Building mental toughness in young athletes is a practical process that goes beyond just sports. If a young athlete lives an easy life that doesn’t challenge their mental toughness, then they won’t be mentally tough. On the other hand, if an athlete must consistently overcome challenges that require mental toughness, then they will develop mental toughness.

Therefore, building a young athlete’s mental toughness must start with their parents. An athlete’s parents can’t let their children off the hook when things get tough. As much as each of us wants to create a safe and happy environment for our children and support them when they’re struggling, overdoing this debilitates mental toughness. Correspondingly, parents must find ways to create challenges for young athletes when things are easy and not help them too much when things are hard.

So, depending on this aspect of the athlete’s home and school environment, building their mental toughness in sports is either going to be a proactive or reactive process.

Proactively Building Mental Toughness

If a parent is already challenging their child in the home, then it’s unlikely a child will lack mental toughness when playing sports. In this case, it’s best to use a proactive approach to continue to make the athlete more mentally tough.

To take this proactive approach, I suggest using the “4Cs of mental toughness” as a framework.

1. Challenge: Proactively seek out challenges and look for opportunities that will require the athlete to overcome adversity.
2. Commitment: Proactively put the athlete in situations where people depend on them keeping their promises and staying consistent over long periods of time.
3. Control: Proactively immerse the athlete in high pressure situations that cause emotions to run high and teach them how to stay under control in those situations.
4. Confidence: Proactively develop their confidence by giving the athlete opportunities to prove that they can perform under pressure and influence how others perceive them being “clutch”.

Reactively Building Mental Toughness

When a young athlete is already beyond the stage of proactive development, this means they already have an obvious mental toughness issue. In this case, a parent must make sure this doesn’t become a defining trait of the young athlete. In other words, don’t let the athlete believe that they were born mentally weak and can’t do anything about it.

First, don’t keep telling the athlete they need to be tougher. If you keep telling an athlete that they need to be tougher then you are also telling that athlete that they are mentally weak. This creates a pattern of negative self-talk.

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 young athletes 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 blurting things like this 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“
• “Hard is good, this is your chance to get better“
• “Focus on your strengths and you will do great“

Positive Affirmations

Once you can eliminate the outside negativity, the next step is to develop some type of positive affirmation routine. An affirmation is a simple statement one says out loud for the purpose of absorbing as a truth in their life.

For example, each morning I may wake up and look in the mirror to tell myself “I am going to attack the day, I’m strong and full of energy.” Many sports psychologist and spiritual thinkers believe that positive affirmation routines are healthy and helpful for eliminating negative self-talk.

The key is that it must be a habitual process for it to work. Subsequently, I recommend for a parent and child to do this together in the morning and at night to ensure the routine is followed. In addition, a routine before and after competitions and/or in critical pressure moments may be necessary.

Regardless of how often you do it, it’s important to stay consistent and remain patient with the process. I suggest sitting with the child and typing the affirmations together. Then, print them out and tape them somewhere that is readily visible. You could also put them on an index card that can be tucked in their sports equipment or take a few pithy positive affirmations and have them printed on those silicone wristbands that can be worn everywhere.

Start Small and Create a Progression

Building mental toughness in an athlete who lacks mental toughness won’t happen overnight. Consequently, the next step is to create a progression that starts off easy, then increasingly gets harder. This requires patience.

Parents and coaches working to build a young athlete’s mental toughness must accept this. 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. But it doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as progress is being made.

Start the young athlete 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.

Mental Toughness Deserves the Same Treatment as Strength Training

Coaches and parents are quick to address a deficiency in physical skills with camps, private coaching, drills, and strength/speed training. For some parents, money is no object when it comes to coaching up a child on their physical skills.

On the other hand, when a young athlete experiences issues with mental toughness they get nothing even close to the same treatment. At best they get a motivational speech. At worst parents and coaches yell obscenities at them.

Athletes struggling with mental toughness get negative reinforcement constantly. Coaches, parents, and even fans tell them they are lazy, lack motivation, have a bad attitude or some other criticism that only makes things worse.

All things being equal, there is almost zero effort made to support athletes who need mental skills training. Some coaches would rather kick these athletes off their team rather than find a way to help them.

The solution? Parents and coaches must stop ignoring the simple things like setting and tracking goals to get mentally tougher. Simple things like sitting still and breathing to learn how to control one’s mind against negative self-talk. Or hanging on a pull-up bar for as long as possible to connect mental toughness to physical toughness.

Can the athlete do these things for 1 minute, 2 minutes, or 10 minutes? Can they set and track a goal to add 10, 20, or 30 seconds to their personal best every week or two? Mental skills training is not rocket science, but it does require consistent effort.

Physical problems become problems because of the lack of physical skills. Similarly, mental problems become problems because of the lack of mental skills. Until parents and coaches accept this and do something about it, an athlete who struggles with mental toughness will continue to struggle.