The Fearless Warrior Podcast

072: Mindset Myths Busted: Why I Don't Use the Term "Mental Toughness"

• Amanda Schaefer

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This is the 5th installment in our "Mindset Myths" series. Today, I challenge the popular notion of "mental toughness," asserting that it often leads to emotional suppression and unrealistic expectations in athletes. I also share with you what term I use instead, and my reasoning around that decision.

Episode Highlights:
• Why I don't use the word mental toughness
• The difference between mental toughness and mental strength
• How the term mental strength can give the power back to your athletes
• Importance of fostering supportive environments over tough love

If you want to read the article I mention in this episode: "7 Signs You're Not Mentally Strong, You're Just Acting Tough", you can find it here

If you are a coach and looking for more resources to help support building mental strength in your athletes, book a FREE call with Coach Kara, our Director of Team Performance, to discuss strategies and resources we provide to help teams, click here

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the fearless warrior podcast, a place for athletes, coaches and parents who know the value of a strong mindset. I'm your host, coach AB, a mental performance coach on a mission, former softball coach, wife and mom of three. Each episode we will dive deep into all things mental performance, mindset tools and how to rewire the brain for success. So if your goal is to gain the mental edge and learn the secrets of mental performance, you're in the right place. Let's tune in to today's episode. We are back for another mindset myths busted. This is the final one of the series. We've done five of these. This is the fifth one and this one is going to be a little bit longer. So, mindset Myths Busted. Why I don't use the term mental toughness? This again is going to be a soapbox. I saved the best for last. Of all the myths that I'm busting, this one might be a bit sassy today. So you've been warned, but rest assured, I think you will find that as I debunk this myth, you will realize it's always about the perception in which we look at these terms. Society, generations, our culture has perpetuated some of these bad practices. It's not the coach's fault or the parent's fault that we use this term. I actually did a poll on my Instagram where I wanted to see, before I posted this podcast episode, how many of you are actually using this term, and the polls are in. A lot of you are continuing to use the term be mentally tough and mental toughness, and so please don't misinterpret this. I am aiming to educate you. I am by no means calling you out if you use this term, but after listening to this podcast, I might be able to persuade you to hop on this soapbox with me. And again, I have colleagues who are mental performance coaches who I will go toe to toe with on this, but I'll state my case on why you won't hear me use the term mental toughness, not with my one-to-toe with on this. But I'll state my case on why you won't hear me use the term mental toughness not with my one-on-one clients, not with my program members and definitely not with the teams that I work with. So I'm going to look at my notes here because, again, this is a long one and I did a little bit of research. So let's define mental toughness and it's actually not some definition, because it's two words. So if we're really going to the root of this, I want to make sure that everything I produce for you is accurate, and when I googled scholarly articles and researched more on this, I had a good chuckle.

Speaker 1:

When you google mental toughness, you get results like the five C's of mental toughness, the four C's of mental toughness, the five pillars of mental toughness, the six markers of mental toughness. Try it for yourself and you'll see how absurd it becomes. It gets muddied really fast. Half of these articles are LinkedIn articles, snippets of TED talks, and they get perpetuated and taken out of context. Very similar to when buzzwords like grit and growth mindset and taken out of context. Very similar to when buzzwords like grit and growth mindset got taken out of context. Dr Dweck has amazing research on growth mindset, angela Duckworth's finding on grit, but when you read these books, cover to cover, you'll realize the context in which these things need to be taught to athletes, not just watching a 30-second clip of a TED Talk posted to Instagram. But I digress.

Speaker 1:

So mental toughness defined According to dictionarycom the definition of mental first word mental of, or relating to the mind, specifically of, or relating to the total emotional and intellectual response of an individual to external reality. So let's look at the word toughness According to dictionarycom, the definition of toughness the quality of being strong and not easily broken, torn, etc. The quality B the physical or emotional strength that allows someone to endure strain or hardship. So let's put those two together the mind's ability to be strong and not easily broken, or the mind's strength that allows it to endure strain or hardship. So what happens if the mind is easily broken or doesn't endure strain or hardship? Very well, these are very real scenarios that happen because life, life happens, and so athletes are going to endure hardships and feel broken. They're going to feel like their mindset wasn't in the right space. But it does not I repeat, it does not mean you are broken. So already you can see how these definitions start to put athletes in a box of unrealistic expectations, and so often I hear horror stories about coaches yelling at their players to just be mentally tough, to suck it up, to be strong I was coached by that generation but they're not actually giving their athletes tools and skills to actually be successful at it.

Speaker 1:

So telling someone to just be tough means to encourage them to endure a difficult situation without showing weakness or complaining, essentially advising them to push through challenges and push their emotions aside and just figure it out, even if it feels really, really hard. And why this is problematic is that it's dismissive of emotions. It can come across as you shouldn't be experiencing these struggles, you shouldn't be experiencing these human emotions, and then it leaves the athlete wondering what's wrong with me, why can't I figure this out? It also shows a lack of empathy. So saying just be tough doesn't acknowledge the complexity of the situations that our athletes might be facing. There's so much more going on off the softball field, in the weight room, other areas, and so, instead of just pushing those emotions aside or just not really putting yourself in your athlete's shoes, we can open up that dialogue. We can offer them support. I want to know what's going on. I want to know what you're feeling, even if it's really, really hard. I want to check in. It's okay to feel this way, it's understandable to feel this way, and I get why you're overwhelmed. And then, at the end of this, I'm going to give you, if we don't use the term mentally tough, what do we talk about instead? And so we're going to say things like you can overcome this, you are strong, you can do this and again, these aren't just platitudes. There's more to this and how you can actually train it. So here's another definition.

Speaker 1:

Again, going back to this term, mental toughness, it was a concept derived from the field of sports psychology as a way to explain how athletes deal with stress and pressure of their intensive competition and need to train. However, as the concept spread, the British authors maintain that it needed to be more precisely defined and separated from other similar qualities. This article mentions grit and resilience. One way was to do so by to test rigorously the connections among all four qualities. Remember I said the four C's. There are four C's to mental toughness, and so what they had to do is they had to research this, and they conducted studies in participants to see if they could score their mental toughness levels. Which leads me to my next big issue on the term mental toughness Is it a personality trait, if it can be measured, or is it a skill? Are you born with it or do you have a natural inclination and tendency to be dependent on your personality traits? So again, here's another muddy definition. Mental toughness is a personality trait that determines your ability to perform consistently under stress and pressure. Yet another definition.

Speaker 1:

Mental toughness, as originally conceptualized by peter clow at the united kingdoms manchester metropolitan university, divides into four main components. Here's the four c's control, commitment and confidence. Control means the ability to control your emotions as well as what happens to you more generally. Commitment involves setting goals and then achieving them. Confidence includes your belief in your own abilities and in your ability to influence others.

Speaker 1:

What I hear in those definitions is that if we can train these, instead of just assuming that it's a personality trait, they're listing a lot of these mental skills that we teach. So, rather, instead of using the term mental toughness, I'm going to talk to an athlete about how to increase their confidence, how to increase their control with goal setting, how to create discipline instead of motivation, their commitment Again, that goes back to their goal setting, their discipline, their self-talk, their routines. Challenge, that would be failure recovery, leaning on your support system, knowing your why, and so when I hear these definitions, mental toughness becomes so broad that how do we teach this? And so, if we go deeper, why wouldn't we start thinking about the applications and the mental skills that we can actually teach our athletes? Are you sick of the definitions?

Speaker 1:

Here's something else, and again, I had so much fun researching this. I found an amazing article written by Amy Morin. She is a licensed therapist, a psychotherapist, an author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, which is a book Ink, top 100 speaker, tedx speaker and host of the Mentally Stronger podcast, and this is her article Seven Signs You're Not Mentally Strong, you're Just Acting Tough. So it's this idea that we're not just mentally tough and when we fall into this category of we're just trying to be mentally tough you can see that there's pitfalls of these, and so the point is that we're going into this gray area of where our athletes think they're being mentally tough, when really they're not. It's actually detrimental.

Speaker 1:

Number one they mask insecurities. If you don't allow yourself to be vulnerable with weaknesses aka you shame yourself for being human when you mask your insecurities, you're trying to cover up your inner self-doubt that everyone experiences. So if you don't know the areas you need to improve upon, how can you even strive to improve those areas? So if you're trying to be mentally tough, you're going to have a tendency to try to cover up those weaknesses instead of being more open and vulnerable with them. Number two mentally tough.

Speaker 1:

If you're trying to be mentally tough instead of mentally strong, you think that failure is not an option, which means that you avoid failure at all costs. I see this often with clients who are avoiding striking out. They avoid it at all costs because it's a failure if you strike out, but in doing so they'll swing at crappy pitches early in the count and make contact because it's too risky to go deep in the count and get an 0-2 count, and so it prevents them from truly trying. People who feel like they need to act tough are gonna rely on the skills they already have rather than trying or risking or learning anything new, and so in avoiding failure, we're actually creating mediocre results versus taking a bit of risk to be great and the greatest of all time have had a healthy relationship with failure, and they know that with great risk to be great and the greatest of all time have had a healthy relationship with failure, and they know that with great risk comes great reward.

Speaker 1:

And Michael Jordan, the famous quote I missed 10,000 shots in my career. I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and fell short. And he wasn't mentally tough because he avoided failure. He faced it head on, and those failures then became his stepping stones for growth. And so I would argue that Michael Jordan wasn't mentally tough. He was mentally strong and he was willing to look at those failures. If he was mentally tough, he would just not even think about those failures. He would try to avoid them. And that's not the case in high performers that they've studied over and over again.

Speaker 1:

Number three your self-worth depends on how others see you. People who act tough are very concerned with their appearance. Their self-worth depends on other people's opinions of them. Mentally strong people, however, aren't worried about proving anything to anyone but themselves. No-transcript. You can kind of see where we're going with this.

Speaker 1:

Number four mentally tough means that you suppress your emotions. The only emotion tough people feel comfortable expressing is anger. They hide their sadness, their fear and their excitement from others as much as possible. Because if we are showing our emotions, it means that we're not mentally tough. And so if something triggering happens on the court or in the field and I'm sad or frustrated about it, often when we're told to be mentally tough, we're told to suck it up. Well, what does that mean? I can't show any emotion, I can't be sad about this. That's not what a mentally tough person does. But a mentally strong person is willing to admit when they're afraid and when they're frustrated, and they're not shy if they let their emotions out and instead of ignoring them, they're kind of using them and monitoring them, like we do in our mental performance calls. Is we move with our emotions. We're allowed to feel those emotions. That's what we want, instead of suppressing them.

Speaker 1:

Number five you deny your pain. People who are intent on acting tough pride themselves on tolerating a great deal of pain, whether they treat their bodies like a machine or they refuse to acknowledge an injury. They view their willingness to keep going as a badge of honor. I'm sure my generation and older we played through injuries at fear of upsetting our coaches. We had to be mentally tough. If someone is trying to be mentally tough, they're not going to listen to their bodies after an injury, they're not going to seek care, they're not going to seek rehab or do their physical therapy. Do their physical therapy and they can be so overconfident that they're committed to their goals that they disregard the negative consequences, like physical injury, caused by their intense desire to be mentally tough and to ultimately reach their goals and win. I can speak from experience on this. I spent my freshman and, I think, sophomore season battling through a shoulder injury because I felt like I just had to be mentally tough.

Speaker 1:

Number six you think you can do everything. While healthy self-confidence and self-efficacy is good, acting tough and just being tough means that we have to have this grandiose idea and this ideation that nothing will ever stop me. I'm a machine, I can do this. And people who act tough often overestimate their abilities and underestimate the work required to reach their goals. And we see this of like I'm D1 or bust, I'm going to go D1. But then they underestimate what it's going to take to be there. On the flip side, mentally strong people are prepared for the realities of a challenge. They know that if they have these big goals, there's going to be obstacles, there's going to be setbacks, and they recognize how much effort it's going to take to invest in that goal. And last number seven you try to control other people. People who act tough thrive on feeling like they have power over other people. They want to be perceived as being in control and they often micromanage others or tell others how they should feel. This happens often with teammates and if you look up the chain of command, it happens often with head coaches and assistant coaches in programs and we see the program culture crumbling because often if a coach is saying be mentally tough, it's going to start at the top as well.

Speaker 1:

If that's not powerful enough, I'm going to be listing that article below. I hope you read that whole article and you're starting to see the dangers of using the term mentally tough. And now we're to the point in this episode where I've told you all the reasons why not to use the term mentally tough. And so what do I use instead? I actually use the term mentally strong or becoming mentally stronger. And when we start to say this, I promise I just have one more definition.

Speaker 1:

The definition of strong is an adjective having the power to move heavy weights or perform other physically demanding tasks, or able to withstand great force or pressure. Notice the use of the word power. The definition of power having control or influence over people and events. And again, strong is an adjective, but when you use it as a verb, it becomes strengthen, and we have the ability to build up strength, to influence our own power. Now, remember, at the beginning of this, we defined tough and it was the quality underline that word the quality of being strong and not easily broken or torn. So my final question is do you want to have the power or do you want to have the quality.

Speaker 1:

As for me, I want to empower my athletes, I want to strengthen my athletes, I want to teach my athletes how they can build this on their own and, all definitions aside, I hope that this myth has been busted for you today as to why I do not use the term mental toughness, but rather use the term mental strength instead.

Speaker 1:

And if this episode resonated with you and you're feeling fired up about giving your athlete mental strength, then you're absolutely in the right place. Our mental skills training programs have helped over 800 athletes and families and dozens of teams, and if we're expanding in 2025 and you wanna hop on board, we would love to work with you. All of our links are listed below. If you want more information or you just wanna have a conversation with us, our DMs are open. We have all of our information listed. You can find us on Instagram. That's the best place to DM us and give us feedback. What did you think of these myth series? Is it resonating with you and should we do more of them? This was the last and final Myth Busted episode we had planned for the series, so if you want us to do more of them, let us know and we'll definitely dig up some more myths. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next episode.

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Amanda Schaefer

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