Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
Do you possess mental toughness? What does that even mean?
If you asked athletes and coaches to define mental toughness, you’d likely get many different answers.
Mental toughness is a type of psychological resilience in the face of challenges and adversity. Mental toughness has been shown to predict success in many areas of life including sport, education, and the workplace.
Why is this important?
In 1987, researchers Gould, Hodge, Peterson and Petlichkoff found that 82% of the coaches they interviewed rated mental toughness as the most important psychological trait for a wrestler’s success.
However, only 9% of those coaches said that they were successful in consistently teaching their athletes mental toughness.
Jones and Moorehouse (2007) created a framework for mental toughness that is based around 4 main attributes of mental toughness.
- Motivation
- Coping with pressure
- Concentration
- Confidence
If you just scanned through your personality and realized that you don’t possess all four of these attributes, don’t worry. You don’t need to be born a certain way to be mentally tough, but you may have to put in some hard work.
A paper by Robert Weinberg, a professor at Miami University in Ohio, points out that building mental toughness comes down to input from two different influences.
- A deliberate attempt to train specific psychological skills
- The environment in which the learning and training takes place
Read the full paper by Robert Weinberg titled, Mental Toughness: What it is and How to Build It.
This remainder of this article is going to highlight the various tools that you can use as an athlete or as a coach to develop the four attributes needed for mental toughness.
1. Motivation
Having the motivation and drive to succeed is a key component of mental toughness.
Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have their place in developing and maintaining mental toughness. However, individuals with high intrinsic motivation have been known to show more excitement, persistence, interest, and confidence than individuals with high extrinsic motivation.
Coaches can have a large part in athletes’ motivation by creating environments that support successful experiences. A balance between enjoyment and challenge is the perfect mixture to keep an athlete interested and confident without having them become bored or discouraged.
Tool for Motivation: Goal Setting
Setting specific goals using something like the SMARTS framework (specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, timely, self-determined) has been shown to increase and maintain levels of motivation in athletes.
On top of making sure to select challenging goals, it’s also important that athletes set different types of goals. The best athletic results come when athletes set various performance and process goals for every outcome goal they have.
(Read another article I wrote about goal setting).
2. Coping with Pressure
Coping with pressure is likely the first trait that comes to mind when most people think about mental toughness.
Most athletes feel as though this ability to deal with pressure and anxiety comes mainly from experience. This typically comes in the form of real competitive experience, but can also from competitive stressors used in training to simulate real competition environments and situations.
One nasty, yet effective, trick that some coaches have is to run a physical conditioning session before the regular training session or practice. This way, athletes are forced to work under stressful conditions and learn to perform under pressure.
Tool for Coping with Pressure: Cognitive Restructuring
Through a process of rationalizing thoughts, cognitive restructuring allows athletes to replace negative thoughts with positive ones.
The process involves 3 steps.
- Identify triggering thoughts and situations
- Develop a thought-stopping cue
- Replace negative thoughts with positive ones; refocus
(Read another article I wrote about cognitive restructuring and reframing).
3. Confidence
Confidence is key, and it is one of the most important traits an athlete can possess. However, it’s also one of the most fragile.
As much as it’s important to get used to dealing with pressure and adversity, confidence is developed through environments that emphasize mastery, enjoyment, social support, and friendly competition.
Once more, coaches have an important role to play in helping to create that kind of positive environment for their athletes.
However, another way to make sure an athlete is confident in regards to mental toughness is, again, through physical conditioning. There’s nothing like gruelling roadwork or exhausting laps in the pool to toughen the mind and harden the spirit.
Tool for Confidence: Imagery
Athletes report imagery as being their main tool for increasing and maintaining mental toughness, citing a variety of reasons including increasing one’s drive to achieve goals, staying focused, and building self-belief.
Coaches can incorporate imagery into practice environments, or athletes can use imagery on their own, either before and after training sessions or closer to competition. Likewise, video analyses can help athletes view past performances and remind them of their successes, or allow them to model after the successes of others.
(Read another article I wrote about how and why you should use imagery, and another article I wrote about how to improve your imagery practice).
4. Concentration
The athlete is the first person responsible for his or her concentration.
In training, it’s important that the athlete self-monitors their engagement and tries to identify whether or not they are simulating the attentional focus required of them in a real competition environment.
Coaches can structure training so that athletes are forced to make quick decisions, or are forced to overlearn a particular skill or process, both of which increase the athlete’s attentional focus.
Tool for Concentration: Self-Talk
Athletes lose attentional focus thanks to two common distractions: attending to past events, and attending to future events. Using self-talk can help athletes regain and maintain their focus.
Instructional self-talk is used to remind the athlete of specific information while performing a skill. Motivational self-talk is used to help athletes find or maintain their ready state, or to keep their mind clear during a stressful moment of competition.
(Read an article I wrote about how and why you should use self-talk, and another article I wrote about how to speak clearly to yourself using self-talk).
Do You Possess Mental Toughness?
At the end of the day, you can use psychological tools to improve mental toughness. As said earlier in this article, you don’t need to be born a certain way to be mentally tough, but you may have to put in some hard work.
These 4 tools – goal setting, cognitive restructuring, imagery and self-talk – will help.
(Read another article I wrote about how to use tools from sport psychology, whether you’re an athlete or not).
Looking back through this article at the attributes listed, ask yourself: do you possess mental toughness?
If not, what are you missing, and what are you going to do to fix it?
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