The #1 Lie Athletes Tell Themselves about Mental Toughness
Athletes tell themselves things all the time to rationalize their situation. This self-talk sometimes helps their performance and sometimes it hurts. Specifically, when an athlete tells themselves lies about their mental toughness to rationalize their situation, this self-talk hurts.
For example, when some athletes struggle mentally, they rationalize it by saying this is just how they are. Instead of doing the work, they accept that their lack of mental toughness in a given situation is a character trait they were born with.
This is the #1 lie about mental toughness athletes must avoid at all costs. If you’re an athlete that has ever had this thought, you must break this fixed mindset. Indeed, athletes must view mental toughness through the lens of the growth mindset if they want to be the best version of themselves.
Mental toughness is a skill. Just like all skills, mental toughness is not something mother nature gives you without earning it. It takes patience, persistence, planning, and practice to develop mental toughness. Sometimes parents create environments that do this for their kids, and sometimes people must go through the process of developing mental toughness on their own. One way is not better than the other, as they both require two steps:
1) Progression
Developing mental toughness requires a progression that starts off easy, then increasingly gets harder. This requires patience.
Parents, coaches, and athletes must accept that building mental toughness won’t happen overnight. Making steady progress by overcoming 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. With that said, 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.
2) Repetition
To improve mental toughness, there must be consistency with repetitions. 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.