Developing Mental Toughness

The first thing that should be said about the book is that it's extremely well-organized – designed with the busy reader in mind. Each chapter opens with a brief, pithy preview of what's to come, and ends with a handy summary of the main points. In between, there are plenty of set-aside case studies and useful visual aids breaking up the main text. Many readers will gravitate to a recurring feature called "Over to Adrian," in which the former Olympian uses his personal experiences to drive home points made in the main narrative. Altogether, the book reads like a particularly engaging PowerPoint presentation – easy to follow, with all of the key information highlighted.

Developing Mental Toughness opens with the authors explaining how they came to be authorities on sports psychology and mental toughness, and how the two relate to the business world. Adrian Moorehouse delivers a concise, instructive account of his journey from precocious teenage athlete to accomplished consultant. And he uses this section effectively to illustrate the role mental toughness plays in building a successful career, in sport and beyond.

As British listeners will remember, Moorehouse won the gold medal for the 100m breaststroke at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. People tend to forget about Mooreshouse's disappointing run at the nineteen-eighty-four games in Los Angeles, when the then-20-year-old athlete failed to earn a medal. Despite his tender age, Moorehouse had been expected in his home country to win the gold. When he faltered, the British press was scathing – one newspaper even urged the young swimmer to retire!

Moorehouse reports that he had let the pressure get to him. In the minutes before the decisive race, he knew he couldn't win – a prophecy that proved self-fulfilling. Moorehouse didn't change his training habits much after the defeat in Los Angeles. But he did change his mental habits considerably. By the time of the Seoul games, he had won status as the top-ranked swimmer in his event. And he approached the final fully confident that he would win – which he did.

The rest of the book essentially draws out the way Moorehouse's change in thought impacted his athletic results, and how he leveraged the same strengths to transition successfully from a world defined by swimming trunks to one defined by business suits. After retiring from swimming, Moorehouse dipped his toe in the water of the business world by delivering motivational speeches to executives. But he realized that he couldn't effectively communicate the process of gaining mental toughness, because he didn't really understand it. He had gained mental toughness without really knowing how.

Then he met Graham Jones in the mid-1990s – and the rest is history. Jones helped Moorehouse understand the process he'd gone through in rebounding from defeat and developing mental toughness, and Moorehouse in turn used his celebrity power and personal experience to help Jones deliver his ideas about mental toughness to a broad audience. The book now under discussion is the fruit of their collaboration.

After this introduction, the authors launch into the meat of the book: mental toughness, what it is, and how to get it. First they focus on what mental toughness is not. The authors say that many people confuse self-destructive or foolish behavior for mental toughness. Think, for example, of the football star who insists on playing on despite a sprained ankle. The injured man is unlikely to help his team much, and he also may be doing long-term harm to his leg – and his career. A mentally tough player knows when in it's in everyone's interest to rest.

Equivalent behavior in the business world might be the manager who refuses to delegate and takes on more responsibility than he can handle. He allows an unmanageable work load to pile up, while clinging to the heroic belief that he can do it all. In the end, he harms his own career and his company's performance.

In both these situations, the men at the center are trying to show others how hard and mentally tough they are, but get caught up in the display of mental toughness, rather than making the tough decisions – like sitting down during a big match when injured, or delegating when your own plate is full.

So, having clarified what mental toughness is not, the authors then begin sketching out what mental toughness is. They note that before high-stakes competitions, nearly all performers experience physical and mental signs of stress – including self-doubt, "butterflies" in the stomach, and increased heart rate. For most athletes, these jitters hinder performance; but for an elite few, they actually heighten their abilities. Thus, two performers with identical skill levels can attain wildly different results. The authors argue that the difference between merely good performers and elite ones is this thing called "mental toughness." And luckily, they say, mental toughness is something that can be learned.

First, though, what are its attributes? According to the authors, elite performance is a solid structure built on what they call the "four pillars of mental toughness." These are: keeping your head under stress; staying strong in your belief; making your motivation work for you; and maintaining your focus on the things that matter. Each pillar then becomes the topic of the following chapters.

The chapter on "keeping your head under stress" draws a direct link between what people experience in the athletic arena and what people go through at work. You don't have to be David Beckham preparing for a penalty kick at the end of a tied match to have experienced heightened expectations and scrutiny. Anyone who's ever delivered a high-stakes presentation, or even gone through an interview for a coveted position, has likely experienced performance anxiety.

To help us learn to deal with the pressure to perform, the authors encourage us to break our stress down into three components: mental, physical, and behavioral. Broken into these small units, stress becomes easier to handle. Mental stress – the kind that keeps you up at night before a big game, or wracked in doubt just before a big presentation – can be controlled with relaxation techniques. Physical symptoms can be brought to heel with breathing techniques or stretching; and behavioral aspects, such as fidgeting, can be controlled through focused awareness.

The authors also suggest using what's known as "transactional analysis." According to this theory, we are all three people in one: child, parent, and adult. The child in us wants to behave impulsively; the parent mimics the voice of our own parents, urging us to do as we "should," regardless of our own interest; and the adult objectively weighs data to make the best decision.

In life, all three viewpoints are necessary. They make us complete, complex people. But in times of great pressure, our child voice can lead us astray by counseling avoidance and flight. And our parent voice can debilitate us by turning our focus on what other people think. It's our adult voice that must be cultivated in such times. It leads us to confront our challenges calmly and rationally, bringing our ability – and not our anxiety – to the fore.

The next chapter, "staying strong in your self-belief," is about sustaining your ability to handle stress despite inevitable setbacks. Say you approach a pressure-packed situation like a champion: cool, calm, collected, and with your adult side fully in control. And yet, for some reason, you fail: the penalty kick bounces out of the goal, the sale falls through, the presentation flops.

Now what? Time to shrivel in the corner, or march on calmly to the next challenge? The second option requires a healthy store of self-belief – the idea that our failures are the exceptions to a general state of success. But how to achieve this kind of self-belief?

In what emerges as a theme for the book, the authors suggest breaking self-belief into smaller components that can be addressed separately. If self-belief seems a daunting thing to work on, first think about your self-esteem and then your self-confidence. Self-esteem is key. The authors define it as "how you value yourself as a human being." Self-esteem is a complex entity, and its level is tied to past experiences such as your childhood. Yet even people with low self-esteem can build it.

How? The authors suggest several exercises, all of which include listing out both recent and lifetime achievements. These include tangible ones, such as "I attained an MBA," as well as intangible ones, like, "My workmates come to me for advice."

From there, the key is taking credit for successes. A person with low self-esteem will attribute achievements to outside factors, while blaming themselves for failures. But to build self-esteem, we need to learn to take ownership of our triumphs. When we learn to do so, we see success as the direct result of our abilities, not chance or fate. And once we achieve that, we've built a solid foundation on which to place our self-confidence – the other component of self-belief.

According to the authors, once we solidify our self-esteem, we equip ourselves to handle the inevitable swings of self-confidence. Self-confidence fluctuates for even the most accomplished athlete or business titan. Even Beckham in his prime questioned himself after a poor match, and the most celebrated CEO feels doubt after missing an important target. But a high level of bedrock self-esteem helps people shake off those negative feelings and face the next challenge with renewed confidence. And confidence, too, can be built up. The authors give loads of strategies for this, including learning to talk to yourself in a positive way.

Next, we turn to the factor that keeps elite athletes heading back to the gym every day – and that's motivation. They suggest that you ask yourself: What drives my desire to excel? For many highly driven people, the answer is "fear of failure." In one sense, fear of failure is a pretty good motivator. Dread of making a poor showing at the next race or sales presentation can certainly fire your drive to prepare. But that same fire can burn you when it's time to perform. Fear of failure can send you spiraling downward at the slightest setback – a frown during your presentation, or an inaccurate pass on the soccer pitch. In standup comedy, it's called "flop sweat" – the comic decides he's lost his audience, breaks into a heart-pounding sweat, and loses complete control of what he's saying, ensuring his failure.

The authors call fear-based motivation "avoidance behavior," and they suggest that you avoid it. Rather than running from something negative, like failure, they urge you to move toward something positive. But what? Ideally, what motivates you will be the love of doing something well. The best accountants, for example, will be people who love numbers and gain deep satisfaction from putting a company's books together right. Moorehouse himself notes that his swimming career thrived when he focused his mind on his love of competition and pride in representing his country. It faltered when he let fear of failure take over.

Next, the authors turn their attention to the all-important question of focus. Most of us know only too well how the mind can wander when preparing for a high-pressure situation, whether it's an Olympic heat, a big job interview, or a million-dollar sales presentation.

You heard earlier that fear of failure can actually guarantee failure, even if it inspires you to prepare thoroughly. But equally, envisioning success can also have dire results if it's taken to extremes. For example, the tennis pro who fixates on how he'll hop over the net after winning may create a false sense of confidence that steals fire from his training regimen. The authors suggest focusing on process, not results. While preparing for a big tournament, our tennis pro might be better advised to visualize the perfect serve – and then practice it repeatedly. After all, it's powerful service that wins tennis tournaments, not stylish net jumps.

This chapter offers plenty of solid advice about maintaining focus. One tip is to focus on what you can control, and don't let the rest trouble you. For example, you're responsible for mastering the material heading into an important presentation, and delivering it in an engaging way. But if the communications technology malfunctions, all you can do is keep a cool head and make do. Likewise, a swimmer can't control the ability of his competitors, so he shouldn't focus on them. But he can "get the dive right," and that should be his focus.

Another bit of advice is what the authors call "fire in the belly, ice in the head." In other words, when the competitive fires are burning, focus on remaining calm and collected. The authors suggest a variety of calming exercises for professionals who often find themselves in high-pressure performance situations. For example, think of a calming mantra, and repeat it quietly while breathing slowly and deeply.

From there, the book wraps up with a catch-all chapter of "frequently asked questions on mental toughness." Here, the authors drive home the book's takeaway message: that the mentally tough learn to use pressure like pole vaulters use poles: as tools to propel themselves to the heights. They do so by developing techniques for keeping a cool head under stress, by cultivating self-esteem, by making sure they have a positive motivation, and by maintaining focus.

The authors also caution in this chapter that like any good thing, mental toughness can be taken too far. No one should be so motivated for professional success that they neglect personal relationships, or so mentally focused on their goals that they can think of nothing else. Ultimately, mental toughness serves us to the point that it improves our overall happiness.

And its potential for that is tremendous. In life, both in the office and beyond, setbacks are inevitable. A good dose of mental toughness keeps us moving through the bad times so we can reach the good. Those seeking to increase their mental toughness will find no better guide than this book. Whether you're trying to win a World Cup match or close a big sale, this book is your road map for when the going gets tough.

Developing Mental Toughness by Graham Jones and Adrian Moorehouse is published in paperback by Spring Hill.

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