At a glance
•
Mental toughness is a highly popular concept mainly because its name is so
ppealing. Almost all
aspiring athletes will want to be seen by others and see themselves as mentally
tough.
•
Athletes from a wide range of sports can display mental toughness, but this
article focuses on coping with sensations of fatigue that stem from intense
training. This type of training is common for most sport and physical activity.
•
Mental toughness is widely debated in the academic literature, and although
there is a great deal of debate on its nature, a common element is that it
describes the capability to relentlessly pursue personal goals and be able to
cope with adversity including sensations of fatigue and pain.
•
When the goal is important enough, and where the athlete is highly motivated to
pursue that goal, then an athlete will accept experiencing intense pain. A
function of intense pain is to question whether the goal is worth pursuing. I
propose that it’s not a lack of mental toughness that limits performance, but
that the goal is not worth the suffering it brings.
What is mental
toughness?
Interest
in mental toughness by the academic, coaching and lay community is hardly
surprising. Mental toughness is a set of interrelated concepts that describe
athletes that are highly competitive, committed, selfmotivated, cope
effectively, and maintain concentration in pressurized situations, persist when
the going gets tough, and retain high levels of self-belief even after setbacks.
Research in mental toughness began gathering momentum following Graham Jones’ article “What is this thing called mental
toughness? An investigation of elite sport performers”. Subsequent research has
clarified and expanded knowledge in this area and further studies have
demonstrated that interventions such as imagery, goal-setting and self-talk can
help athletes build mental toughness . As a crude summary of developments in
this area, researchers have made theoretical leaps and bounds to define and
clarify theconcepts,
and, importantly, kept an ongoing focus on how to transfer theory to practice.
Research into mental toughness is flourishing and this can only be helpful as
the concepts it covers have a huge interests to athletes and coaches.
However,
the popularity of the topic and focus on elite athletes has led to questions on
the extent to which non-elite athletes are mentally tough . In this article, I
argue that the ability to display mental toughness is within all people and,
conscious of that fact, they should learn when they can activate it.
What evidence is
there that we are all mentally tough?
People
who might seem normal or average frequently display mental toughness in
potentially life-threatening situations. Possibly the most powerful literature
on the area of pain management is the study of pregnant women going through
childbirth . An industry has developed to help women manage pain during
childbirth; however, it is worth noting that most pain-management interventions
are relatively modern (within the last 100 years). Qualitative accounts of
women going through childbirth without pain management provide detailed
descriptions of mental toughness characterized by dealing with thoughts of
death and coping with intense pain .
Evolutionary
psychologists have argued that humans have evolved to cope with pain and this
coping response is hard wired and that we only access this response when
situation demands call for it . In situations such as childbirth or other
potentially life-threatening situations such as military endeavours , intense emotions
are activated. Emotions have been found to mask sensations of pain . If an
individual is aware that this
is the process, and effective coping systems are with them, albeit dormant most
of the time, then they have the potential to show an abundant amount of mental
toughness. If an athlete perceives that sensations of pain are something that
has to be endured in order to achieve goals, then they have opened the door to
activating their
inner mental toughness.
Activating beliefs of
mental toughness: “if he/she can do it, so can I”
People
have a great deal more resources than they believe they possess and it is the
ability to access these resources that is important. However, prior to being
able to access them, the first step is to recognise that they exist; that is, say
to yourself you can cope with a lot more than you think. One way of changing
your view of how much
you can cope with is to watch seemingly normal people do extra ordinary
challenges. One example is Prof Greg Whyte’s work on Comic Relief challenges,
which include some extra-ordinary performance such as swimming the English
Channel (David Walliams), running repeated marathons (Eddie Izzard), and
swimming in very cold water (Davina McCall). It’s worth remembering the
qualities needed to be a comedian/actor bear little resemblance with those
needed to be an athlete. Research shows that people learn by watching others and
if someone of a similar age, gender, and experience of the task at hand
succeeds, then this can develop the thought that “if he/she can do it, so can
I”
Is the goal worth it?
A
key aspect that can help decide if someone activates her/his mental toughness
is whether the goal is sufficiently important. When we ask athletes whether the
goal is important, they tend to report positively. On a 1-10 scale (1 is not
important and 10 is highly important), few athletes report a goal is lower than
5, and the variation in terms of importance often starts at 8 . Therefore,
using a rating scale does not reliably provide useful information.
The
task below can help you identify which goal is the most important. Rather than
rate the importance, it helps the individual work out which goal is more
important, and whether trying to achieve one goal might influence attempts to
attain another.
Task: Rate and rank
your goals
Example:
What
is your goal? Reflection on the challenge the goal presents
1.
To run a sub 3-hour marathon “This has been a goal for a while and whilst I
have come close (within seconds),
I have not achieved it”
2.
To run 5km in sub-17 mins “I have come close to this, but not achieved it. I
find the marathon training leaves me a bit tired at times”
Reflection and
evaluation
The
aim is to compare and contrast the two goals and examine if they could
conflict. Having time to go for 2goals can be an issue and so prioritising one
over the other in terms of when they will be attempted can help. In this case,
the athlete needs to focus on one of these goals almost exclusively of the
other. Placing the emphasis
onto speed required for the 5km and intense pain from lactic acid associated
with speed work is a different type of coping than that needed for a marathon.
Running pace in the marathon would feel slow in comparison to running 5km, but
mental toughness is likely to stem from being able to manage the supposedly slower
pace over the final stages.
The
suggestion is that the athlete decides which goal to focus on and commits to
achieving that. The two goals are arguably in conflict both physiologically and
psychologically.
Your goal
What
is your goal? Reflection on the challenge the goal presents
1.
2.
3.
Using psychological
skills to build mental toughness
Having
identified the goal and worked out that you are committed to achieving that
goal; the next step is to develop resources ready to meet the challenges that
you could face; that is, getting the qualities that might be described as
mental toughness ready for when they are needed. Research has found that use of
psychological skills
such as imagery and self-talk associate with mental toughness . Both imagery
and self-talk are strategies where an individual changes her/his internal
dialogue to be able to do a task successfully. Imagery can help achieve this
via use of images and self-talk via language.
Example of developing
mental toughness in a soccer player…
A
young professional soccer player has to participate in a multistage shuttle run
test (bleep test) as part of his club’s conditioning and assessment programme.
The bleep test is progressive and maximal and therefore he will run until
exhaustion. The player believes that being one of the fittest players will help
him gain an established place in the team. He also believes that the coach
likes players to show mental toughness. Therefore, on the day of the test,
getting a high score on the bleep test is an important goal, and the player
needs to accept that he must produce a maximal performance and this will
require coping with intense fatigue. To develop strategies to show mental
toughness, the player should examine their inner dialogue and thoughts
when doing similar tasks. Even if the player has not done the test before,
there will be a time when he actively made a decision to stop exercising or slowed
down; that is, he weighed up current feelings of fatigue against what was
causing them, and made the decision to slow down. It is these thoughts and perceptions
of fatigue that need to be addressed via self-talk training and imagery;
thoughts that say slowdown will not be accepted if thoughts to achieve a
certain goal are more powerful. And the decision to slow down is based on
perceptions of fatigue, and the individual needs to increase the point where
these thoughts occur. In
conclusion, mental toughness is something humans have in abundance and can
access this when priorities demand. Where these goals are voluntary where the
decision to abandon the goal is an option rather than involuntary, such as
life-threatening situations or childbirth, then reflecting on whether the
pursuit of the goal
is
worth the pain that will be experienced can help clarify whether managing the
pain will be worth it. Where goals are appraised as highly important, then
psychological skills such as self-talk and imagery can help an individual
re-programme how they will respond when unwanted thoughts occur during
performance.
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