Mental Toughness

Last month, in the second article of a series of sports psychology articles written by Jeremy Lazarus, we talked about creating the right mindset for success in sport. This month, Jeremy, who's book, Ahead of the Game: How to Use Your Mind to Win in Sport was ranked number one on Amazon in sports psychology, takes a look at mental toughness and overcoming obstacles, so if your looking to get an edge on your competitors read on!

In sport generally, as in life, we are bound to be faced with setbacks and difficulties. How we handle them psychologically is an essential factor in our results.I would like to suggest that setback can be grouped into three categories:
Defeat and/or poor performance
Injury
Difficult relationships

This article will deal with some aspects of the first point. Other aspects, and the other two points, will be dealt with in subsequent articles.

Dealing with Defeat and/or Poor Performance
Clearly, losing is part of sport. Some people are better at handling it than others. And playing at our best every time, never making mistakes, is something that is clearly unrealistic. Many sportspeople get upset about mistakes and defeat – whether the upset is some form of anger, or sadness, and possibly leading to some fear of repeating it and/or guilt for letting people down in the future.

So how can we handle this? There are four key ways to do this, and they are not mutually exclusive:
‘Acknowledge and learn’
Just ‘let it go’
Get back into the same state as when you were playing well
Focus on what you want

It is important to say that if you are already happy with the way you handle defeat and/or poor performances, just keep doing it! If you are not, or if you are a coach who wants to have more ‘tools’ in your toolkit, then read on.

Acknowledge and Learn
Often the reason athletes struggle to overcome defeat or poor performances is that they become emotional about it. Rather than remain upset, it is more useful to step back (mentally) and ask themselves, “what can I learn from this situation, such that if I learned it and incorporated it into future situations this could be a blessing?” If that is too difficult, the athlete can ask themselves what advice they would give someone else who had experienced the same situation.
It is probably also useful to do some mental rehearsal, seeing themselves in that future situation doing it perfectly (Mental rehearsal, a major element of successful sporting performance, will be covered in a subsequent article).

Let It Go
Another way, once you have taken all the necessary ‘learnings’ from the event, is to allow the picture that you have of it in your mind to float off into the dim distance. For most people, a small dim picture in the distance will have less impact than a big bright one very close to us.
A slightly more rigourous way is to remember an old event which was disappointing, and which is now virtually insignificant. Notice the qualities of the picture (for example its size, location in relation to your field of vision, and brightness), sounds (for example volume, speed and direction of movement of the sound) and feelings (for example where are the feelings when you think about that event, what temperature are they, what shape, are they still or moving etc). Put that event to one side. Then, think of the recent event, and once you have taken all the ‘learnings’, alter the mental image (especially the picture) of that event to be the same as that of the old event, so that you relate to the recent event in the same way as you did the old event i.e. it is virtually insignificant.

Change Your State
By changing your state, you will be able to perform differently, mainly because of the (proven) link between the mind and the body. One way to do this is to fully immerse yourself mentally in a situation when you performed excellently.

Another way is by using the ‘physiology of excellence’ principle. Spend some time to relive events when you were in a good state and an unuseful state. You will notice the subtle differences in your physiology between those two types of events. There will be changes in aspects such as your posture and breathing rate and location. By being clear on your own ‘physiology of excellence’, you can then replicate it and use it to get into an excellent state.

Focus on your Goal
Often when faced with situations not going well, we can find ourselves thinking about what we don’t want to happen, for example:
losing/not winning
performing badly/not performing well
feeling bad/not feeling good

The principle of The Law of Dominant Thought says that what we pay attention to will increase. By paying attention to what you DON’T want to happen will paradoxically make it more likely to happen! In such situations, keep thinking about/focussing on what you DO want to happen, such as winning, performing well and feeling good.

Summary
We may not always be able to get the results that we want, but we can manage the way we respond. This article has give some tips how to do that. Future articles will cover ways to deal with other forms of setback.

About the Author: Jeremy Lazarus is a High-Performance Sports Coach, and a Certified Master Trainer and Master Practitioner of NLP. He has coached a top five Ironman athlete. He has been coaching since 1999, and is the author of the best-selling book ‘Ahead of the Game: How to Use Your Mind to Win in Sport’ (Ecademy Press, ISBN 9-781905-823093), a practical guide for athletes, coaches and players of all levels. He can be contacted on: 020 8349 2929, http://www.thelazarus.com/ or jeremy@thelazarus.com

He is also an associate of TriSport Coaching UK, which offers the full range of coaching and support for tri-athletes of all levels. http://www.trisportuk.org/ 020 8722 4617, ask for Martin Allen.