Tough Enough: Mental Toughness Explored
“Rub some dirt on it and get back out there.” Though this sort of sentiment is less common in modern sports it is still seen from time to time. With some still believing that building mental toughness requires borderline torture practices where the body is push to its farthest limits are the only methods to achieve the “ideal” mental toughness. Unfortunately, this thinking has led to just as many burned-out or hurt athletes as it has champions. Thus it is important to take a deeper look at what mental toughness is and what it isn’t.
What is Mental Toughness?
Mental toughness by definition, is one's ability to perform at a high level despite adversities that arise throughout the performance. This can be in a single game or event or it could be a career-based mental toughness that helps an athlete push through the many adversities. It is the skill that coaches love to point to because it is the one that looks the best. There is a mystique behind it, however, this mystique can often blind people to chase it in ways that do not help. This is because they ignore what goes into mental toughness.
Unlike other skills, mental toughness is not a competency on its own but a combination of other skills and is determined by how you have developed those skills. These underlying skills are confidence, motivation, resilience, focus, and stress management. Developing these will lead to greater mental toughness, but when the mystique blinds us, we ignore it and focus on what it looks like (i.e., miserable workouts, constant yelling).
According to research by Gucciardi et al. (2015), mental toughness is a multi-dimensional construct involving the interplay of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral factors that enable individuals to thrive during adversities.
So How to Train It.
To train mental toughness, we must look at the competencies that make up mental toughness, then delve into how each thing we do affects them:
Confidence - One's self-belief that something can be accomplished.
For mental toughness, this looks like the belief that the task you are doing can be accomplished (i.e., this game is winnable) as well as the confidence that you can make it through adversity (i.e., rain affects us both, so I can still win).
Motivation - The drive, desire, and passion to accomplish something.
In mental toughness, if you do not have a true desire to accomplish something when you are under perfect circumstances, it will be near impossible to motivate yourself to accomplish it when the conditions are unfavorable. The more motivated you are, the more likely you are to push through the adversity.
Resilience - The ability to bounce back after being knocked down and not let the stresses overwhelm you.
Often confused with mental toughness, resilience is more based on single events (e.g., a bad call or mistake) that you bounce back from, whereas mental toughness is pushing through continued adversity (e.g., many bad calls, several turnovers in a game, or bad weather). To a point, mental toughness is continually stacking moments of resilience and finding ways to perform.
Focus - The ability to focus on something and redirect it as needed.
In mental toughness, the mind has to stay with the event or redirect itself when needed. Either negating attempts to negatively distract the mind where the mind is trying to go somewhere else that does not help the athlete (i.e., the mind doesn’t like this challenging workout, so it is thinking about dinner or a test tomorrow). Or it is helping the mind with positive distractions where the mind is trying to redirect away from discomfort but staying with something relevant to the performance (i.e., using mindfulness to focus on the next play instead of the turnover or a runner concentrate on the person in front of them instead of the burning in their legs).
Stress Management - The ability to handle unneeded stress and reduce it.
This can involve reducing stress before a competition so that it does not affect the competitor when the performance begins. It can also mean handling the frustrations that arise during a game (e.g., handling the pressure of the crowd, relatives, or even things like bad calls).
Enhancing Mental Toughness
Now that you have a better understanding, let's examine how we can enhance these basics to make real changes with mental toughness.
Confidence: To increase a performer’s confidence, we use techniques that allow for the performer to be challenged but also make it possible for them to succeed. Then, after they do, we increase the challenge. For coaches and athletes, the easiest thing to do is to simulate pressure and adversity. Simulations where one group is down so many points or have the odds stacked against them are a good start.
Ex: Working with a basketball team, you may have them play to so many points, but one side is missing a player. Then, when the team overcomes this deficit, you may start the simulation with the one team up so many points and down a player. Stretch the adversity slowly until the players can overcome it without becoming disheartened.
Motivation: In this, the focus is using techniques that make an athlete understand their "why" to compete and push through. For coaches and athletes, one of the easiest things to do is have a conversation with your athletes and then create reminders.
Ex: Working with a cross country team the group may meet sometime in the first few weeks and discuss the goals for the team and individuals for that season. Then, have a deeper discussion on why they are in the sport. Some athletes may have deeper reasons, such as their grandma always loved running and recently passed away, while others may simply be using it to train for another sport. Once these whys are understood, they may make wristbands with their why written on them so they can look at the symbol whenever a run becomes hard for them.
Resilience: Here, we are looking to deal with adversity but focus on our reactions while also simulating adversity. Instead of just repeating what you did with confidence (many techniques will hit more than one thing), you may also add a reflection element.
Ex: Working with a hockey team, you run the athletes through an adversity drill, like in the building confidence example, having one group on a power play. Then, afterwards, you sit down with them and have them discuss how they responded and what they wish they had done better. Then, you run it again to see if they can respond in the way they said they wanted to.
Focus: Here, we are concerned with directing attention and keeping the player in the game. This skill is often underdeveloped, as we rarely put any intention into actually training it. Often, just telling people to focus doesn’t work. So, one of the easiest ways to train it is to create small examples to focus on, usually focusing on something likely boring to train them to keep their mind on something they don’t like.
Ex: Before practice one day, have the group sit in a room and draw a giant circle on a board, then have the team focus on their breath and the dot for a minute. Then the next time, stretch it to two or three minutes, and so on. Just learning to hold focus on something boring so that it is easier to do so with something that excites the athletes.
Stress Management: As a coach, you must work on yourself first to help others manage stress. Here's an example of a skill anyone can use.
Ex: Before practice or competition, take some time to run through a progressive muscle relaxation script. The idea behind it is that we cannot be tense and relaxed at the same time, so relaxing muscles helps the mind relax as well. While you can do this with your whole body, you may start with just a body part or two. Take a few deep breaths, then tighten a muscle as hard as you can and hold it for a breath or two before relaxing. Then move to the next muscle and do it again until the whole body has felt tension and then let it go.
What Isn’t Helpful
There is a lot of discourse and examples on mental toughness. Unfortunately, many of these can be misguided or purposefully deceptive. In order to avoid wasting your time, watch out for training that looks akin to torture (e.g., working at max effort for an hour with no breaks), is packaged as a one-day mental toughness fix (there is no one-day fix; it takes time to build), or tries to generalize mental toughness.
A significant issue is the misuse of military-style training. While military members are some of the most mentally tough people, there are big differences in motivation and context. For example, it is easier to be mentally tough when your life is on the line versus pushing through a rainy playoff game. Additionally, the military employs sports psychology specialists to create plans for mental toughness. If you are not employing one of these specialists, likely, you are just using someone who is trying to apply what they learned without the science and practical experience for teaching. They just survived it. Finally, the high dropout rate in many military specialties suggests a survivorship bias—those who made it were already the most mentally tough.
Now, I’ll repeat that the military generally includes people who are more mentally tough than most of the population, but just because you are good at something does not mean you are the best teacher, especially when the skill is developed over time rather than in a single session.
Summary
Mental toughness can make or break athletes. However, it has been trained as a skill rather than understanding that it is the result of training other skills to their full potential. So, if you want your team or yourself to be more mentally tough, break it down to its basics and get to work.
Studies like those by Crust and Clough (2011) have emphasized that mental toughness is built through a combination of cognitive strategies, supportive environments, and appropriate challenges.
References:
Gucciardi, D. F., Hanton, S., & Mallett, C. J. (2015). Progressing measurement in mental toughness: A case example of the Mental Toughness Questionnaire 48. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 4(2), 143.
Crust, L., & Clough, P. J. (2011). Developing mental toughness: From research to practice. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 2(1), 21-32.