By PETER CLOUGH AND DOUG STRYCHARCZYK
Mental toughness is a significant factor in performance and wellbeing. Most of us have it, but don’t know how to use it. In part one of our two-part series, Peter Clough and Doug Strycharczyk explain their MTQ48 measure, which helps clients identify and develop toughness
Mental toughness helps individuals respond to stress, pressure and challenge, irrespective of prevailing circumstance. Although its roots lie in resilience theory, mental toughness has emerged as a wider and potentially more useful concept.
Initially working with athletes, Dr Peter Clough and his colleagues at Hull University identified the core components of mental toughness and how to apply the concept. Work with psychometric test developer AQR around its application in a number of fields led to the development of the MTQ48 measure in 2003, allowing effective assessment of mental toughness.
The four Cs
Mental toughness is described as:
Control
I believe I can do it and I can keep my emotions in check when doing it
Commitment
I promise to do it and I will do what it takes to keep that promise
Challenge
I am motivated to do it – I can see the opportunity in change
Confidence
I have the ability to do it. I can do it even if others challenge me
Resilience is thought to embrace control and commitment: “I can deal with adversity or challenge, because I believe I can do it and I am committing to achieving despite the setback or challenge”1. Mental toughness also embraces challenge and confidence.
Research2 shows that mental toughness is a significant factor in performance and wellbeing – and particularly in the development of positive behaviour. This translates into valuable outcomes such as completion of difficult tasks, employability and openness to and managing change.
Coaches can use the four Cs model as an individualised framework for diagnosis and analysis, while MTQ48 offers the opportunity to close the learning cycle.
Changes in mental toughness can be measured and related to desired outcomes. Alongside the evaluation piece, the interventions that are useful here will be well-known to many coaches.
Interventions
Research and feedback from practitioners show that the most useful interventions for developing mental toughness fall under these broad headings. Most are experiential in nature and will be familiar to coaches:
Positive Thinking
Recognising opportunity and possibility, not just threats
Visualisation
Using the mind to create opportunity and a unique learning environment
Anxiety Control
Tools and techniques to help deal with anxiety and panic
Goal Setting
Scoping what the client wants to achieve and using that to create plans
Attentional Control
Focusing better and for longer
Developing clients’ awareness about their own mental toughness is sometimes enough to spur them to action, particularly for those who emerge as more mentally tough than average, but whose performance and behaviour doesn’t reflect that.
Positive Thinking
Control, commitment, confidence, challenge
This approach encourages ideas, words and images into the mind conducive to performance, wellbeing, growth and success.
Too often we are more aware in a negative than a positive sense of our extraordinary power over ourselves – everything we know, feel and believe is based on our internal thoughts.
Make it work
Help the client avoid negative thoughts and encourage positive thoughts using, for example: making positive affirmations, mental and physical thought-stopping, turning negatives into positives and ‘think three positives’. Changing the self talk is highly effective.
Researchers at the University of Parma using MRI brain scans found a link between an individual’s score on the Challenge scale in mental toughness and grey matter density in the fusiform gyrus – one of its functions lies in word recognition and how we respond emotionally to words.
Fatal flaw
Assuming it’s easy to teach someone to think positively.
Visualisation
Control, challenge and confidence
Many coaches use these techniques, but may not appreciate their usefulness in developing mental toughness. Most clients know how to visualise, but not how to harness it.
Make it work
Encourage clients to use their mental voice to increase self-belief in their ability to deal with change and deadlines, and to use their imagination to relax. The imagination communicates with the mind at the deepest levels and visual imagery is far more potent than words alone. Practising something mentally is as real to our minds as actually doing it.
Anxiety Control
Control, confidence, challenge
We know physiological responses can help clients manage mental responses such as worry, fear and negative self talk, which can have an impact on interpersonal confidence, life control, emotional control and challenge.
Make it work
Coaches often use techniques for breathing and muscular relaxation. Other techniques include: self-hypnosis, controlled distraction, anchoring and sleeping more effectively.
A recent study at the University of Basel showed a close link between mental toughness, the ability to sleep and performance and wellbeing.
Goal Setting
Works powerfully on commitment and control, but is also a factor in challenge.
Goal setting is a powerful means to develop mental toughness, for example, setting milestones can help them become realistic and achieve the right balance.
Next issue: Part 2: Attentional Control
References and further info
1 J Passmore (ed.), Psychometrics in Coaching, Kogan Page, 2008
2 P Clough and D Strycharczyk, Developing Mental Toughness, Kogan Page, 2011
3L Crust and P J Clough, ‘Developing mental toughness: from research to practice’, in Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 2, pp21-32, 2011
For information on MTQ48, see ‘A tough nut to crack’ (Coaching at Work, vol 4, issue 1)
www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/01/02/a-tough-nut-to-crack/
or email: doug@aqr.co.uk
For information on resilience, see ‘Bouncing back’ (Coaching at Work, vol 7, issue 3):
www.coaching-at-work.com/2012/04/24/bouncing-back/?
Volume 7, Issue 4