twofold. Firstly, by acknowledging that you can change and grow, you will see what you can work on to improve your grit by adopting new practices and continuously putting you mind under pressure.

Secondly, the mindset itself helps you become gritty. A growth mindset by definition needs to acknowledge criticism, failure, success, praise and more to facilitate change. These growing pains mirror grit, as your mind accepts the lows and highs and keeps pushing in the face of both.

Conversely, having a fixed mindset will only result in you giving up easily. After all, if your potential is capped, how would you be able to push beyond your limits and why would you bother trying?

Reframe failure, avoid being NAF

We either win or we learn, we never fail, or so another inspirational saying goes. It is OK to feel sad and disappointed with failure. In fact, trying to deny and bury our emotions is unhealthy. Do not layer your disappointment with guilt for feeling disappointed because you think “gritty people” do not get upset. Everyone does.

How to build your mental strength for tackling endurance sports

But you should actively learn from failure and add it to your grit fuel for next time. Examine what went wrong and remember the feeling of regret.

However, do not become bogged down with the issue. Ensure that failure was an event, and not a cloud that follows you, or it will eat away at your grit until there is nothing left.

In sports psychology, there are opposing mindsets: need to avoid failure (NAF) and need to achieve (NACH).

In simple terms, a footballer with a NAF attitude will approach a penalty thinking, “I cannot miss or I’ll lose the match for my team”, but one with a NACH attitude will think, “I can make this, then I’ll win the game for my team”. In all likelihood, a NAF player would avoid taking the penalty altogether and hand over the responsibility.

In reality, few people are one or the other but a combination of both. You should focus on being NACH – picture the success of finishing your event, the gratification for getting over the line despite wanting to quit.

But do not discard the usefulness of learning through failure and remembering the feeling; just make sure it does not consume you as negativity will undermine you grittiness.

Practice

Having grit is easier said than done. Knowing all the right triggers and mindsets are of little help when your joints ache and your muscles burn.

It takes practice. When you are training, practice drawing on the above advice. Even if you are not on the verge of quitting, focus on reminding yourself that your mind can grow and it is growing as you train.

Remember past successes and picture the feeling at the end of your training session. When you need to call on these tools in the race, they will be there at your disposal.

Hoping to wake up with grit because you know the sports psychology behind it is like hoping you will be able to dead lift twice your body weight just because you studied biology. You need to train.