aHEAD IN THE GAME

Sport is full of hundreds of thousands of things that we don’t want to do. Seriously, I mean do you think I want to get up everyday and do 45 minutes of knee rehab? No. Do you think I wanted to run fitness tests or, even worse, train for them? No. And I can promise you I absolutely did not want to chase girls down 30+ yards, and throw my body in front of crosses and shots because someone else lost their mark. Most of sport is literally just things no one wants to do and decisions we don’t want to make. So, why do we do it to ourselves then? We know it’ll be hard, or it’ll hurt. We’ve all been there, negotiating with ourselves, weighing pros and cons, and wondering whether we really have to do something. But then, there’s that that little voice that tells us to suck it up. What is that voice, that keeps us getting back on the line, and keeps us doing the hard thing?

I’ve had a lot of coaches in my life, all with differing strategies and philosophies. However, they all agreed on the importance of mental toughness. If you’re reading that, you probably rolled your eyes. It probably prompted a flashback of a lecture or an unpleasant, corner of the field half-time speech. But seriously, mental toughness has been hailed as one of the most important variables to athletic success.

Coaches, athletes, and researchers agree on the importance of mental toughness; so, it’s ironic that for many years it was difficult to pinpoint an exact definition. It has been described as the ability to overcome stressors, be resilient, to bounce back from failures, the refusal to quit, or just overall superior mental skills. It has also been described as an aspect of personality, an overall state of mind, and/or an aspect of self-efficacy. I mean there’s no limit to the research on mental toughness so why don’t we just come up with a definition that’s a conglomeration of all of that, then? Well, that’s the thing. There is so much research speculating on what mental toughness is; it’s pretty much everything. Literally at one point we couldn’t even really say what constitutes a mental tough athlete because it seemed like every variable affecting performance had something to do with it. A 2002 research article summarized it really well, “the characteristics of mentally tough performers… have also been wide ranging and include: high levels of optimism, self-belief, and self-esteem; achieving, consistency, desire, determination, commitment; focus and concentration, and will power, control, motivation, and courage.” Sooo yeh that definitely narrows it down. The lack of consensus concerning the definition of mental toughness and the aspects that comprise a mentally tough competitor made it difficult for researchers to objectively measure and determine its relationship to sports performance.

Attempting to rectify the gap in literature, there were two studies that I found very interesting. One, a qualitative study of elite athletes, sought to define and identify the attributes of mental toughness. The other, a subsequent study of soccer players, investigated claims made by the former. In 2002, the first study by Jones et al., interviewed 10 elite level athletes. Participants were asked to define mental toughness and describe qualities that constituted a mentally tough performer. Using the athletes answers, a definition of mental toughness was created. Mental toughness was described as, “a natural or developed psychological edge that allows you to: generally cope better than your opponents with many demands (competition, training, lifestyle) & specifically be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, and in control under pressure.” Now, this is a great first step. It provided an actual definition of mental toughness. Additionally, 12 essential attributes to mentally tough performers were identified and ranked according to importance. I will try my best to describe all 12 in not too many words: unwavering self-belief, bouncing back for setbacks, belief that your abilities are unique and superior to opponents, desire to succeed, ability to remain focused even with distractions, regaining control after unexpected events, pushing through pain while maintaining performance, coping with anxiety, not being effected by the performance of others, thriving on pressure, staying focused despite off-the-field distractions, and the ability to shift focus from sport when necessary. In my opinion, a lot of these attributes are just kind of facets of the same few qualities.

The later, two-part, study of soccer players aimed to investigate the definitions and attributes of mental toughness from the earlier investigation. This time a soccer-specific population was featured. Part one of the study involved interviewing 6 elite level soccer players with experience at the international level. Basically, they confirmed the previous study’s definition, with a minor change. Instead of “generally” coping better, these athletes insisted mentally tough performers “always” cope better. Similarly, the athletes also came up with attributes of mentally tough performers that pretty closely mimicked what was produced in the 2002 study. Ten attributes of mental toughness were indicated by the group. Again, I’ll try to list them as succinctly as possible: total self-belief, wanting the ball all the time, even during a bad performance, responding positively to situations, remaining calm under pressure, having the ability to get out of trouble, staying focuses despite distractions, regulating emotions during competition, having a presence that influences opponents, controlling variables outside of sport, thriving under pressure. Part two of the study was about confirming those previously created definitions and attributes with a larger soccer population. For this part, 43 players with first team experience were asked to indicate their level of agreement with the generated definition of mental toughness and to rank the importance of the generated attributes. Overall, there was strong support for the definition. Additionally, players indicated that self-belief and attributes relating to resilience (always wanting the ball, even when things aren’t going well) were the most important for mentally tough performers. The attributes that were associated with things occurring outside of sport or the pressure that comes from performance were seen as the least important, further supporting findings from the first investigation.

It’s pretty clear that these two studies are very similar in their definitions and attributes of mental toughness. I believe that the main differences between them exist because the second study was sport specific. You can tell that some of the attributes of mental toughness are soccer-specific like “wanting the ball at all times.” If other sports were included, we could expect the category to be a little more broad. It would probably reflect something closer to the unwavering self-belief which was a constant theme in the first study. In both investigations, many of the attributes are very similar. Pretty much every attribute listed can be boiled down to a few important skills: self-belief, focus, coping, and resilience. This makes sense given that the definitions created by both studies pretty much boil mental toughness down to these aspects. In general, both studies support that mental toughness is our ability to be more consistent confident, focused, able to cope, and resilient than our opponents. Mental toughness is informed by our past experiences. Successfully persisting in the face of obstacles and prevailing through challenging situations bolsters mental toughness.

I don’t have too much to complain about in terms of the definitions or attributes of mental toughness provided by these investigations. Mental toughness is a conglomeration of our past experiences. It is defined by an ability to consistently believe in yourself, stay focused, cope, and be resilient in the face of obstacles. There are, however, particular elements of the definitions that I think deserve emphasis. In my opinion, the most important words in the definition of mental toughness are “consistency” and “opponent.” Ok think about this. What happens when you face a weaker opponent? Do your coaches ever say, “let’s just play well enough to beat them?” No. You face a team that you could beat 5-0 the same way you would face a team that would beat you 0-5. This is true mental toughness; it’s consistently having a higher standard regardless of who your opponent is. We see this sentiment echoed in the version of mental toughness described by soccer study as well. Mental toughness is not just as simple as checking a box for each attribute. An athlete who just kinda believes in themselves, has a little bit of focus, or just sort of has the ability to cope isn’t automatically going to be mentally tough. No, it’s also about the magnitude of these beliefs, or the degree to which an athlete believes in themselves, and how well they can focus, cope, and bounce back in a variety of situations. Without consistency you can’t have true mental toughness. Like the definitions state. It’s not just a one time thing. You have to be able to demonstrate superior abilities time and time again in both comfortable and uncomfortable circumstances.

In order to quantify mental toughness there has to be some metric we can use for comparison. There has to be some way to assess an athletes mental toughness. The “opponent” serves this purpose. However, I think to truly understand mental toughness, we have to bend our ideas of what an “opponent” is. Think of the previous example about the team you can beat 5-0. Even though an opponent may require less self-belief, less focus, or less motivation to beat, a truly mentally tough athlete doesn’t allocate less of these things just because she can. True mental toughness is being faithful to a standard higher than your BEST opponent. However, realistically, we never know who our best opponent is/will be. It’s hard to base our own mental skills on an imaginary person. For me, I base my standards for self-belief, focus, coping, and resilience on the idealized version of myself. I ask what would my best self do in this situation? How many reps would she do? Whatever the answer, let’s add two more. I mean if you even think about accepted sport psychology terms like intrinsic motivation, the highest form of motivation; it’s defined by being wholly motivated by the activity itself, not to be better than some external metric or to be judged in comparison to another. This is where that mental competition I was talking about before comes in. When I think of the best athletes, they are their own opponent. They push themselves even when there is no obvious competition. Arguably, this is harder than trying to outdo a traditional opponent. Every training you’re basically fighting a ghost. I have faced some really really really talented players and I’m not saying I’m perfect every time I face them. However, beating any of them is never more challenging than beating the version of myself I want to be. That’s who my opponent is, that’s who I’m striving to beat everyday. I understand why the word “opponent” has to be included in a definition, there has to be some outward measure of measure of mental toughness. However, true mental toughness is having the discipline to remain consistently loyal to your own highest standard of self, it really has nothing to do with anyone else. If I had to come up with my own definition I would say mental toughness is having the discipline to remain confident, focused, able to cope, and resilient at your highest standard.

Mental toughness is what takes over when your legs don’t want to work anymore, when you’re exhausted. It’s what allows you to stay disciplined and persistent during hard times. It’s that little voice in your head that says, “one more.” How loud that little voice is in your head, how fast you listen, and how committed you are to listening to it is an indicator of how mentally tough you really are.