I'm looking for tips on being more assertive, making one's presence felt, toughening up, exploding dumb IF stereotypes, growing a thicker skin, fighting for your rights, voicing dissent, and all those great things. The topic is intentionally broad.
While this is all good stuff in the long run, I am also gearing up for an event where public discussion and debate is paramount, and everyone has really got to keep it together. Every useful suggestion will receive its very own report back on how I rocked it.
No, your mindset is all wrong. You're talking about posturing, which is the antithesis to real mental toughness.
Exhibit A:
Posturing is for people who have little or no substance to rely on. Sure, most of young American males rely on posturing, and for that reason it is, many times, a passable way of survival, but come against one person with substance and you're gonna get washed away.
So, it's up to you. You can be a posturer or you can be a predator. Posturing is less work since it is essentially "faking it" and like I said, it will "work" many times which gives many people the illusion that they're "making it", hence 'fake it till you make it'. Just realize that in reality it's a house of cards.
Imagine two guys in a bar, challenging each other and bumping chests. These guys are posturing. If a fight were actually to occur, it would only be to preserve their appearance. Why do you want to be one of those guys? The only way to be universally believable (which is the key to winning a debate, no?) is to truly not be out to prove anything.
To become a predator, just throw out the whole notion of success by acting and search for the truth. Merely having the desire to look for it will give you a consistent means of traction by which to work towards equally true success.
Just to give you a glimpse at my mindset, call it predatory game-theory if you will... at times I will often posture and play the game to blend in. This does 2 things, mainly it reduces the amount of times I actually get in a fight (which not only alerts everyone that I am a real threat, but I actually don't stand to gain anything from a fight since I have nothing to prove). If I do actually have to fight (be it physically, mentally, verbally, whatever) they often don't even know where to begin to understand why they lost so it's usually a short and conclusive failure for the other person(s) which is beneficial for the same reasons as the first motive.