Mental Toughness vs. Mental Mobility
You’ve probably heard the term: mental toughness. And I bet you have a pretty good idea of how you’d define it. Mental toughness is all about having the strength to endure until you get the success. It’s about working hard to achieve your goals and the grit or perseverance to see it through. However, there’s a BIG downside when it comes to mental toughness. When you pursue mental toughness, you have only one option. It’s to do more of what you’ve been doing in the hopes that if you work harder and want it more, then success will follow. The problem is…the outcomes, the results, the wins are outside of your control. And failure equals being mentally weak. So to recap: you’re mentally tough if you win, mentally weak if you lose, and the amount of control you have over winning or losing is minimal at best.
Picture this. There is a brick wall in front of you. Success is on the other side. So you run hard at the brick wall with the intention to break it down. What happens? You get knocked down. In the mentally tough approach, you pick yourself back up and say “I just need to run harder” and then go at it again. But this is a brick wall and it’s not designed to budge. Does this mean that you are mentally weak? That you are incapable, that you are somehow defective or unworthy? NO!!! There is another way – Mental Mobility.
Mental Mobility is a concept created by Dr. Lindsey Swanson Schriefer that focuses on developing both the mental strength AND the mental flexibility to face any obstacle and take on any challenge. Mental Mobility provides athletes with options. With it, you have skills that you can use to find the best approach to solve the problem in front of you. You have the strength to push through, to persevere, and to work hard when it’s needed. You also have the flexibility that allows you to adjust, make changes, and find new approaches to get you where you want to be.
Let’s picture that brick wall again, but use the Mental Mobility approach. After running at the brick wall and getting knocked down, you step back to reevaluate the situation. The goal is simply to get to the other side. That’s where the success is. So how it happens is flexible. Maybe you need to climb over the wall. Or walk around it. Or build a catapult. Or get a friend to help.
The goal remains the same. You are still fighting to get to the other side of that brick wall. But instead of one option, you have many that you can choose from to put yourself in the best position to get to the success on the other side. This is what it looks like to have both strength AND flexibility. And this is why developing Mental Mobility is more important and more effective than mental toughness.