Five tips on developing mental toughness

How can you match the world's top players in resilience and mind power? Dane Barclay provides some advice.

What do you see when you look at Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka? For me, it's players who can consistently perform when it counts, regardless of how tight or how big the match is. They look, and more importantly act mentally tough.

Mental toughness expert Dr Daniel Gucciardi of Curtin University in Western Australia, suggests that "'mental toughness' is a personal capacity to produce consistently high levels of subjective (e.g. personal goals or strivings) or objective performance (e.g. win set, win tournament) despite everyday challenges and stressors as well as personal adversity."

Parents want it in their children; coaches want it in their athletes. Being mentally tough is important for all athletes - however in my experience, a lot of people who try to develop it go about developing it in ways that are well intended, yet lead to promoting performance inconsistency. Behaviours that lead to choking.

Normal human experiences and mental toughness mythology

Firstly, competition isn't stress free, it never has been. Think about your own experiences - it is the place where you should experience stress. In my last article on choking, I discussed how by explicitly and implicitly teaching that it is inappropriate to have 'negative' emotions and thoughts when playing tennis matches, actually reinforces the mind to focus on removing these experiences, rather than being truly focused on the match.

It's natural that focus goes to the emotions because we think and feel that they are problematic and therefore we should change these to positive feelings. However, it doesn't always help us. Performance is negatively affected because the mind is busy problem solving how to reduce the negative feeling rather than focusing on what actually counts at that moment in time (i.e. the point being played out).

Let's be clear, experiencing anger, sadness and anxiety is not 'weak minded', it's a normal part of competition and these experiences will always be there, regardless of how good you are. Top players also experience these thoughts and feelings, after all - they're human too!

Mental toughness is not the absence of negative thoughts, emotions or other internal experiences, it's the understanding and acceptance that they will show up on the court when you don't want them to and still being able to commit to the game plan and behaviours that lead to consistent performance.

It's also not the ability to always think positively about situations, but the ability to focus on relevant behaviours and willingly accept pressure and still commit to the game plan.

Mental toughness is about your capacity to perform consistently when you have both positive and negative thoughts and emotions and execute behaviours time and time again - it doesn't (and can't) always feel comfortable.

Here are five tops to help you develop mental toughness:

1. Are you feeding the tiger?

By this I mean, are you unknowingly amplifying your stress responses? We often engage in short-term feel good behaviours (slowing a serve down, avoiding a tournament, blasting a shot, internally criticising ourselves) that feed the tiger of anxiety or stress. These types of behaviours actually amplify our stress, as we are teaching ourselves that we 'can't' cope with tournament stress - and we keep getting in a cycle of short-term relief - taking us away from performance consistency.

2. Willingness to experience

By putting yourself in competition and stressful situations you are developing resilience. More often than not, it is resilience to the thoughts and feelings that arise during competition that you typically don't want to have. The more willing you are to have these negative thoughts and feelings, the greater your capacity to focus on what is actually important, when it counts.

3. Judgements

Good, bad, fast, slow - your mind is constantly judging experiences - and we are often not aware of this process. Being able to take an objective viewpoint of your experience while experiencing it, allows you to have task-focused attention, rather than getting caught up in the myriad of reasons your mind will give you to take you away from your game plan.

4. Awareness

Awareness is attention and focus. It's helpful to develop your awareness around not focusing on what is most important in the here and now when you are involved in a match. If you are not aware of when you are caught up in unhelpful thoughts and feelings - regardless of how painful they might be - you cannot choose to act in ways that are in line with your game plan.

5. It's behaviours that count

Let's not get confused, it's not positive thinking that consistently allows us to win points and matches. Though it certainly can appear that this is the case - ultimately you can have whatever you thought you want - all you have done though is task-focused attention and executed behaviours in line with the task at hand.

Perhaps as The Performance and Sport Psychology Clinic's Daniel Dymond suggests - it may be more accurate to call it 'mental flexibility'. Whatever you wish to call it, mental toughness or mental flexibility - it takes time to develop. Regardless, it is necessary to do so to become a more consistent tennis player. Tennis players who are mentally flexible can consistently focus under stress and pressure, when it truly counts.

This article originally appeared in Australian Tennis Magazine, April 2013 issue.