Wiktionary
a. Not distracted from actual facts by enticements, intimidation, or sentimentality; steadfast in one's actions, commitments, beliefs, etc.
WordNet
adj. facing facts or difficulties realistically and with determination [syn: unsentimental]
Usage examples of "tough-minded".
Baru, called the Serpentslayer, and as a result, Akee was considered very sympathetic to the Kingdom, a quality not universal among the independent and tough-minded hill people of Yabon.
He had been something of a scourge in his time, all right -- a tough-minded, hell-raising boy wonder who had taken over a floundering Midnight Detective in 1942, when he was twenty-three years old and a 4-F asthmatic, and kept it -- and more than a dozen other detective, Western, love, and air-war pulps -- alive during the war and for nearly a decade afterward.
And then it was in terms of editing by similarly tough-minded Heralds, and only to ensure accuracy.
It's hard-driving, competitive, confrontational, tough-minded - whereas women, they say, are more accepting, consensus-building, and uninterested in challenging conventional wisdom.
The elders might be pacifists, but that didn't mean they weren't tough-minded.
This is why some of the world's biggest and most tough-minded corporations, once the living embodiment of presentism, today hire intuitive futurists, science fiction writers and visionaries as consultants.