All athletes want to be mentally tough. Not only do they want to be mentally tough, but all athletes need to be mentally tough. Especially high school athletes.
In high school, competition becomes strong. Those who will make it to the next level begin to separate themselves from their peers.
A key differentiator between high school athletes who excel vs those who perform below their potential is their mindset.
Which is why it’s critical for high school athletes to work on building mental toughness as soon as possible.
Mental Toughness Defined
No matter if it’s mental toughness for high school athletes, or mental toughness for any other age group, the same core principles apply.
Mental toughness refers to your ability to control your mind, push past hardships, overcome failures, motivate yourself to stay disciplined, and have the confidence to play freely.
It is a term that can often seem vague. Which is why, as a mental performance coach who works directly with high school athletes, I find it helpful to break mental toughness down into different individual mental skills.
Just as a strong body is composed of many different muscles, a strong mind is made up of different mental skills (mental muscles). Breaking mental toughness into different mental skills gives us a clearer idea of how it can be developed.
There are many mental skills that add to the strength of your mind, but the main ones I help athletes build and I’ve seen have the greatest impact on high school mental toughness include:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Confidence
- Focus
- The Ability to Calm Nerves
- Resilience
- Self-Management
By focusing on each one of these mental skills, any high school athlete will see their mental toughness strengthened. Leading to significant benefits seen within their game.
Why Mental Toughness Matters for High School Athletes
A strong mind leads to greater levels of play.
Something that becomes clear when we look at the effects a weak mind has on performance.
Now, when I say a weak mind, what I am referring to are certain mental skills that are underdeveloped. This doesn’t mean the athlete is weak. It simply means there are patterns of thinking and frames of thought that are weakening their mental game.
Self-doubt being one of the main ones.
When an athlete doubts themselves, what happens to their performance? They will hesitate, hold themselves back, and underperform.
All due to the fact they lack a strong level of confidence in themselves and their skills.
Fear of failure is another mental game challenge that weakens a high school athlete’s mindset. When they play with fear, they will play scared and hold themselves back. This is due to wanting to avoid mistakes.
A third challenge is poor focus. When an athlete’s attention shoots from one thing to another, practices will not be as effective and games will suffer.
These begin to illustrate just how harmful a weak mindset is to a high school athlete’s level of play.
But just as a weak mindset is hurtful, a strong mindset is helpful.
When a high school athlete develops mental toughness, their confidence, focus, and resilience will grow. Just as their self-awareness and self-management will.
All of which positively impact their ability to perform on the field or court.
Let’s take confidence, as an example. When self-confidence is present, the athlete will perform freely. This means they will let go and play.
Instead of holding themselves back due to fear and doubt, they will allow the skills they’ve worked to develop to shine through during games.
Free play is where we find peak performance. Not in timid play where the athlete is focused on not making any mistakes.
Such free play is found in athletes who exhibit high levels of mental toughness.
Tips to Build Mental Toughness in High School Athletes
To build mental toughness, we need to work on developing the six mental skills that make up mental toughness, which include:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Confidence
- Focus
- The Ability to Calm Nerves
- Resilience
- Self-Management
By focusing on strengthening each one of those mental skills, we can trust mental toughness will increase as a result.
What I’ve done below is outlined each of the six mental skills and provided you with a simple tip you can apply to begin strengthening each skill.
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is all about understanding. It involves you understanding your thoughts, feelings, and actions and how the three play into one another.
Self-awareness provides you with a strong understanding as to how your mind works. With this understanding comes the power to control your thinking and manage your emotions better.
Tip to Build Self-Awareness
To develop a better understanding of yourself, you must begin paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, and actions more consistently.
To become aware of something requires us to observe the thing we want to become aware of. In this case, you are wanting to become aware of your own mind. Therefore, you must observe your mind.
Now, I know that may sound a bit strange. But all you need to do is spend time each day reflecting on your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Daily reflective writing is a great way to do so.
Either in the morning or at night, write a page in a journal. Don’t worry about what you write. Simply allow your thoughts to stream onto the page.
Daily reflective writing provides you with the opportunity each day to spend time with your thoughts, which will increase your awareness over time.
Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is all about trust. It refers to the belief you have in yourself that you can do something well. That you are capable.
When you trust yourself, doubt has less of an impact on your mind. You will be able to play with more freedom and not hold yourself back in big moments.
Having confidence in yourself and your skills is a key foundational mental skill if you want to be a mentally tough athlete.
Tip to Build Self-Confidence
Since self-confidence is all about trust, we want to work on strengthening trust. But trust is difficult to build if you’re not currently playing well.
This is a challenge a lot of athletes face. It’s a confidence crisis: they need to play well to build confidence, but need confidence to play well.
So what can we do?
A tool you can use to begin building trust and belief in yourself is visualization. It’s a powerful tool that provides you with the opportunity to see yourself as successful. Something that is difficult if you’ve been underperforming recently.
Aim to visualize every day. When you visualize, imagine yourself playing well. Go into different scenarios within the game and see yourself facing different opponents.
The main idea here is that you’re giving yourself the opportunity to see yourself as successful each day. Over time this will work to increase the trust you have in yourself.
Focus
Focus is critical to the success of a high school athlete. Since this is the time athletes begin to separate themselves from their peers, it’s important practices are performed with full focus, as well as games.
But focus isn’t the easiest skill to develop. Especially with all the different internal and external distractions athletes face.
If, however, focus is strengthened, it is a key piece to building mental toughness as a high school athlete.
Tip to Improve Focus
Focus is all about attention. It requires you to be able to center your attention and keep it fixed where you want it. While this is a challenge, it is a skill that can and must be developed.
To strengthen your focus, you can begin practicing mindfulness meditation for a few minutes each day.
Mindfulness is the state of having your awareness completely centered in the here and now. You are focused in the present moment.
Mindfulness meditation is a way for you to train your ability to be present.
Read this article to learn how to start your own mindfulness meditation practice.
The Ability to Calm Nerves
Nerves and anxiety can quickly eat away at an athlete’s ability to perform well.
When nerves take over, they control the mind and result in physical symptoms that inhibit performance.
If a high school athlete has the ability to calm their nerves going into a game, this creates a calmer and more focused mind. It also helps with self-confidence.
All in all, the more an athlete is able to calm their pregame nerves, the more mentally tough they will be.
Tip to Calm Pregame Nerves
The mindfulness meditation I introduced in the previous tip on improving focus will also help with calming pregame nerves. It’s something I recommend athletes perform pregame.
In addition to mindfulness meditation, another tip is to pay attention to your thinking.
Anxiety is directly linked to thinking. When we are anxious, our minds have traveled into the future and we’re thinking about things we can’t control.
We want to work on reducing those outcome thoughts and keep the mind more present.
To help, you can practice a technique known as reframing. When you notice yourself thinking about the future, reframe your thinking and turn your attention back onto the present.
The less future thoughts you allow to stick around, the calmer you will become.
Resilience
Resilience is all about bouncing back from failure.
Mistakes happen. Failures happen. They are a natural part of life and especially sports. For high school athletes to build mental toughness, they must be able to bounce back from setbacks.
Instead of allowing a failure to tear down confidence, we must be able to learn from it, get back on our feet, and keep moving forward.
A mentally strong athlete is one who can be resilient in the face of setbacks and failures.
Tip to Be More Resilient
Failures and setbacks are heartbreaking. They are by no means easy to bounce back from. Especially if the failure was not making a team or getting benched and losing your starting position.
When something like that happens it can feel like giving up is the best option. However, if you want to be mentally tough, you must focus on bouncing back.
The best piece of advice I can give when it comes to being resilient is always looking for a lesson in a failure.
If you experience a setback, ask yourself, What can I learn from this?
I know it’s not easy. Honestly, asking yourself that question will be the last thing you want to do. But it is absolutely necessary if you want to be a resilient player, and as a result, a more mentally strong player.
Self-Management
The sixth mental skill that makes up mental toughness is all about you managing yourself. This includes you managing your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
The first mental skill I mentioned was self-awareness. Self-awareness involves understanding your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Once that understanding is present, we want to turn our attention to control.
There are very few things within sports we, as the individual athlete, can control. Our thoughts, emotions, and actions make up most of the list.
If we can manage ourselves better, we will be exhibiting a high level of mental toughness.
Tip to Improve Self-Management
To manage oneself means you determine what actions you take and what your mindset will be, instead of having both be controlled by external factors.
A great way for you to begin gaining a higher level of self-management is sticking to a routine.
A routine will force you to be disciplined with your actions, which will carry over to other areas of your life as well.
A simple way to begin is by creating a morning and nighttime routine for yourself, as well as a training routine.
You could also create a nutrition routine or even a better sleep routine.
Choosing a routine and then forcing yourself to stay disciplined and stick to the routine is a fantastic way to develop the mental skill of self-management.
Final Thoughts
At the high school level, athletes begin to separate themselves from their peers. Those who will be good enough to compete in college begin to stand out.
Mindset is a key factor that will help athletes at this level separate themselves from the competition.
But mental toughness is not always the easiest thing to develop. Which is why I find it helpful to break mental toughness down into different mental skills that are easier for us to define and improve.
Here are the six mental skills that will help high school athletes develop mental toughness:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Confidence
- Focus
- The Ability to Calm Nerves
- Resilience
- Self-Management
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
