Mental Toughness
What is mental toughness?
Mental Toughness can be considered as "….having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to (a) generally, cope better than your opponents with the many demands (competition training, lifestyle) that sport places on the performer and (b) specifically, be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, confident, and in control under pressure (Jones et al, 2002, p209).
What is a mentally tough athlete?
Why is mental toughness important?
How to build mental toughness?
What can the coach do?
Mental Toughness can be considered as "….having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to (a) generally, cope better than your opponents with the many demands (competition training, lifestyle) that sport places on the performer and (b) specifically, be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, confident, and in control under pressure (Jones et al, 2002, p209).
What is a mentally tough athlete?
- Mentally tough athletes tend to be highly competitive,
committed and self-motivated.
- They have the ability to cope effectively and
maintain concentration in pressurized situations.
- They maintain persistence when
improvement does not happen immediately and retain high levels of self-belief
even after setbacks (Crust and Clough 2011, p.22).
Why is mental toughness important?
- Mental toughness is
considered by coaches to be one of the most significant aspects to performance
excellence. (Butt, Weinburg & Culp, 2010, 316).
- Having greater mental
strength to stay on course while dealing with different stressors in athletics,
can be a great benefit to the student athlete in regards to improving
positive attitude and creating a better training outlook during the season.
- Avoiding giving up might help athletes reach higher level goals and produce greater outcomes in athletics.
How to build mental toughness?
- Mental toughness can take a long time to develop.
- Mental toughness can be cultivated with success or easily attained levels of difficulty. Initially, it might be important for an athlete to start out with small goals or easy beaten levels of difficulty. After 'athletes' succeed with less challenging tasks, the coach can build practices with more challenging tasks.
- The athlete will have a certain level of belief that they can achieve a slightly higher goal.
- It is important to slowly build on this concept, because when athletes are thrust in to situations that exceed their level of likely success, they might easily get discouraged and fall back into a belief level that is not so mentally tough.
- Working with athletes on their mind set and building stronger self belief might be important for building mental toughness.
- Athletes who don't find early success might not believe in what the coach is encouraging them to do ("it doesn't work") or may not believe in their own abilities.
What can the coach do?
- The coach can play a large roll in the initial development of mental toughness by creating situations for the athlete to have a positive learning experience.
- Put the athlete in drills or on a team with peers that are in the same general ability level can keep them from feeling overwhelmed.
- Providing opponents that are near the same skill level allows the athlete to gain greater belief in their abilities before giving them more challenging opponents.
- The coach can also help by assisting the athlete in creating easily attainable goals that lead the athlete to early success, paving the way for more success in the future.
- Putting goals far enough ahead so that they can be reached, yet are still relatively challenging allows the athlete to achieve, and can allow the athlete to slowly build on their mental toughness.