Improve Your Mental Toughness for Sports Performance

Many athletes search for the answer for how to become “mentally tough” and many athlete don’t know how to cultivate it. Even worse, many athletes and coaches don’t know what mental toughness is and how it can help their performance.

Athletes hear professional athletes and Olympians espouse the virtues of mental toughness training and how mental toughness was the reason for their great athletic achievements.

Tom Brady, quarterback of the New England Patriots highlighted the importance of mental toughness, “Football is so much about mental toughness, it’s digging deep, it’s doing whatever you need to do to help a team win.”

A lack of mental toughness is the biggest enemy of athletes. Lacking mental toughness causes athletes to give up, give in, tank the match, and give less.

The level of your athletic success is in direct proportion to your level of mental toughness. To be mentally tough, you must be willing to do what most athletes don’t do.

First, let’s demystify mental toughness…

Many athletes believe you are born with mental toughness. The sentiment is you either have mental toughness or you don’t… And if you were not born with the mental toughness gene, you can’t succeed in your sport.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You are 100% correct that you need mental toughness training to succeed but you are 100% wrong to believe you cannot become mentally stronger.

Some athletes do have a disposition to be more mentally tough than others, such as athletes who have handled adversity in their lives and are used to rebounding. I’m thinking about Greg Norman and Michael Jordan–just to mention a couple athletes who responded well to adversity.

And coping with adversity is a component of mental toughness. Mental toughness is an attitude and attitudes are constructed by you and no one else.

If you are the one responsible for your attitudes, you can deconstruct the way you think about yourself or your ability to succeed. By changing the way you think, you will change the way you feel about yourself which changes the way you act, train and compete.

Not only is mental toughness is an attitude and not something you were born with, it is a habit…

Mental toughness in athletics isn’t something you pull out of your back pocket when there are seconds left in a game… or when you need to sink a 3-foot putt to win a tournament… or even when you are up the plate with bases loaded in the ninth inning.

Mental toughness requires an ironclad approach to the challenges in your sport on a consistent basis. You need to consistently focus, train, and grow your mental toughness habit.

When mental toughness training becomes a habit, you can perform at the upper range of your athletic ability… And you are better equipped to handle obstacles, interference and difficult circumstances without losing confidence or motivation.

Mental toughness is like your fitness level, the more you train, the more fit you become. When you stop training your fitness level slips back. If you don’t consistently attend to your mental fitness, your mental toughness level begins to atrophy.

So, in essence, mental toughness is not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are varying degrees of mental toughness. This is great news because all athletes can benefit from mental toughness training.

As your mental toughness reserves increase, you will see a significant improvement in your performance.