How can coaches build mental resilience? A Sport Psychology Perspective

A study conducted around 30 years ago by Gould et al (1987), found that 82% of coaches rated mental toughness (MT) as the most important psychological attribute in determining wrestling success. Unfortunately, only 9% believed they were successful in developing MT in their athletes. 

A lot of the literature is based on interviews with coaches, athletes, and to a lesser degree, parents. From the views of sport psychologists who are from applied and research experience background in MT and therefore more united views of how coaches should build MT. 

Weinberg et al (2018) suggest that to build MT, sport psychologists believe coaches should be thoughtful and purposeful in how they think about their players (i.e. be instructive and to encourage, to foster autonomy and see them as individuals) and their staff (i.e. to be multidimensional and educate). This is in addition to what they do (i.e., to create adversity and also teach mental skills). 

Weinberg et al (2016) conducted a study where they interviewed 14 sport psychologists with regards to how they feel coaches should/could build MT in their athletes.

These sport psychologists were experienced/expert sport psychologists who had accepted research (i.e., publications in journals) and/or had applied expertise (worked with teams and/or individuals) which focused on building MT.

They came up with thoughts on their experiences and research which provides a framework that is displayed in the figure (1) below.

Figure 1. Weinberg et al (2018).

How coaches think about the athlete (Challenging but encouraging):

To build MT, sport psychologists recommend that coaches should be challenging but also be encouraging their athletes. For this to be challenging, informative feedback needs to be accepted. The point for this to be accepted is that coaches need to establish strong relationships with their athletes as they will be more willing to allow coaches to provide informative and constructive feedback.

Furthermore, when providing constructive feedback, coaches need to be clear that this feedback is to help athletes learn and improve their skills. Although, previously providing support and encouragement after giving critical but constructive feedback (Martindale, Collins, & Daubney, 2005) has never been directly associated to MT. 

How coaches can foster autonomy in their athletes: 

When building MT, coaches should think about their players as individuals who desire a sense of personal control. This autonomy gives a player a sense of competence/confidence as they can feel that their coaches have faith their decision making. This confidence then helps athletes make decisions on their own when the stress is high (attribute of MT) during competition, therefore increasing their chances of success.

Additionally, increased autonomy will enhance an athlete’s intrinsic motivation, sense of responsibility, effort and moral development. Ultimately and in theory, coaches would like to create better people and by giving athletes a greater sense of autonomy it should allow this in the long term. 

Weinberg et al, (2018) noted that one sport psychologist said that “a coach should create an environment where athletes get their own choices, sense of volition, internalized control and specific feedback ... so there’s aspects of developing mental toughness that require a coach to be caring and nurturing, and supportive of building autonomy.” 

Current research (Mageau & Vallerand, 2003) suggests that coaches who form an autonomy-supportive environment have athletes that are greater in intrinsic motivation, feel greater competence within their abilities, show greater sporting behaviour, and have greater autonomy when making decisions.

Sport psychologists suggest various things that coaches can do in order to help build an athletes’ autonomy. This includes providing athletes with options, giving them opportunities to use their initiative (e.g., designing sessions on their own) and by creating a general democratic environment where they feel that the coaches listen to what they say. 

Seeing the athletes/players as individuals:

Athletes are individuals – everyone has their own way when responding to criticism, with different strengths, and weaknesses. As a side note, people could learn to respond to criticism better through adopting more of a growth mindset.

Getting to know each person as an individual is something throughout the coaching literature that has been stressed (Gilbert, 2006). With regards to MT literature though, it has not really been emphasised. Effective coaches need to know athletes’ attitudes, coping styles, personalities and motives. The coaches also need to know as well, the ways to create an environment favourable for allowing the development of MT to take place. 

One suggestion is for coaches to ask their athletes to write down three things that they want the coaches to know about them, especially in terms of building MT.

Sport can be a very busy and quick environment and getting to know players can be time consuming for coaches. This information could help coaches devise player-specific drills to increase MT. 

Being purposeful with how you as a coaching team (multi-dimensional) think/act: 

Part of coaching is thinking both about themselves as a coach and about their staff (e.g., assistant coaches) and how they all function with their players.

Sport psychologists suggest that when building MT coaches should take a multidimensional approach when trusting a range of different techniques that come together to reach the end goal of a player who is “mentally tough.”

This means being on the same page and passing on the same message whether you are on the coaching side, the nutritional or physiological side.

Being purposeful with how you as a coaching team can educate:

To be able to educate, you first need to gain the knowledge and learn how to best deliver it. This could involve reading the literature about MT strategies, attending coaching education seminars or conferences.

Attending sport psychology conferences on MT and speaking to professionals who can help with these strategies are some options available. This education could lead to the coaches educating their athletes by getting them to reflect upon their experiences in their sport and or life and what they have learned from previous games, races and competitions i.e. with regards to setbacks / adversity.

Coaches can initiate meetings with their athletes and can get them to keep diaries where they record their thoughts and feelings to help with their reflections. 

Create adversity and teach mental skills: 

The most consistent response from the sport psychologists that were interviewed was that coaches should be creating situations that are stressful, difficult and adverse when looking to build MT.

Sport psychologists believe that if coaches create adversity in practice for their athletes, they would then develop particular coping strategies to deal with different difficult situations effectively when facing them in future competitions.

Not only should athletes develop coping strategies on their own, coaches should teach athletes specific coping strategies to effectively deal with adverse situations. 

Players should be regularly challenged so that they avoid comfort zones where they are confident and comfortable in their abilities. The idea of putting athletes in these types of adverse situations is to create the feeling of being uncomfortable.

If coaches want to increase an athletes’ feeling of competence, then they should be giving more challenging tasks to achieve. These challenges shouldn’t be so tough that athletes can’t complete them and therefore risk threats to self. They should be difficult but attainable.

They should push athletes to their limits, where they can experience achievement by giving consistently hard effort. The effort here should be praised and not to praise any talent that they may possess.

Then when these situations arise in games/races/competition, they have actually dealt with them previously and therefore are more likely be able to react to the challenge in a more efficient and effective manner. 

In some situations, one way to create adversity, is to use distractions that can be brought into the training environment in order to create greater stress and imitate game conditions. For example, by having loud noises/music and fans waving their hands and banners in basketball practice sessions. This then would create distractions for a player who is practicing their free throws and needs to concentrate. 

Psychological pressure also can be introduced by having players solve certain problems. One way for coaches to do this could be to present players with different demands in the environment and asking them to deal with things such as different defending strategies in soccer, different wind or putting conditions in golf, or rainy/snowy cold conditions in kicking practice in rugby.

Although this would be difficult to make this happen in certain situations. But you could use bad weather situations to your advantage. The importance here is to have the players trying to solve these various conditions/situations independently. 

Teaching mental skills: 

When attempting to cope with these adverse situations, it is necessary for players to be taught a range of mental skills which should allow them to experience greater success. This in return can maintain or build confidence and self-esteem.

However, it would be logical, that before you put them into these difficult situations that you give them the basics of mental/coping skills to learn so that they can begin to deal with those situations effectively. 

Imagine if a tennis player were to have certain negative behaviours after losing several points in a row. For example, they would start to play too fast, become more negative and put themselves down.  

The coach could teach the player the certain mental strategies which would be tailored to their individual needs in that situation, by (as an example) slowing down, focus on some deep breathing techniques, change from negative to positive self-talk and to focus on their pre-serve routine.

This could be one way to address the set of behaviours and would provide them with psychological tools for their toolbox. Essentially, it isn’t just about providing the athletes with mental skills but skills in how to cope effectively in certain situations and getting them mentally prepared for adverse situations that may arise when competing in the future. 

Coach Rose (who won four consecutive NCAA Division I women’s volleyball championships at Penn State) stressed the importance of MT in attempting to maintain excellence over time.

He stated that “the result of repetition and simulated competitive practices, which in turn fosters better execution and instinctive decision making under pressure” is critical for success (Yukelson & Rose, 2014) and summarised the importance of MT. 

References

Gilbert, W. (2006). Introduction to special issue: Coach education. The Sport Psychologist, 20, 123–5. 

Gould, D., Hodge, K., Peterson, K., & Petlichkoff, L. (1987). Psychological foundations of coaching: Similarities and differences among intercollegiate wrestling coaches. The Sport Psychologist, 1 (4), 293-308.

Mageau, G., & Vallerand, R. (2003). The coach-athlete relationship: A motivational model. Journal of Sport Sciences, 21, 883–904. 

Martindale, R., Collins, D., & Daubney, J. (2005). Talent development: A guide for practice and research in sport. Quest, 57, 353–375. 

Weinberg, R., Freysinger, V., & Mellano, K. (2018). How can coaches build mental toughness? Views from sport psychologists. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 9(1), 1-10.

Weinberg, R., Freysinger, V., Mellano, K., & Brookhouse, E. (2016). Building mental toughness: Perceptions of sport psychologists. The Sport Psychologist, 30, 231–241. 

Yukelson, D., & Rose, R. (2014). The psychology of ongoing excellence: An NCAA coach’s perspective on winning consecutive multiple national championships. Journal of Sport Psychol- ogy in Action, 5, 44–58.