What is Mental Toughness?
Recently, athletes’ mental health has taken center stage in the media. A healthy mind is important for everyone, but especially for athletes like gymnasts who are performing difficult, often dangerous, skills. If you’re not in the right headspace to perform to your best abilities, you can get yourself into trouble. Building your mental toughness is important in your gymnastics journey – it takes a lot of strength, both physically and mentally, to keep up with all of the demands of gymnastics at all levels. However, you don’t want to misidentify mental toughness and put yourself into negative situations. Let’s discuss mental toughness for gymnasts and what it means and doesn’t mean to be mentally tough.
What mental toughness isn’t.
Being mentally tough doesn’t mean accepting hateful or rude comments from others or yourself. It can be easy to identify the negativity in the words others say when they ridicule your mistakes or slip-ups, but it is even harder to realize just how hurtful these statements are when you think them to yourself. It can be easy to think that negative self-doubts and self-evaluation, such as “you’re weak” or “you could never do this”, are helping you become better, but would you think that these words were helpful if you or someone else were saying them to a friend or teammate? Just like how hurtful comments are mean to say to others, they are also mean to say to yourself!
Mental toughness doesn’t come from tolerating or accepting bullying, threats, shame, peer pressure, or abuse. Taking in rude comments without discussing them with a trusted adult and learning how to cope and move on from them can be hurtful. There is no reason to be ashamed to talk about these kinds of things with grown-ups you know. Tolerating peer pressure or doing things you aren’t comfortable with without complaint may seem like a brave or tough thing to do, but doing so can lead to dangerous situations or injury.
So what does mental toughness look like?
Mental toughness is being able to stand up for yourself and others and make smart choices in tough situations. Mental toughness is enduring through hard times, and that includes being able to ask for help and support when you need it during those tough times and during any other time. Mental toughness is not being afraid to be afraid, but controlling that fear and treating your difficult skills with the respect they deserve. Mental toughness is pushing past the “I won’t” and recognizing and respecting the “I can’t” until you train enough to say “I can”.
We hope that these lessons and discussions helped you to focus on your mental health a bit more this week. What’s your definition of mental toughness? Do you have any tips and tricks for building your mental toughness, and relaxing your mind when you need a break? Put them down in the comments below!
