Mental toughness is a character trait one must earn by successfully completing activities that require mental toughness. These activities include those that cause emotions that deal with pain, discipline, boredom, repetition, fear, and fatigue.

Moreover, it’s through the process of completing these types of activities that an athlete develops mental toughness by learning the behaviors that support mental toughness. These behaviors include self-motivation, self-control, discipline, commitment, confidence, and courage.

With that said, there are 3 major insights parents need to know about mental toughness when raising an athlete who needs to develop more in this area.

1) Mental Toughness is Linked to Physical Toughness

Physical toughness is not the same as being physically strong. You could be physically strong and not physically tough.

There is a clear distinction. Physical strength is easy to measure in a weight room. Furthermore, almost anyone can get physically strong in the weight room by simply following the right program. In typical scenarios, following a strength training program does not require much in terms of mental skills. Rather, one must only be good at following directions. In short, almost anyone can become physically strong and still be mentally weak.

On the other hand, you can’t be physically tough if you’re mentally weak. Physical toughness often requires strength, but is much more than just strength. Physical toughness is a measure of how your body can endure pain caused by fatigue and adverse conditions. While it’s true that pain is physical, research shows that the intensity of the pain one feels is mental.

When it comes to pain, this basically means that although pain itself is not a state of mind, the intensity of how we feel the pain is. What’s more, Linden’s research suggest that positive emotions can minimize the intensity of the pain one feels. Furthermore, the reverse effect of having negative emotions increases the intensity of pain.

This is the link between physical toughness and mental toughness. Mentally tough people have the ability to continue to think positive as they experience more and more physical pain. Those who are mentally weak are prone to not only negative thoughts in the face of physical pain, but also complain and are quick to give up and quit. This is why mentally tough individuals are capable of pushing their bodies beyond the limits of those who are mentally weak.

Therefore, as a parent working with a child to develop mental toughness it’s imperative that the first thing you do is work on their self-talk. As long as a child uses negative self-talk, they will not be able to get mentally tougher.

2) Developing Mental Toughness Requires the Use of Positive Training Pain

To grow mentally tougher, an athlete must change their mindset on pain. The mindset an athlete needs is to accept that even though pain never goes away, one can increase the tolerance for it.

Moreover, your role as a parent is to help them increase this tolerance. Not the tolerance for the pain caused by trauma, injury, and disease. Leave that to the doctors. Instead, I’m talking about the pain directly impacting mental toughness such as soreness, conditioning, fatigue, and failure.

The process of increasing this type of pain tolerance requires a process that is repeated with intention and consistency. The fact about processes in general, and the process of increasing pain tolerance specifically, is that change doesn’t happen overnight.

By definition, a process requires a series of interrelated actions to create transformation. Therefore, when the transformation you want to make is to increase pain tolerance, then those interrelated actions to create the transformation must include experiencing pain. But not just any pain, it must be what is called positive training pain.

Positive Training Pain

Positive training pain is the mindset of intentionally putting an athlete through a non-threatening painful experience to push them just beyond their pain threshold. The pain is non-threatening because 1) it’s under the athlete’s control to stop at any point and 2) it doesn’t threaten injury.

What’s more, the pain is “positive” because the specific intent of the painful experience is to improve the athlete’s performance by increasing their pain tolerance using a progression.

That last word “progression” is ultimately the secret sauce for increasing pain tolerance. Being that positive training pain is a form of pain under the athlete’s control, the athlete must know their limits. Consequently, to know their limits you must test their limits. Therefore, increasing pain tolerance requires a progression. A progression is the process of starting with the athlete’s current abilities and gradually layering on new abilities as they improve. 

In short, this means you must test the athlete’s absolute maximum limit. Then as soon as they recover and not a second later, have them do a little more than they did the last time. Repeat this over and over and their pain tolerance will increase.

3) Mental Toughness is a Skill

The final insight parents must understand about mental toughness is that children aren’t born mentally tough. Some children may be more predisposed to behaviors that lead to mental toughness, but ultimately mental toughness is developmental.

To explain this in simple terms, mental toughness is a skill. So, just like any other skill, there are only two ways to guarantee improvement.

A) Learn from experts who are already mentally tough in the way you want your child to be

• Identify experts who have mental toughness in the way you want your child to have it.
• Figure out what they are doing (by either interviewing them or through thorough research) to allow them to have that type of mental toughness.
• Come up with practice techniques that will teach your child to do what they are doing the same way.

B) Hire an expert coach who can teach your child how to perform with more mental toughness

• Hire an expert coach who has experience helping athletes in your child’s age range improve their mental toughness.
• The coach explains to you exactly what accounts for improvement and how it is measured.
• That coach then guides you and your child in performing specific practice techniques designed to help improve mental toughness.

The challenge in both approaches starts with finding an expert in mental toughness. However, with approach A you must not only find an expert, but you must also have the ability to diagnose what the expert is doing that you are not and develop a practice technique that helps you do that. On the other hand, with approach B the coach helps you with the final two steps.

As you can see, although approach A is free and approach B cost money, approach B is more efficient. So, the decision of what approach you take comes down to if you have more time than money or more money than time.