Can You Assess An Athlete's Mental Toughness?

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You often wonder how you can assess mental toughness in tennis and what are the ways the tools that you can use to see how mentally tough your tennis player is. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn and I recently received a question from Joel from Singapore. He wants to know how to assess an athlete's mental toughness. He said, I'd like to know the possible ways you can assess mental toughness in athletes. Is it through some assessment rubrics or some type of self rating tools? And how can you measure improvement in an athlete's mental toughness? Can you please answer these questions improve.

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Joel, let me first say that mental toughness is a really broad concept. In my work, mental toughness really includes everything in relation to an athlete's mental game from their pre match preparation all the way to confidence and focus and trust and composure and how they assess their performance, you know, after they perform in a match. So are there ways to assess mental toughness? Well, yes. Every student that I work with completes what's called an AMAP assessment. The AMAP assessment stands for Athlete's Mental Aptitude Profile and the AMAP I developed over the last 20, 25 years to help athletes identify some of the challenges that they have with their mental toughness. Now that particular tool is reserved for when I work one on one with tennis players. However, I do have another tool. It's a simple what I call one page assessment. Now the one page assessment is a really quick way that your athletes can kind of test their particular mental toughness. If you go to sportspsychologytennis.com and click on Mental Game Test you can, you can actually download that one page assessment and this is a rough gauge or test of mental toughness. But obviously it's often through the self report of the athlete. That's a big part of how you're going to test the mental toughness. And if the big sign is if your athlete underperforms in matches compared to practice, the then you have to assume that there's some challenges there with mental toughness. Now how can you measure the improvement of mental toughness? You're relying on the athlete's self report again. In other words, you're asking the athlete from 1 to 10 how confident do you feel today? Now initially they might have responded five, but today they might have responded, you know, an eight or nine. So really when you measure the improvement of mental toughness, you're you're relying a lot on the athletes report about various mental skills like confidence and focus and composure and trust, ability to let go of mistakes between point routines, etc. So it's a little bit more tough, but I think it can be done. And you're once again you're relying on the athletes self report in this particular instance. So if you're interested in learning about the mental coaching for tennis players and would like to take the AMAP and do some one on one coaching, Please check out peaksports.com and click on Contact Us. That's the mothership. Or you can go to sportspsychologytennis.com and you can also click on Contact Us there as well. Thanks for your question, Joel. Good luck with tennis.

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