The Quote Coaches Must Apply to Help Athletes with Mental Toughness
Once a coach decides they need to help their athletes with mental toughness, they must first start with how they think about mental toughness. Mental toughness is not just an idea, it’s a practice. So, just like any form of practice it must have meaning and purpose as this quote suggest.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The process of helping an athlete develop mental toughness is quite simple. There is really only one way a coach can develop it. To develop an athlete’s mental toughness, coaches must help the athlete learn how to overcome mentally tough challenges. This requires facing real life pain, ideally positive training pain. Moreover, overcoming real life pain requires building new mental and physical skills. Skills that can only be built through the pain of repetition.
Therefore, if an athlete does not believe in a “why” for the “how” of overcoming the pain of building mental toughness, it won’t happen. This is the mistake far too many coaches make, skipping the “why” step. Until an athlete has a purpose they believe in, mental toughness training can’t be the focus.