Mental Toughness for Sport, Business and Life

In all facets of life, most people strive for success.  This could mean getting a promotion to vice-president, making the high school basketball team, having your children grow up to be good citizens, getting into the college of your choice, learning a new gymnastics skill, or getting the entire family together for holidays.  Many of the elements in your quest for success are likely to include dealing with success and recovering from failure, short and long-term goals, perseverance, hard work, focused concentration, coping with adversity, battling through periods of uncertainty and anxiety, keeping confident despite obstacles, and a commitment to excellence.  To be successful requires having many of these attributes and keeping on the path toward achievement in a consistent manner.  Some people might consider the elements mentioned above to be the ingredients of mental toughness.  But what is mental toughness?  It is a word that is thrown around a great deal but few people really know exactly what it is.

Let’s look at the following examples and you can decide whether the person is mentally tough or not.

• A basketball player is injured and despite the fact that he may re-injure himself and hurt his long-term career, he decides to play in the championship game to help his teammates.
• A businesswoman is feeling really sick but she has a big presentation scheduled for today. Even though she might not be at her very best she “sucks it up” takes some medicine and goes into work to deliver her presentation.
• A mother sets an 11:00 PM curfew for her 16 year-old daughter, even though all her friends can stay out until 12:00.  The daughter breaks curfew by 5 minutes and despite throwing a fit, the mother grounds her for a week.
• A husband is told by his doctor that he might have a serious cancer, but he won’t know until he gets a series of tests back that will take about a month.  The husband does not want to tell his wife and family (or boss) since he figures all they would do is worry.  So he keeps it to himself and is really depressed and not himself at home and at work for the next couple of weeks.  In fact, his work suffers to the point of almost losing his job and his home life is also suffering.

Are these examples of mental toughness or not?  Would your conclusion be any different based on the outcome of the situation? For example would you say the businesswoman was mentally tough if she gave a great presentation but should have stayed home if she couldn’t focus well due to her illness and gave a poor presentation? In any case, these are difficult decisions, and different people will typically come to different conclusions concerning what is (or is not) mental toughness.

In this book, empirical evidence will be provided based on scientific studies (including interviews) regarding the meaning of mental toughness.  The components of mental toughness will be broken down so you can look more closely at these different aspects. The four different pillars of mental toughness (a) motivation (persistence), (b) concentration (focus of attention), (c) confidence (self-belief), and (d) coping with pressure will be discussed in detail.  Finally, tips for how to build mental toughness will be provided along with psychological characteristics that appear to be associated with mental toughness. It will be noted that developing mental toughness does not happen overnight.  It takes deliberate practice over a long period of time to develop these mental skills that make up mental toughness. In addition, in almost all cases, other people (e.g., parents, coaches, teammates, co-workers, siblings, mentors, etc) have played an important role in helping to develop mental toughness.  We are still in the infancy of studying mental toughness from a scientific perspective (although the term has been around a long time) and we will continue to learn more and more as the years go by.  For now, let’s get started on the journey of understanding mental toughness and then taking concrete steps to become more mentally tough.  Hope you enjoy the journey.