Mental Toughness Essay

Mental toughness is a choice. The athlete must choose a path of honing their mind toward a course of strength, power, and preparedness. It’s a personal choice (Kuehl, Kuehl, & Tefertiller, 2005). Therefore, the coach has to create a positive environment that cultivates trustworthy relationships with two-way communication with a cooperative-style, task-mastery, and growth-mindset. Then the coach and the sport psychology consultant need to create a customized mental training tools and skills training program to intertwine the basic fundamentals of sport psychology with the team’s physical programs to include strength and conditioning. Lastly, the coach and consultant need to live out sound principles and values on and off the field or court

That means the coach should be deliberate, thoughtful and systematic to include how they relate to their athletes. Getting to know their athlete in more than one way is required, too. This has not been emphasized within mental toughness literature (according to Weinberg, Freysinger, & Mellano); however, in order to create the environment conducive to the development of mental toughness, the coach must know each athletes’ personalities, attitudes, coping styles, and motives. This is a very time consuming process and Weinberg, Freysinger, & Mellano admit this; however, their suggestion was to ask each athlete to write down three things they wanted the coach to know about them with an emphasis on developing mental toughness. I would first give a 30 minute presentation on what is mental toughness so that my athletes understood the subject before requesting them to write down three things (Weinberg al et, 2016). In addition, this would be the first step in my subjective assessment to discover their current level of mental

Being positive, encouraging, providing informative feedback that is clear and supportive. One way to do this is by establishing a trusting, authentic, and ethical relationship and be a good listener. To be a good listener, the coach must actively listen with empathic and attentive ears and try to understand how each athlete feels from their point of view. The coach also must foster autonomy, the centerpiece of self-determination theory. This gives them a sense of personal control and increases their competence, confidence, and intrinsic motivation, effort, sense of responsibility, and moral development. This will make the athlete feel that their coach trust their decision-making skills which further increases their confidence and motivation (Weinberg al et,