Mental Toughness: the Key to Success
When it’s the end of your work day and you don’t feel like hitting the track, do you find a way to get it done, or do you make an excuse to skip out? If is starts raining while you’re on your bike, do you call it a day or do you welcome the challenge? When you have a bad race does it shake your confidence, or do you take the experience and build from it?
Many athletes and coaches say that mental toughness is a key component to achieving success. Mental toughness is your ability to persevere in the face of challenges, to keep going even when things get hard, and to have an unwavering commitment to your goals. When you develop mental toughness, obstacles are only temporary and one bad performance doesn’t shake your belief in your ability. There are four strong attributes of mental toughness.
COMMITMENT
Motivation might be the thing that gets you going, but commitment is what keeps you going through fatigue, self-doubt and burn out. Mentally tough athletes know exactly what they want to achieve and are committed to making it happen. When you are mentally tough it means you can delay immediate gratification and make decisions in the moment that lead to your ultimate goal. When you are committed to the goal, any setbacks you encounter are temporary and it’s not a matter of if you accomplish your goal, but when.
FOCUS
Mentally tough athletes are able to perform consistently under pressure. By staying in the present moment, keeping your focus on the things that are in your control, and not getting distracted by things irrelevant to your performance, you are able to focus on the task at hand. Imagining circumstances that might rattle your focus or confidence on race day while training can help you practice focus.
RESILIENCE
How quickly you regain your composure after a setback. A mentally tough athlete can quickly assess the situation and adapt to the new circumstances. A resilient athletes sees no demand they can’t meet, no obstacle they can’t overcome, and aren’t immediately defeated in the face of a setback.
SELF-CONFIDENCE
A key to being mentally tough. Every thought you have is a message you are sending to yourself about whether or not you are confident and capable of accomplishing your goal. Mentally tough athletes have an unshakeable belief in their ability to accomplish their goals and know that one bad day doesn’t define them. They use failures as feedback and carry what they learned into the next competition. Failures don’t make them want to throw in the towel; they make them want it even more.
Mental toughness isn’t one skill; it’s many skills. And it’s a skill we have to work for. When you show up to a race and haven’t prepared yourself mentally, you are leaving a significant portion of your performance up to chance. That same discipline you use for your physical training needs to be applied to your mental training. Set yourself up for success by training both your body and your brain for race day.
