Mental toughness

Mental toughness is the ability to keep performing as well as you can, even when things are going against you.

Mental toughness is your determination to keep trying, even when you are not succeeding. It is your willingness to get up each time you are knocked down. It is your ability to keep your head up no matter how bad you feel. It is your insistence on playing the game to the end, whatever the odds.

Here's three quick tips for improving mental toughness:

1. Be positive

Mental toughness comes from being totally committed to performing to the best of your abilities on the day, whatever the consequences.

When some athletes feel that they are not performing well, they adopt a cautious or defensive approach of doing everything possible to avoid making any mistakes. The message they send to themselves with their self-talk is “don’t do anything wrong”.

But making mistakes is essential to success in sport: elite athletes must take risks to succeed, and taking risks means that sometimes you will fail. To do well in your sport, you must be prepared to play like you have nothing to lose. The experience of most elite athletes is that taking chances is what gets you to the top of your chosen sport.

Don’t be afraid of making a mistake: use the experiences of your career to build your confidence that you will be able to pick yourself up when you make a mistake.

2. Deal with failure

To develop mental toughness, you must be able to deal with failure.

When asked why he how he could give up basketball for baseball, Michael Jordan’s response was “I am not afraid to fail”. Jordan’s philosophy on his sport was past of an advertising campaign, in which he said: “I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

For Jordan, as for many elite athletes, failure (losing a game, making a critical error) is a normal part of his sport. He was able to deal with failure. That doesn’t mean you have to be satisfied with losing: it is right to strive for and expect success. But mentally tough athletes deal with failure by using it in a positive way: as a lesson which provides ways of improving.

Jordan said that, for him, failure was not the worst experience. He said “I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying.”  Most elite athletes know this to be true: to achieve in your sport, you must give it 100% of your effort and ability. As Ian Thorpe said, “For myself, losing is not coming second. It's getting out of the water knowing you could have done better. For myself, I have won every race I've been in.”

Mentally tough athletes distinguish between failure (making a mistake) and letting yourself down by not trying.

3. Practice your psychological skills

Developing mental toughness requires the acquisition and practice of psychological skills. The better you prepare for an event (imagery, pre-game preparation), the more positive and confident you will be. The more you work on making your self-talk positive, the better you will be at responding to an error on the field. The more focus and concentration you bring to training, the easier it will be to focus during an event.