Mental Toughness

Mental toughness is a multifaceted construct made up of several key components — values, attitudes, cognitions, emotions and behaviours — that together refer to a person's ability to thrive through both positive and negative challenges, pressures and adversities. Put another way, mental toughness is having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables an athlete to:

• generally cope better than their opponents with the many demands of sport (competition, training, lifestyle); and
• specifically be more consistent and better than their opponents in staying determined, focused, confident and in control under pressure.

Mental toughness is no longer seen as merely a personal disposition; current research holds that it consists of both natural and developed psychological characteristics. It matters to sport psychology because it represents the culmination of what it takes to be an elite athlete at any level of competition — two athletes with near-identical physical training can produce very different results on competition day, and the gap is very often mental toughness.

Several factors are important for mental toughness:

1. the ability to thrive through challenge;
2. sport awareness;
3. a tough attitude;
4. a desire for success.

Attributes of mental toughness

Mental toughness can be developed in athletes and plays an important role in competitive sport. The characteristics commonly considered its attributes are that a mentally tough athlete is:

• self-confident and self-assured;
• able to focus and concentrate;
• intrinsically motivated;
• strong in work ethic;
• committed to excellence;
• persistent and determined;
• positive in attitude, with no negativism;
• resilient in the face of failure or injury;
• able to thrive on pressure and challenge;
• consistent in personal values;
• emotionally intelligent;
• physically tough;
• gracious in the face of success.

How mental toughness is built, not just born

Because mental toughness is partly developed, coaches and sport psychologists train it deliberately, much like strength or endurance, through methods such as goal-setting (breaking a match into process and performance goals that stay within an athlete's control, even when the scoreboard isn't), self-talk (swapping a negative statement for a rehearsed instructional cue, e.g. "elbow in, follow through"), visualisation (mentally rehearsing a tough situation before it happens so the body isn't reacting to pressure for the first time in competition), arousal-control techniques such as controlled breathing, and simulation training — practising under conditions that deliberately mimic match pressure so the stress response already feels familiar.

Why it matters in practice …