Developing Mental Toughness

In my previous tip I discussed what doesn’t development mental toughness – emotional abuse. This tip will discuss what does development mental toughness.

Mental toughness is a defining characteristic of all successful athletes. In general it refers to an athlete’s ability to persevere through difficult circumstances. The key attributes of mental toughness include confidence, determination, focus, and self-control. What this means is that mentally tough athletes keep their confidence, determination, focus, and self-control when things are not going their way.

Mental toughness can also be described as an athlete’s ability to succeed after failure. Preferably the failure will be short lived. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes mentally tough athletes will persevere through a bad shift or a bad game, and sometimes they will persevere through longer instances such as a month long slump. In the end, mentally tough athletes prevail and succeed again.

It is important to note that mentally tough athletes do not always succeed; one of the easiest ways to lose mental toughness is to believe that you will succeed every time. No one always succeeds. It is important to believe that you can succeed, but to believe that you should succeed every time creates unrealistic expectations that will cause frustrations and self-doubt, and decrease confidence and focus. The ability to embrace failure is essential to developing mental toughness. This was exemplified best by Michael Jordon when he said “I’ve missed over 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And this is why I succeed.” This quote by Jordon also speaks to the importance that you cannot succeed without trying.  

Furthermore, a key component to developing mental toughness is using appropriate challenge and support. Providing athletes with challenge and support directly impacts their confidence. Appropriate challenge pushes an athlete to work harder and improve; the challenge isn’t too hard so that the athlete is doomed to fail, nor too easy so that the athlete isn’t challenged. As a result of the appropriate challenge athletes will improve and they will gain confidence from their accomplishments. Appropriate support gives an athlete encouragement and reinforces confidence within the athlete. It is important to have a proper balance between the two. Too much challenge and not enough support the athlete will become discouraged. Too much support and not enough challenge the athlete will become complacent and less motivated to improve. 

Moreover, developing self-awareness and clarity is crucial for mental toughness. Self-awareness and clarity is correlated with an athlete’s levels of determination, focus, and self-control. Self-awareness is developed through relaxation techniques, self-evaluation of one’s performance and goals, and self-scans of one’s feelings and thoughts (positive or negative). As a result of improving an athlete’s self-awareness the athlete’s self-control and ability to maintain his/her focus will increase. Similarly, clarity is developed through appropriate self-questioning. The ability to ask oneself important questions and give honest answers can bring clarity and purpose to one’s motivation and focus, and increase levels of determination and the power of one’s focus.

In summary, the techniques briefly described will help athlete’s develop mental toughness. For coaches and parents, help your athletes embrace failure (to avoid their confidence from being deflated and their focus from being distracted when they fail), give them appropriate challenge and support (to build their confidence), and help them develop self-awareness and clarity (to build their levels of determination, focus, and self-control). Similarly, athletes can embrace failure, give themselves appropriate challenge and support, and develop their self-awareness and clarity on their own.

Concerns about Competitive Sport and Mental Toughness

In this tip I will raise some concerns about competitive sport that are often over looked due to the popular belief that sport is associated with positive developmental outcomes. The purpose is not to scare people away from competitive sport, but make people aware of the problems that exist and help prevent these problems from occurring. Furthermore, the relationship between mental toughness and emotional abuse will be discussed.

Some of the negative outcomes of competitive sport participation identified by researchers include occurrences of athlete maltreatment, overuse injuries, eating disorders, burnout, social isolation, lost childhood, premature identity forclosure, aggression and violence, doping, decreased self-perceptions, and dropout.

The outcome I believe to be the most overlooked is athlete maltreatment; particularly, emotional abuse. Recent research on athlete maltreatment in sport indicates that athletes are not immune to experiences of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In addition, research on abuse suggests that emotional abuse may be the most frequently occurring form of abuse in sport. Emotional abuse is defined as:

A pattern of deliberate non-contact behaviours by a person within a critical relationship role that has the potential to be harmful. Acts of emotional abuse include physical behaviours, verbal behaviours, and acts of denying attention and support. These acts have the potential to be spurning, terrorizing, isolating, exploiting/corrupting, or doing emotional responsiveness, and may be harmful to individuals’ affective, behavioural, cognitive or physical well-being. (Stirling & Kerr, 2008, p.178)

Emotional abuse can easily go undetected as its effects can be hard to notice. However, the most disturbing component of emotional abuse is how it is commonly normalized and referred to as a means of building mental toughness. It is very important for an athlete to have mental toughness, but let me make it clear that emotional abuse does not lead to mental toughness.

Some examples of emotional abuse include shouting, belittling, ignoring, threats, and humiliation. Note that emotional abuse differs from bullying because it is carried out by a person in position of power versus a peer.

Recent research by Stirling and Kerr on emotionally abused elite athletes found that the athletes perceived emotional abuse to have many negative psychological effects (e.g. decreased mood, self-efficacy, and self-esteem, as well as anger, poor body image, and increased anxiety) and many negative training effects (e.g. decreased enjoyment, impaired focus, difficulty with skill acquisition, and decreased motivation). As a result some of emotionally abused elite athletes perceived that emotional abuse had decreased their performance. Similarly, research by Miller-Perrin and Perrin found that long term effects of emotional abuse include low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and dissociation.

Likewise, I can attest to the severity of emotional abuse. Throughout my career there has been many times where I felt playing hockey was no longer fun and even a few extreme cases where I hated hockey and just wanted to quit. These negative experiences from emotional abuse certainly did not make me mentally tough. Instead, it was mental toughness that got me through those negative experiences.

Mental toughness is a widely used term that generally refers to an athlete’s ability to persevere through difficult circumstances. There are various positive attributes used to describe mental toughness. The one that I think is the most important is confidence. For athletes to have the confidence to continue to believe in themselves when things are not going their way is a crucial factor in determining if they will persevere. Confidence is not built by emotional abuse, but destroyed by it. Confidence and mental toughness are built by appropriate challenges and support. Other key attributes of mental toughness include determination, focus, and self-control, which are also not built by emotional abuse.

In conclusion, remember that positive developmental outcomes are not automatically achieved through sport participation alone. Therefore, I suggest parents, guardians, and coaches make it their intention to create positive developmental outcomes, particularly in competitive sport, and to prevent negative developmental outcomes. On the other hand, it is important for athletes to realize that negative experiences are not required for performance success and that they have the right to positive experiences.

5 Habits that Make a Big Difference

Many of my previous tips have examined ways in which young hockey players and athletes can become more successful. This tip is intended to give 5 simple habits young players can follow that will make a big difference; some of these habits are summarized from previous tips and some are new. The 5 simple habits are:

1.       Being Very Very Prepared – It is obvious that being more prepared than your opponent gives you an advantage. Having that little bit extra can be the difference from scoring or not scoring, from winning or losing. It is by far the biggest and most obvious distinction, thus it cannot be stressed enough. Make doing the work and going down the extra mile to be very prepared a habit!

Preparation can be broken down into physical and mental preparation. Physical preparation includes working out and practicing yours skills to taking time off, resting and recovering. It is not only important to put in the time to be well prepared but it is also important to be deliberate in preparing. As discussed previously (click HERE), it is deliberate practice that predicts success, not just practice. The top players practice hard; they have high intensity, pass hard, shoot hard and shoot to score, skate hard, stickhandle fast, battle hard, check hard, and play good defense. These good habits start in practice. Practice like you play or you will end up playing like you practice.

On the other hand, mental preparation can be acquired through various sport psychology techniques. However, one of the best forms of mental preparation is doing a lot of physical preparation (as just mention). This often gives one of the greatest mental edges one can acquire – confidence! In fact, when players lack confidence, one of the best ways to get it back is to simply practice more. The various forms of sport psychology techniques such as imagery, self-talk and goal setting will be discussed another day, but they certainly also help in getting that mental edge on your opponents.

2.       Stay Focused – Second to being very prepared is staying focused. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are if you can’t keep your focus and perform when it counts. I won’t dare to suggest one specific best way to stay focused as this can vary from person to person. I will comment that having clarity in one’s focus is beneficial, as discussed in a previous tip (click HERE). If you are focused on doing too many things there is a good chance you are not going to remember most of them. I will also suggest that during games or game like situations in practice, it is usually good to focus on broader things; such as “just play my game,” “I have more time then I think” – Jason Spezza, “have fun,” “be present,” or “just breathe.” The rational being that if you break things down into too small of parts when you are performing it will hinder your performance; the performance becomes choppy and the optimal state where things just flow will be unattainable. This is probably not the same for skill acquisition where you might learn a skill one piece at a time. Since what works for one person might not work for you, I recommend to just do what works best for you; you may even find that what works best will change overtime. Nonetheless, make it a habit to get focused and stay focused.

3.       Be Assertive – I’ve written several tips about the differences between aggressive, assertive and passive (Click HERE, HERE and HERE). This is in part because being assertive is so crucial to one’s success. Zach Parise is a great example of a player who is effective because he is very assertive. He is small for an NHLer but he chases down defenseman with a lot of tenacity. He reaches, uses his stick, and throws his body around. Similarly, as a coach I consistently teach my players to be assertive and compete. Being assertive when battling with an opponent is instrumental. I don’t encourage slashing and crosschecking (aggression), but if you are not using your hands and stick to push and dig then you are not doing everything you can within the rules to win a battle. If you want to make it anywhere in hockey you need to make it a habit to be assertive.

4.       Have High Standards or a Low Tolerance – Great players don’t put up with teammates that create a poor team culture or environment. Team culture is extremely important for the success of team, but it is also important for individual success. A team’s culture depends on both the coach and the players of that team. The coach is obviously influential and certainly helps shape the culture and can do so knowingly; however, it is the players that ultimately create the culture through their behaviours and comments. If players on a team don’t think it is important to practice hard or they are negative and picking on other teammates, this can create a culture where these behaviours become normalized and/or accepted. In turn, this is detrimental to how the team feels about each other (team cohesion) and the team’s success, as well as the individuals’ experiences and development are hindered. Practicing battling against a player that isn’t giving his/her best effort will not be nearly as beneficial as battling against a player that is giving his/her best effort. Therefore, make it a habit to have a low tolerance for players who are creating a poor team culture, and consequently pull up your teammates to help them, your team and indirectly yourself.

5.       Have Fun – Having fun while playing hockey is so fundamental, it is often forgotten. However, it can actually be associated with increased effort, a positive state of mind and, subsequently, improved performance. Aside, if hockey isn’t fun, then you should probably reassess why you are playing in the first place. I suggest you make having fun a habit, you can always find a way to have fun, even when things aren’t going your way. And focusing back on having fun may just be what you need to turn things around!

Those 5 habits have been chosen based on what I felt as most important. There are many other important habits; some honourable mentions included: never giving up, thinking long term (click HERE), and asking for feedback (click HERE). Lastly, if players are not already practicing these habits, it is never too late. I’d suggest they should start practicing them now and continue to practice them right into next season.

Early Specialization and Youth Training

I recently came across a well written Blog on Youth Training by Victor Hall. This is an important issue for young athletes (7-12 yrs) with dreams of making it to the big leagues. Hall does a great job going through the arguments against it and illustrating his points for it. Here is the link to the post and my thoughts below - http://sportsperformancecoaching.blogspot.com/2008/12/youth-training.html

First off, I agree that Youth Training can be very effective if done properly. Hall talks about Youth Training as “laying a foundation of movement skills,” and “building multi-lateral physical competency, which in turn fosters improved levels of self-confidence/esteem and enjoyment for physical activity.” My experience makes me biased in my decision but it also has allowed me to see exactly these kinds of rewards.

When discussing what age is the most appropriate to start, Hall boils it down to physical and emotional maturity. He highlights that the kids need to be able to follow instructions and maintain an acceptable level of concentration. Moreover, I agree with his remarks that kids don’t have as much free play these days. Thus, I see venues that provide a structure for kids to develop in a fun, engaging and positive atmosphere as great alternative to free play.

Regarding early specialization, experts suggest athletes acquire elite performance through sampling. This sampling route is illustrated in the development model of sport participation as:

-          Sampling years – 6 to 12 – focus on fundamental motor skills and fun.

-          Specializing years – 13 to 15 – Reduce involvements in other sports, narrowing in on one.

-          Investment years – 16 to 18 – Focus on one sport, high amount of practice.

In contrast, early specialization has no sampling years or only a few. Experts claim following the sampling model gives athletes enhanced physical health and psychosocial development. I think we would all agree that the sampling model is the smart choice to guide a young athlete’s developmental path.

In summary, a combination of different sports and youth training can be a great way for young kids to develop their self-confidence, health and athletic abilities, if done properly.