Mental Toughness

By Dr. Rob Bell

Dr. Bell is a Mental Toughness Coach and Certified Consultant of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology.  He consults with hundreds of athletes, coaches, and teams and has served as the mental coach for PGA tour winners, USTA Champion, and Olympic Medalists.  He is also the author of several mental toughness books. For more information about Dr. Bell and his services visit https://drrobbell.com/

A team locker room is a sacred place.

Basically, what is said there, when you leave there, leave it there.

Sorry, but here’s the wrong way to win the locker room.

New Buffalo Bills Head Coach Sean McDermott felt that setting the tone of the locker room was important.

Agreed

Coach Sean McDermott is all about “culture” and leading by example. He’s a 3:30AM fitness guy.

Agreed

He is a driven, hard-nosed, accountability coach whose locker room culture begins with him.

Agreed

Coach stated that “this is a business”, so he removed the pool table and video games from the locker room.

Disagree    

Players don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Hall of Fame coach, Bill Walsh, set up a fishing tournament amongst his players during pre-season. He stated, a “team that can laugh together, can get serious together.”

Hard nosed, two time Super-Bowl winning coach, Tom Coughlin, spent the very first day of a training camp by having a bowling tournament. He changed his tyrant approach because  he “wanted his players to see him as his grandchildren did.” 

Super Bowl Winning coach, Dick Vermeil was known for his “boot camp” practices and discipline, but only after he started to develop a relationship with his players did he finally reach the pinnacle.

Look, there is nothing sexier than discipline, accountability, hard-work, grit, perseverance, and a culture of excellence.

However, in order to win, coaches have to win their hearts as well. In order to do that, they need to win the locker room.

Here’s 5 ways to win the locker room

---

Develop a TEAM culture- 

Every coach would agree that when you have players willing to fight for one another, there is nothing more powerful. Practices should be difficult and demanding, but developing team chemistry also takes place in between practices and games. You hang out so much together, that either bonds or cliques get formed in various ways.

Developing a locker room where players can unwind, relax, be themselves, and hang-out is crucial. Who wants a locker room where players simply dash out after showering and changing?

A pool table or ping-pong table encourages players an outlet to bond over a competitive activity that is not directly related to their own sport. The Cornell basketball team that made the sweet sixteen and finished 29-5 all lived together and touted their Super Mario bros. and table-tennis competitions. 

Allow the players to take ownership-

Jeff Van Gundy allowed all minor decisions like where to eat, which music and movie to play on the bus up to the players. He granted them a voice in their own culture.

Have a leadership council-

In all pick-up games, kids self-govern themselves. You can’t break the written and unwritten rules of the court and expect to be welcomed back. A leadership council of players should make decisions on certain disciplines that coach doesn’t have to. That creates more ownership among players and takes more off of the coach.

Orchestrate the cohesion-

Teams become cohesive over the task at hand (winning), or socially (togetherness). Ultimately, task-cohesion is king. However, these task-cohesive teams are only fostered through extremely strong peer-leadership.

Social cohesion is queen. Teams full of mutual respect for one another have more trust and uphold standards within the team. Usually, the best teams have BOTH task and social cohesion. These bonds can be enhanced through scheduled sessions intended to do so.

Foster organic cohesion-  

Yes, it is a business. Winning is a habit. But, allow play to be a part of the culture. Allowing athletes to express themselves through free-play is as old as the cave-man days. We thrive on working hard toward a goal and also having fun along the journey. 

---

I’ve been in the team locker room at the end of a season with such tears of joy from winning, because they all knew of the effort and sacrifice and bond. I’ve been in the other locker room as well, that tears flowed because the loss was so heartbreaking because of the sacrifice and bond.

If you’re in the game long enough, these moments will happen. That’s life.

The way to a winning team locker room begins way before these moments of joy or heartbreak. It begins with the culture of the team and finding ways to win the locker room.

This post contains some of my takeaways from Texas A&M Women’s Assistant Bob Starkey’s Coaching Blog. IMO, his Hoop Thoughts Blog should be on your regular reading list for basketball coaches!

With most teams being back in school and in their conference play or getting close to the second half of the season, here are some mental toughness thoughts to help your teams finish the season strong:

This first section is from Texas A&M men’s basketball staff and Coach Mitch Cole. To sign up for his email list, email Coach Cole at Mitch Cole [email protected] and ask him to put you on the list.

Here are the Aggie thoughts on peak performance as we head down the stretch. This time of year, everyone is searching for the best ways to get their teams to play at peak performance in February/March. Every staff asks the questions:

What is the best way to prepare our players for a late season run? What is our strategy if our team is favored and playing well?… Or what if our team is the overwhelming underdog? What approach is best when our team is inconsistent, good one game and poor the next?

The following are a few concepts that are some helpful reminders to stress to our players in February, regardless of where our teams rank in the standings:

1.EMBRACE “THE MOMENT”

This month is the reason you (the player) work so hard in the off-season. Don’t have a mindset of “I can’t wait for the off-season.” You are working for February (and March) when you spend countless hours in an empty gym the other 10 months of the year. Stay in the moment. The time is now!

2.”TRUST” THE PROCESS

Regardless of the final outcomes of games, ask the question, “Are we improving in certain areas?” For good teams, “are we eliminating mistakes that could cost us when the competition gets tighter?” For struggling teams, “are we seeing improvement and building toward a successful culture/program?”

3. HOW DO YOU MEASURE ON THE “GRIT” SCALE?

Some educational researchers have defined GRIT as “passion and perseverance to achieve long term goals”. When struggles come, do you get more DEJECTED or more DETERMINED?

Studies have shown that the attribute of GRIT, is one of the most powerful indicators of success. The most GRITTY people usually succeed on and off the court.

4. STAY TOGETHER, PRACTICE “TOGETHERNESS”

-Teams can become selfish during good times and turn on each other during tough times. Teams that stay together can resist the temptation to be selfish, can withstand tough times, and even conquer insurmountable odds. I love this clip of the movie Gladiator. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWRfWr65rlg

Is it possible that a more “together” team could be worth 1 point in a game? Have you ever won or lost a game by just 1 point?

5. KEEP FIGHTING, BE “RESILIENT”

Most people can appreciate a team or athletes that refuse to give up no matter what the circumstance. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficulty and in some cases, be better than before. This can happen when the other team goes on a run and things look most bleak, or even within a season. Teams that “Fight” and show tremendous Resilience over and over again have the best chance for sustained success.

Here are more thoughts on teamwork from Pat Summitt. They come from Coach Greg Brown who has wrote a book about Coach Summitt and Coach Don Meyer, whom he both worked for. The book is called The Best Things I’ve Seen in Coaching. You can find out a little more about it at this link: The Best Things I’ve Seen in Coaching

“Teamwork is not a matter of persuading yourself and your colleagues to set aside personal ambitions for the greater good. It’s a matter of recognizing that your personal ambitions and the ambitions of the team are one and the same. That’s the incentive.”

“Teamwork is not created by like-mindedness. It’s an emotional cohesion that develops from mutual respect and reciprocity and from coping with good times and adversity.”

“To me, the greatest reward for being a team player, far outweighing any personal gain, is that it means you will never be alone. Think about that. Life has enough lonely times in store for all of us. The wonderful thing about partnership is that it halves your sorrow and compounds your joys. When you are pressure, your teammates will only multiply it. The amount of success you are capable of enjoying and the pleasure you are capable of feeling, is equal to the number of people you are willing to share it with.”

Winners they get knocked down, winners get up, champions get up a little faster.

“Being relentless means constantly working for that result, not just when drama is on the line. Clutch is about the last minute. Relentless is about every minute.” -Tim Grover From “Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable”

I was fascinated by the following tweet from Eric Musselman: @EricMusselman

U of Penn study found that “grit” (passion & perseverance for long-term goals) is best predictor of success. “Grit is unrelated w/ talent.”

I retweeted it of course but found myself very interested in the finding so, as we all do these days — I Googled it. In doing so, I found the actual report from the Duckworth Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. There is a long research statement that you can read in its entirety here but below are some excerpts that I found interesting.

The Duckworth Lab focuses on two traits that predict success in life: grit and self-control. Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of behavioral, emotional, and attentional impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. On average, individuals who are gritty are more self-controlled, but the correlation between these two traits is not perfect: some individuals are paragons of grit but not self-control, and some exceptionally well-regulated individuals are not especially gritty. While we haven’t fully worked out how these two traits are related, it seems that an important distinction has to do with timescale: As Galton suggested, the inclination to pursue especially challenging aims over months, years, and even decades is distinct from the capacity to resist “the hourly temptations,” pursuits which bring momentary pleasure but are immediately regretted.

In terms of Big Five personality, grit and self-control both load on the conscientiousness factor, which also encompasses dependability, punctuality, and orderliness, among other facets.

Some educators typically prefer the umbrella term “social and emotional learning,” whereas many other educators, as well as philosophers and positive psychologists, embrace the moral connotations of “character” and “virtue.” So, grit and self-control are facets of Big Five conscientiousness, but are also conceptualized as dimensions of human character, social and emotional competency, and non-cognitive human capital.