Masterclass: Mental Toughness
What does it mean to be mentally tough? It means making the effort to think of and develop a game plan that gives you your best chance of success and then having the commitment and discipline to carry out your plan under any circumstances.
To develop a plan for success, you must have a very clear understanding of how your game works and this includes knowing your strengths, weaknesses and how you play best. The odds are that if you have ever performed well in the past you carried out a process to help you achieve success. In general, consistently repeating your individual process for success you will give yourself your best chance of success.
Great players understand their game very well, right down to tiny details, which allows them to know exactly what they are doing at every step of their performance and also to self-correct rapidly if required.
Once you have established your plan for success, you need to carry it out and this takes discipline and commitment. There are many distractions that will take your mind off doing your job successfully (executing your plan for success) if you focus on them. Remember that any time you are not focused on implementing the steps you need to take to be successful, is a waste of effort if you truly wish to succeed in achieving your goals.
It takes genuine toughness to commit to focusing on your success process in the face of challenging and uncertain conditions but remember, giving up or not thinking are easy and don’t work. The hard road of being mentally tough is difficult but the effort is worth the reward, if you have the desire to succeed.
A helpful way to self-manage the execution of your plan, is to firstly know your plan and your job (your job is to implement your plan) and secondly, some simple self-questioning in the middle while you are playing can help focus your mind on the job at hand. A good question to ask yourself is, ‘What is my job’, this will not only bring your mind back to the present, it will help you to focus on what you need to do now to succeed. We often get distracted thinking about past or future events, for example what happened the previous delivery or how you will perform at the end of the day.
If your can leave the past in the past and understand that the future is only influenced by the next ball, it will help you to know that the most important thing you ever do in cricket is deal with the next ball the very best you can.
Good luck
Mark
What does it mean to be mentally tough? It means making the effort to think of and develop a game plan that gives you your best chance of success and then having the commitment and discipline to carry out your plan under any circumstances.
To develop a plan for success, you must have a very clear understanding of how your game works and this includes knowing your strengths, weaknesses and how you play best. The odds are that if you have ever performed well in the past you carried out a process to help you achieve success. In general, consistently repeating your individual process for success you will give yourself your best chance of success.
Great players understand their game very well, right down to tiny details, which allows them to know exactly what they are doing at every step of their performance and also to self-correct rapidly if required.
Once you have established your plan for success, you need to carry it out and this takes discipline and commitment. There are many distractions that will take your mind off doing your job successfully (executing your plan for success) if you focus on them. Remember that any time you are not focused on implementing the steps you need to take to be successful, is a waste of effort if you truly wish to succeed in achieving your goals.
It takes genuine toughness to commit to focusing on your success process in the face of challenging and uncertain conditions but remember, giving up or not thinking are easy and don’t work. The hard road of being mentally tough is difficult but the effort is worth the reward, if you have the desire to succeed.
A helpful way to self-manage the execution of your plan, is to firstly know your plan and your job (your job is to implement your plan) and secondly, some simple self-questioning in the middle while you are playing can help focus your mind on the job at hand. A good question to ask yourself is, ‘What is my job’, this will not only bring your mind back to the present, it will help you to focus on what you need to do now to succeed. We often get distracted thinking about past or future events, for example what happened the previous delivery or how you will perform at the end of the day.
If your can leave the past in the past and understand that the future is only influenced by the next ball, it will help you to know that the most important thing you ever do in cricket is deal with the next ball the very best you can.
Good luck
Mark
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