The Process of Coaching an Athlete to Develop Mental Toughness
The process of helping an athlete develop mental toughness is quite simple. There is 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.
As the renowned German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said:
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Until an athlete has a why they believe in, mental toughness training can’t be the focus. Instead, the focus 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. Thus, the process of coaching an athlete to develop mental toughness must follow three steps in the following order:
1) Get buy-in from the athlete on the why.
2) Get buy-in from the athlete on the how.
3) Repeatedly train the athlete to overcome positive training pain through practice.