Have you ever heard a coach or parent tell an athlete that they need to be ‘tougher’? Have you ever told your child that he or she must ‘toughen up’?

If you have, then you didn’t hear what you thought you heard and /or say what you thought you said. What you thought you heard or said was advice to help a child get mentally tougher. What you actually heard or said was reinforcing negative self-talk perpetuating mental weakness.

This may or may not be obvious, but young athletes who have problems with mental toughness struggle with negative self-talk. Moreover, negative self-talk causes negative outcomes.

It’s quite common for both children and adults who are experiencing negativity to both think and whisper negative messages to themselves. Therefore, when a young athlete is having an obvious mental toughness issue telling them they need to be mentally tougher will only make things worse.

You must make sure people are not ever telling young athletes things like:

• “stop being so weak“
• “don’t go out there and choke this time“
• “you always quit when things get hard“
• “you have to toughen up if you want to win“

If you have a habit of thinking this way and blurting it out to a young athlete, stop yourself and say the reverse:

• “You got this, you’re stronger than you think“
• “You’ve been here before, there is no pressure“
• “This isn’t hard, this is your chance to get better“
• “Focus on your strengths and you will do great“

Mental Toughness is a Muscle

The fact is mental toughness is a muscle. The more you work on it, the stronger the muscle becomes. If an athlete is struggling with their mental toughness, telling them they need to be mentally tougher is pointless. Telling is not teaching, and listening is not learning. Therefore, the only thing parents and coaches can do is to treat mental toughness as a muscle that gets stronger with training.

With this in mind, it’s best to approach developing mental toughness as a process just as you would a weight training process. This process requires two basic steps.

1) Progression

Developing mental toughness requires a progression that starts off easy, then increasingly gets harder. This requires patience.

Parents and coaches must accept that building a young athlete’s mental toughness won’t happen overnight. Making steady progress by allowing the athlete to overcome small, manageable challenges is critical.

For this reason, the athlete, parent, and coach must approach the process of developing mental toughness with a crawl, walk, run mentality. Moreover, no two athletes are the same just like no two babies learning to walk and run are the same. Some may figure it out fast while others take longer. It doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as progress is being made.

So, all you must do is remember this when you are developing the process. If you want to develop an athlete’s mental toughness, you must make them do mentally tough things. If an athlete lives an easy life that doesn’t challenge their mental toughness, then they won’t be mentally tough. On the other hand, if you require an athlete to consistently overcome challenges that require mental toughness, then they will develop mental toughness.

Start them off with something tough but doable, and don’t try to break them. Then just keep making the activity progressively more difficult as they succeed just as you would add more weight to a bench press.

2) Repetition

To improve a person’s mental toughness, there must be consistency and repetition. Consistency removes uncertainty and leads to trust.  Repetition is the key to learning and building instincts.

Coach John Wooden speaks on this best:

The four laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition. The goal is to create a correct habit that can be produced instinctively under great pressure.

To make sure this goal was achieved, I created eight laws of learning; namely, explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, and repetition.