How to Proactively Build Mental Toughness
Mental toughness is a favorite topic of conversation among parents on the sidelines of almost any youth practice. So it shouldn’t surprise you that during the week of the Georgia Kids State Wrestling Championship that I found myself in multiple discussions on this topic.
I’m the type of person who likes to center conversations like these around expert research and time tested frameworks. Thankfully, mental toughness is a topic that has both. When digging through the research, one particular framework immediately jumped out above the rest. It’s called the 4Cs Model.
The 4Cs of Mental Toughness
The 4Cs of mental toughness suggest that mental toughness is something people have to proactively build. In order to do this, 4 areas of focus are required.
- Challenge: You must proactively seek out challenges and look for opportunities that will require you to overcome adversity.
- Commitment: You must proactively put yourself is situations where people depend on you keeping your promises.
- Control: You must proactively immerse yourself in high pressure situations that cause emotions to run high and practice staying under control in those situations.
- Confidence: You must proactively develop your confidence by proving to yourself that you can perform under pressure and influence how others perceive you.
When looking at mental toughness through the lens of the 4Cs Model, I see it as developing a muscle.
- Developing mental toughness requires a progression that starts off easy, then increasingly gets harder.
- To improve a person’s mental toughness, there must be repetition and consistency.
- It’s better to create a plan to build upon specific areas than to just randomly work in different areas with no plan.