5 Sports psychologists explain their work

Now, children have to be tough to succeed, according to Dr Peter Clough, Head of Psychology at the University of Hull. He’s developed a system to teach schoolchildren to be mentally robust, less likely to regard themselves as victims of bullying and to cope with initial failure. He says students with higher levels of mental toughness perform better in exams. Dr Clough, you say your interest in mental toughness stems from working with professional athletes, Nadal and Federer. Are they the ideal examples?

I mean, they’re ideal in mental toughness. They’ve also got a lot of talent. Many of us are not blessed with the same levels of talent, but what brings it all together, what I’m interested in is working in high pressure environments, and being a schoolchild nowadays is a high pressure environment.

What exactly do you mean by mental toughness?

I think that’s what we’ve achieved at Hull. It’s often mentioned, it’s often mentioned in radio and in interviews, we’ve operationalised it, so mental toughness is the ability to perform at your maximum in hostile environments. You can split it down a little bit more to say, but you see challenge as an opportunity, high levels of commitment, you control the things you can control and you have higher levels of confidence.

So what can learning mental toughness achieve? Are you saying that low ability can be made up for with drive?

I think to some extent, and I think most listeners would recognise that’s a way forward. But I think on the other side of the coin high ability can be lost on the basis of lacking mental toughness. So what learning mental toughness allows you to do is learn. You need to be put in a situation to fail to move forward in my view. My job then is simply to allow people to learn from their mistakes and be willing to challenge themselves.

So how do you measure the effectiveness of your theory?

Well I think it’s a key question, because, you know, it does sound like a bit of a dinosaur theory sometimes, you know, it seems like an old-fashioned approach and perhaps it is. We have a questionnaire developed with my colleagues in AQR, and we can measure mental toughness, that’s a starting point. But more than that, when we actually give people these mental toughening interventions, at the end we measure their mental toughness again. Well obviously, they’re going to say they’re more mentally tough because they’ve been on a mental toughness course. We also look at their psychological, psychophysiological reactions to stress, and we’ve got clear evidence that they can deal with pressure more effectively.

To practically, at a practical level what does a mental toughness course consist of?

It’s… it started off life, because I’m a Sports Psychologist and an Occupational Psychologist, it started off life, yeah looking at things like the tall ships race, sending old people ice climbing, a whole range of, you know, what you’d expect. We’ve then developed a classroom version, which obviously most people aren’t interested in outdoor activity, and what it involves, the first, the starting point is getting people to set clear realistic goals. And that is a real issue, you know, with the X-Factor culture we now have, people setting realistic goals based on their talent is the starting point and it’s the crux. Once you get past that, we have an issue then where we can deal with what goes on between people’s ears.

You’re saying that this may be seen as an old fashioned approach. Are you saying it should be out with the sensitive, caring, sharing approach altogether, no more prizes for all happiness lessons and talking therapies?

I don’t, it’s never black and white or clear. I am certainly more of the end where, in my view, my research, what we find is happiness isn’t a precursor to successful education, unhappiness certainly stops it, but education’s not about happiness per se, it’s about challenge. So you’re rewarding children. I’ve got a seven-year-old, Emily, who, yeah, is the pride of my heart, and if she’s in a situation where she fails things obviously I feel bad as a parent. However, without that failing experience, without the ability to fail, I think even seven and eight-year-olds are sophisticated now, and they twig that they’re going to get a certificate no matter what they do. So it loses its power.

You expect teachers and parents to be part of this developing mental toughness. But how positively is your theory being received in those circles?

I think it’s been received more positively than I thought. It is a positive. If I claim is the answer to everything, obviously people react negatively against it, and absolutely as a Psychologist there is no clear answer to everything, but I think people do see the point, that it’s a tough world. We then get into the debate, do we make it less stressful, or do we allow people to deal with stress more effectively, and I’m of that latter group, that we’re not going to make the world less stressful. It is stressful. When you go into the world of university, when you go into the world of work it gets even more stressful. My job is, therefore, to allow people to prosper in that environment.

Dr Peter Clough. Thank you.

The thrust of our work I should say first has been mostly in the teaching of skills, the teaching, testing and developing of skills in young athletes. We developed a set of criteria, which draws heavily on the work of Terry Orlick that we call the PCDEs – the psychological characteristics of developing excellence. And that was really where we sort of came in sort of the mid-nineties in terms of saying ‘This is what someone needs to get them to the top’.

As we then started to extend that into looking at the Talent Development Environment or the TDE. We spotted that a lot of the talent systems, especially in the UK and elsewhere where there were lots of resources, were focused very much what might call a professional setting whereby you removed all the challenges – I think you guys might refer to that as snow ploughing – snow plough clearance certainly - remove all the challenges from the path of the young, developing athlete enabling her or him to focus on – on the challenge of the sport. And what we actually recognised was that that seemed to be a pretty counter productive approach so we came back with this idea which we published in sort of the late twenties that looked at The Rocky Road to Success. For a catchy title we went for ‘Why Talent Needs Trauma’. And since then that’s been a big thrust of our research, If you're a super champ and I'm a champ we might both encounter some challenges around say the growth spurt around thirteen/fourteen. It’s how well I cope with them but more importantly how well I learn from that and enhance my skills and my competence that I take into the next challenge. Does that make sense? So it’s not the incidence of challenge, it’s what I get out of it, what I learn from it and therefore what I bring to the next challenge because of course any pathway is a series of challenges that is the distinguishing characteristic, the biggest distinguishing characteristic between the super champs and the champs.