Mental Toughness for Sports, Coaching the Athletes Mind

Picture the scene: you’re an athlete and you’re on target to achieving your goal of being selected for the Olympic training squad. Training has been going well and you’ve been producing consistently good results. You’ve achieved a personal best performance this season and, crucially, you’ve remained injury free. The recurring injury that prevented you from making the team last time around appears finally to be behind you. You’re feeling in the form of your life and feeling mentally good.

Then you have a bad training day. In fact, your bad day begins before you even get to your training session. You wake up that morning feeling more tired than when you went to bed after a restless night of bad dreams revolving around not making the team. Even though you know it was just a dream, you’re unable to shake the enormously heavy feeling of bitter disappointment you experienced. You then get held up, through no fault of your own, on your way to the training ground and arrive late. Your coach lets you, and everyone within earshot, know just how disappointing your late arrival is and questions your commitment to the selection process. Your mood is now at an all time low and you proceed to put in some of your all-time worst performances ever in training. You feel in the worst form of your life and, just to add injury to insult, that old injury begins to niggle.

Living your dream or Creating a Nighmare…

So what happened? In the space of a few hours you’ve gone from feeling in top form and on track to achieving your Olympic dream to feeling you’re at the bottom of a pit of despair and a million miles from realising your dream. Is it physically possible to lose all condition in such a short period of time? Of course not, but it is mentally possible. Your emotional state has had a dramatic effect on your physical state. You’ve effectively gone through your day physically and mentally living your dream – you’ve been dwelling on the disappointment and re-living it over and over again in your mind. The weight of that disappointment has not only exhausted you mentally, it has also affected your whole demeanour and your physical ability to function normally, let alone to the best of your ability.

Recognising the Mental Game

Your ‘poor’ emotional state led to your ‘poor’ physical performance. Because of your low mood, the wrath of your coach served as confirmation that you’ve been right to dwell on thoughts of disappointment all day. You’re feeling disappointed, your coach is disappointed, therefore your ‘logical’ conclusion is that you are indeed a disappointment. Your thoughts are totally irrational and doubly so because you boarded that train of thought in a dream – nothing is based on reality! This serves to highlight the extraordinary power of the mind.

Think of it this way; if you had dreamed of winning Olympic gold, how would that have affected your mood? If you had gone through your day feeling positively inspired by your dream, how would your coach’s comments have affected you? Chances are you’d have been right royally peed off at having your commitment questioned, especially when the circumstances that delayed you were out with your control, but you’d probably also feel even more motivated to demonstrate your commitment and your readiness for selection!

Thoughts in residence ? Training the Body and Mind.

Your physical state is unquestionably influenced by your emotional state, but what about that niggling injury? The real question is; did the niggle physically reappear in isolation or did it come as part of a ‘disappointment package’? If you’ve suffered the disappointment of failing to make squad selection before because of a recurring injury problem, the train of thought you boarded in your dream will take you right back to that point in your life and recreate everything you felt at that time, both emotionally and physically.

Clearly, positive thoughts are the driving force behind positive performances but in the high pressure environment of competitive sport, it’s not always going to be possible to prevent negative thoughts from entering your mind. The key is to accept each thought for what it is, a thought. A thought can enter your mind but a thought can also leave your mind. Thoughts might hang around in your mind for a while but with practice, you can learn to identify the good, the bad, and the ugly and learn to evict the unhelpful variety before they claim squatters rights.

Ever heard the expression, ‘Hell on a handcart’? It’s used to describe a situation that’s going from bad to worse, and out of control. Well, think about that for a moment. If your train of thought has got you on a handcart to somewhere you don’t want to go, who’s controlling your handcart? The clue is in your mode of transport – it’s a handcart. Stop powering it. The more time you spend dwelling on a thought, the more power you’re giving it. You might not be able to halt it instantly but the moment you stop powering it, you begin to slow down. You can’t always control the thoughts that enter your head but you can control where those thoughts take you.This is an important element of mental toughness for sports. So,If you’re not enjoying the ride, get off at the next station!

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