Dr. Robert Weinberg, PhD, and former president of AASP, is the co-author (with Daniel Gould) of the most popular textbook in the world for students studying Sports Psychology, “Foundations in Sport and Exercise Psychology” which he wrote with Daniel Gould.  It’s currently in it’s 4th edition, and is used in universities around the world to prepare the next generation of Sports Psychologists.

He joins me today to talk about his new book, Mental Toughness in Sport, Business, and Life.  In the book, expected just after the first of the year, he discusses the concept of mental toughness, and breaks it down into 4 pillars:

-Motivation

-Dealing with Pressure

-Focus / Concentration

-Self-Confidence

This interview primarily focuses on the application of mental toughness to sports, and contains a brief breakdown of each of the concepts above.

Dr. Weinberg has approximately 30 years of experience consulting with performers (recreational to elite) in a wide variety of areas in both sport and business developing mental skills to enhance performance and personal growth. Some of his specific credentials and accomplishments include the following:

•  Certified Consultant, Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, AASP.

•  Sport Psychology Registry – United States Olympic Committee

•  Past President -three major scholarly and applied sport psychology organizations

•  Author – Over 200 articles in scholarly and applied journals

In addition to his work with athletes from all over the world, he is a content contributor to OMT, and he’s also a professor at Miami University in Oxford, OH, Dr. Weinberg lives in Cincinnati.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the book, about Dr Weinberg, or about mental toughness, and its application to sport, business, or life, contact him here.

Speaking of reading, the text of our interview is below.  SpeechPad.com makes it easy, and cheap to get your video and audio interviews converted into searchable text.

Bob: The most popular sports psychology text book in the world, “Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology,” was written by Dr. Robert Weinberg. He joins us today to discuss his new book, “Mental Toughness for Sport, Business and Life.” Dr. Weinberg, welcome.

Dr. Weinberg: Thank you very much.

Bob: It’s good to see you. Tell us a little bit about the new book.

Dr. Weinberg: It came out of research that has been done over the last ten years or so. Mental toughness is a word that’s been used a lot, particularly in sport, but also other aspects of life. Most people want to become mentally tough. They talk about that they were or were not mentally tough, but we had very little empirical data or information on that. So I tried to interview a bunch of people in business and sport and everyday people. Other people have done research in the last ten years about it. We’re now getting some information that we can count on. It’s a little more scientific about what mental toughness is or what it’s not.

Bob: So what is it?

Dr. Weinberg: That’s a good question. I’ll give you a very overall statement to start off with. Mental toughness is generally being able to play at the top of your game or the best of your ability most of the time under most conditions. If you can play near your top most of the time under most conditions, that’s usually mentally tough. Although that is not a very specific definition, it does get us started.

Bob: So what sorts of strengths or components make up mental toughness?

Dr. Weinberg: Mental toughness, we have found, as well as others, varies somewhat between sports. Being mentally tough in soccer might be somewhat different than being mentally tough in tennis or golf. In reality, mental toughness is much more similar than it is different across the different sports.

In our research, as well as in other’s research, there seems to be four, what I’ll call or what people have called, pillars of mental toughness. Those pillars are as follows: there’s one that has to do with dealing with pressure, coping with pressure; one that has to do with motivation, drive and determination; one that has to do with self-confidence and self- belief; and one that has to do with focus and concentration. Those four aspects come up again and again when people assess and talk to top athletes or business people or top performers when they talk and are asking what mental toughness is.

Bob: Let’s break each one of those apart just a little bit. Dealing with pressure was the first skill that someone who is mentally tough would exhibit. What does that dealing with pressure look like?

Dr. Weinberg: Particularly in sport, dealing with pressure has a few components. One is that you have to cope effectively with adversity. For example, when you play sport, bad things are going to happen. You are going to make mistakes, you’re going to have pressure from big games, “I need to make this shot,” and so on and so forth. People who are able to cope effectively with the big times, the big pressure.

We know from talking to athletes and watching athletes that the great ones seem to be able to do their best when it matters most. And that’s coping with pressure. Another thing in relation to coping with pressure is that you need to embrace it. People who are mentally tough look forward to these big moments. They enjoy it. It’s like, “Bring it on.” They live for it being a one-point game in basketball and eight seconds left, and they have the ball. They live for that. If they’re a golfer and they’re on the 18th hole and they need to make a 12-foot putt to win the tournament, they live for that.

For other people, that would be the last place in the world that they’d want to be. They feel anxious. They feel nervous. Their muscles are tense. They don’t want to be there. Typically, because of that they don’t perform their best.

Coping with pressure, again, is staying calm, cool and collected under these kinds of stressful situations, being able to cope with it effectively and, in fact, seeking them out.

Bob: How about motivation? What does that look like in sport?

Dr. Weinberg: Motivation in sport has to do with desire and determination. Someone who is motivated hangs in there. They don’t give up. They persist. Persistence is one of the key things. One of the best qualities in people, not only in sport, is that when you get knocked down, you get back up, if you will.

In sport you might need to persist because you have lost seven games in a row. Can you still persist on the eighth game? Or maybe you are losing by a lot of points and yet you still persist and hang in there. Persistence is one thing in terms of sport and motivation. Another would be goal setting. People who are goal-setters generally are high in motivation. They set short-term goals. They set long-term goals. They have ways to reach those goals. People who are mentally tough set goals for themselves. They go out and try to achieve those goals. They have long-term ones which might be yearly or maybe down the road.

A long-term goal could be, for a 12-year-old, “I want to make the NBA.” That could be a long-term goal. A shorter-term goal might be what they’re going to do this season, and then what they are going to do today. Those kinds of things. The whole notion of pushing yourself beyond your abilities, setting goals, having a desire and determination that you’re not going to be stopped, that you’re going to succeed regardless of anything, that you’re going to work hard, you’re going to work harder than others, you’re going to set appropriate goals, these are all part of what we would call motivation as an aspect of being mentally tough.

Bob: You mentioned concentration and self-confidence as the other two pillars. Dig into concentration first. What’s that like in sport?

Dr. Weinberg: Concentration tends to look like being totally focused on what you’re doing. That has a couple of components. For example, you need to maintain your concentration in some sports for a long period of time. If you’re playing a basketball game or football game or baseball game, you might have to keep your concentration for two, three, four hours. Golf is a great example. You might have to keep your concentration for four rounds over four days. Being able to sustain this focused concentration over a long period is one aspect.

On the other hand, you have to be able to be focused on a particular queue or what we might call a relevant queue, at a particular time in a short period of time. A gymnast, for example, who is doing a balance beam, has 30 seconds, a minute, a minute and a half, whatever their routine is, and they have to stay focused for that period of time 100 percent, absolutely. A figure skater, the same thing. They may have a two-minute short program and they have to be totally focused during that.

Part of being mentally tough is being able to deal with distractions that might be part of the game. If you’re a football player and, for example today, you get a lot of trash talking, people trash talk to you, can you maintain your focus? Their job is to try to get you off your focus. So that would be something that also would be mentally tough.

Some people have to maintain their focus and they have problems with outside events. They might have gone through a divorce or their parents went through a divorce. There was an illness in the family. They lost their job or something. They have an outside event that could be impinging or impacting on them. Can they stay focused on this sport for that hour, half-hour, two hours, while these very negative things are happening outside of sport? All those come together in terms of focused and concentrated.

Bob: How about self-confidence, how does an athlete develop it and how do they foster it? Talk about self-confidence a minute.

Dr. Weinberg: Self-confidence the last pillar, but it may be the most important, although we have not said that one is more important than the other. Although in our interviews with athletes, as well as other people’s research, there appears to be nothing more important in terms of reaching high levels of sport performance than the belief in self, that you can do it.

You don’t want to go into a game and look across the net or look across the court and go “I can’t beat those guys. Those guys are too tough. I don’t have a belief in self.” That’s where you get these upsets of teams that have no real reason to beat someone but they believe they’re going to beat someone. That doesn’t mean they’re going to do it, because I can believe that I can go one-on-one with LeBron James, but I can guarantee you I can’t. Can I believe that I can do something? Give me a possibility of doing that.

A way-back classic example is an individual who people as old as me might remember, Roger Bannister, who is a person who broke the four-minute mile for the first time. No one had ever run a four-minute mile and he was trying to do that. A lot of people didn’t believe it. In fact, the physiologists wrote a book, or at least a chapter in a book, that said it was physiologically impossible for a human to run a mile in under four minutes. A lot of people believed that. In fact, people who were closer to breaking the four-minute mile, John Landy being one, never did.

Roger Bannister always felt he could break the four-minute mile. He’s a very bright guy. He was a medical student at the time and broke the four-minute mile. But what was really interesting is in the next year or year and a half, about a dozen people broke the four-minute mile. Why all of a sudden? For many, many years no one ever broke the four-minute mile and now a dozen people broke it.

It’s not empirical data, but certainly from an anecdotal point, it’s like, “Okay, if Roger Bannister can do it, I can do it.” You go up to the line and you have a mile, and you go “Oh, I can’t run this mile in under four minutes,” or “I can run this mile in under four minutes.” Again, of course you have to be trained and everything, but you have a belief that allows you to reach the maximum amount of your ability.

Bob: Let’s recap the four pillars of mental toughness.

Dr. Weinberg: The four are, in no particular order, somehow dealing with pressure, maintaining your ‘calm, cool and collected’ under pressure, seeking out pressure, enjoying it. That’s all about dealing and coping with pressure.

A second one was motivation, which might be the beginning thing, actually. If you’re not motivated you’re not going to do stuff. So you’re motivated, you set goals, you hang in there. You’re persistent in what you do. You believe you have the abilities to succeed. You’re very determined. That’s all under motivation.

Then you have your concentration, or what we might call attentional focus, where you’re focusing all your attention on the task at hand right at that moment. You also have to keep that focus for a long period of time in certain sports. You have to be able to stay focused despite what might be going on; trash talking, booing by the crowd or other kinds of things inside the sports environment. You have to keep your focus even though there might be some things going on outside your sporting environment in your life, like relationship issues, family issues, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, or whatever.

And finally, we have this self-belief or self-confidence, where once has to believe that they can in fact perform a movement or perform a skill win a game, beat somebody, and they believe in their abilities that they can do it, so they go in expecting that they can do it.

Those would be the four pillars. Not to say there’s nothing else having to do with mental toughness, but I think that covers what most athletes have talked to us about as being the key ingredients.

Bob: “Mental Toughness in Sport, Business and Life,” and the author, Dr. Robert Weinberg. Thank you.

Dr. Weinberg: Thank you very much. I appreciate talking with you.

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