Do you want to win? Then get tough. Mentally Tough

Mental toughness is often needed to overcome any stress and anxiety

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is one way to say it. Or, as one sports psychologist put it, mental toughness is “the ability to consistently perform towards the upper range of your talent and skill regardless of competitive circumstances.”

Mental toughness is a necessity in competitive sports. Competing against other athletes, or even against your personal best, can be a stressful process. Competing, in general, can cause anxiety in some athletes. It’s one thing to enjoy playing basketball on your day off, but when you’re playing a game of basketball against a rival team and all eyes are on you to perform, mental toughness is often needed to overcome any stress and anxiety.

The Role of Mental Toughness in Sports Performance

When it’s time to compete and prove your physical and sports ability to yourself and to others with an audience present, stress and anxiety can often get in the way. If you miss a basket or swing the bat and miss, you might feel like you have failed or that you are not good enough. With others watching, these feelings can become magnified. Mental toughness during sports performance involves tuning out the opinions of others. After all, you are human and you will make mistakes. Acknowledging that no one is perfect and that all you can do is make your best effort each time is a large part of demonstrating mental toughness in sports.

Exercising Your Mind to Help You Excel

If you have watched your favorite tennis player you have probably seen some instances of the player serving many double faults and nearly losing the game only to come back with several aces in a row and win. This is an example of mental toughness, where the prospect of losing can potentially take over, but the athlete stays so focused on the task at hand that he has the potential to do his best each and every time. The exercise of the mind in this process is that of staying present in each and every moment. As soon as your mind wanders off to what happened minutes before or centers on negative thoughts about yourself or others, your potential for sub-par performance increases.

Five Crucial Psychological Factors for Success

At the elite end of sport, pressure can be extreme – not only on the day of the competition, but from within the teams / organizations for which you perform to get selected to compete, financial strains, and the impact on your personal life requiring great sacrifice. Recent research identified five key psychological factors in elite athletes that act as a protective buffer from the possible negative effects of stressors. These factors shape the way successful athletes explain and respond to the stressors they face, such that it promotes healthy and positive responses in their behaviors increasing the likelihood of their best possible performance in their chosen sport on the day. Here are five important factors which one needs to have in abundance.

1. Positive personality
2. Motivation
3. Focus
4. Perceived social support
5. Confidence

Building Confidence in Sports

Sports psychology can help athletes looking to improve their confidence. You may be the strongest, tallest, most powerful athlete on the field, court, or track, but if you aren’t confident in your abilities, you’ll have trouble reaching your goals. Work on improving your confidence just as you work on developing your sport-specific skills, and your performance will soar.

• Realize that confidence fluctuates. Confidence for all athletes — even at the highest level — ebbs and flows. Confidence is not all-or-nothing. It’s a state of mind that fluctuates, so don’t beat yourself up when your confidence is lower. Just focus on improving, and your confidence will follow suit.
• Focus on yourself, not on others. Instead of thinking about how well your teammates or opponents are doing, think about your own performance and how you can improve. This is your athletic career, so you need to focus on what you need to do to improve as an athlete. And when you improve as an athlete, your confidence will increase.
• Focus on day-to-day success. When you have success every day in training — even the smallest of successes — your confidence rises. If your confidence rises a small amount each day, just think where you’ll be in one month, six months, or a year!
• Concentrate on the process, not outcomes. When you focus on improving your performance — the process of improving — you become more confident because you’re focusing on something you have control over. You can’t control outcomes — you may play your best game ever and still lose. If you’re focused on process, sure, you’ll be disappointed when you lose, but your confidence will remain high because you’ll know you performed your best.
• Focus on what you’re doing right. Learning from your mistakes is important, but you don’t want to linger on them. If you spend too much time thinking about your mistakes, your confidence will wane. When you focus on what you’re doing right and correct your errors, your confidence will rise.

With mental toughness, you rely on all of your strengths and abilities. You acknowledge your weaknesses but push through every aspect of your game to become better. You stay relaxed at all times and focus only on what you can control in each moment.

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