Factors determining Mental Toughness development
To prepare our athletes to be both physically and mentally tough, we have identified a need to train our athlete’s minds as well as their physical bodies. We hold many one-on-one meetings to discuss goal setting, challenges, and realistic expectations of training. It is during these one-on-one meetings that we can begin to build the foundation for the four C’s of mental toughness training.
Challenge
Some athletes consider challenges to be learning growth-opportunity, whereas other athletes may be likely to consider a challenge as a threat. Those who embrace challenge may have a mindset for self-development whereas those who avoid challenge may do it out of fear of failure or aversion to effort (Dweck, 2007). During our meetings and training sessions, we setup the environment where athletes embrace challenging scenarios as a “learning opportunity” rather than a “test”. This allows for athletes who struggle or lose to embrace an ideology that their “learning” from the experience.
Control
Some athletes believe that they can exert influence over their environment or that they can make a difference and change outcomes. Whereas, other athletes feel helpless and perceive that outcomes of events are fixed and out of their control. Our staff tries to empower athletes by giving them simple choices over their environment, i.e. the music, exercise selection, or warm-ups. We do not allow the coaches to direct every single decision where as we want the athlete to take ownership over the control of their workout.
Commitment
Athletes differ in their likelihood to persist with a goal or work task. Some athletes, in the face of difficulty, will persist till the skill or task is completed. Other athletes may easily become distracted, bored or divert their attention to competing goals. We setup environments where we break down goals or commitments to micro-goals. We coach our athletes to climb Mount Everest “one step at a time”. Often times, athletes can lose commitment to a goal or task when the result looks too overwhelming or too far away (Goleman, 1998).
Confidence
Athletes that have high confidence have the self-belief to successfully complete tasks which may be considered too difficult by individuals with similar abilities but lower confidence. At Wichita State, our staff does everything in our power to build the confidence of our athletes through proper progressions and challenges. As Harter (1981) wrote about in her research titled “A Model of intrinsic mastery motivation in children”, an athlete’s perception of competency or ability to succeed in a task is highly influential on their intrinsic motivation for that particular task.
We never accept excuses
At Wichita State, our athletes have learned to accept responsibility and not make excuses for performance. If our roles as coaches is to prepare athletes for the challenges of tomorrow, than a realistic and transferable skill is accountability.
We don’t allow athletes to make excuses for themselves nor their teammates. We also don’t allow athletes to accept any excuses. This has created a culture where athletes are consistently honest with each other and everybody is held to the same accountable actions as everybody else.
Teaching athletes how to work “ruthlessly hard”
We receive a lot of athletes who have talent that delivered them division one scholarships. The downfall of that statement is that these athletes have relied off of their talent versus their work ethic. We aim to change that continuum in the direction of relying off of their ability to work extremely hard. Talent gets you to the starting line; work ethic delivers you to the checkered flag.
It is not uncommon for our staff to physically challenge athletes to do what they believe is impossible. Conditioning sessions are perfect environments for teaching athletes how to work “ruthlessly hard” as a team.
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