Mental Toughness blog

I work with a lot of coaches to help them prepare their teams for crunch games: Derbies, finals and games against big rivals. This is still the most common style of consulting I do, although to be fair there are some teams that are realizing that developing mental skills, attitudes and high performance mindsets are critical to get vastly improved results, and to do that takes time, and is part of a bigger process.

During my time working in rugby, I have never worked with someone who could step as effectively as Frank Wagenstroom. I first got to know Frank in 2008 when he was in the Sharks 2008 Super 14 Squad, he scored a good try in the warm up game against Free State but didn’t feature during that season and later moved on.

I often get asked what I think the ratio is between physical requirements and mental requirements to compete at the highest level in sport. Many athletes I speak to say its 80 /20 (80% mental and 20% physical), and others say 50/50.

Parents and Coaches are often challenged with what to do when a youngster is not performing or achieving anywhere near what they could in terms of potential – primarily through their lack of application. They try the reward, they try to threaten, and often they try everything. The danger here is that the youngster doesn’t actually know what he wants – however his resolve to do the opposite of what he is being pushed to do just gets stronger as time goes by.

When Mike Cooper and I wrote “In the Zone” (2007: Zebra Press) we noticed that the top athletes we spoke to all had high quality and meaningful practise.

People routinely treat the body as if it has no direct impact on the mind and vice versa. However the two are different sides of the same coin. The ancient Greeks were amongst the first to starting talking about the link between the two, they emphasised the importance of bodily exercise for developing the mind. More recently in western literature Joseph Pilates (of Pilates fame) was the first to emphasize this point, “A strong body improves the mind. And, the improved mind was believed in turn to improve the physical body”