Review

A helpful reimagining of our understanding of toughness. Grounded in evidence this book gives some clear guidance to parents, coaches or anyone who want’s to push themselves. This is a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life’s biggest challenges.

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value:

• The traditional view of toughness is overcoming obstacles with a combination of perseverance, discipline, and stoicism.

Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision. Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can.

Real toughness replaces control with autonomy, appearance with substance, rigidly pushing forward with flexibility to adapt, motivation from fear with an inner drive, and insecurity with a quiet confidence.

• Toughness is having the space to make the right choice under discomfort. Not bulldozing or pushing through, but navigating.
• The four pillars of real toughness provide a tool kit to navigate whatever obstacle you face:
  1. Ditch the Facade, Embrace Reality
  2. Listen to Your Body
  3. Respond Instead of React
  4. Transcend Discomfort

Pillar 1: Ditch the Facade, Embrace Reality

• Toughness is about embracing the reality of where we are and what we have to do. Not deluding ourselves, filling ourselves with a false confidence, or living in denial.
• When there’s a difference between what you project and what you are capable of, it all crumbles under stressful situations.
• An honest appraisal of ourself and the situation allows us to have a productive response to stress.
• Strategies to nudge us toward an accurate appraisal and productive stress response:
  1. Set goals slightly beyond current abilities to maintain motivation.
  2. Choose goals that reflect true self for better follow-through.
  3. Focus on process-oriented goals (effort and execution) rather than outcomes.
  4. Learn to navigate stress and fatigue by adjusting expectations and actions.
  5. Shift focus from threats to opportunities to enhance performance.

• Self-esteem is helpful only when it’s founded in reality, it shouldn’t be the goal itself, but a by-product of hard work

Lasting self-esteem doesn’t come from being told that we are great. It comes from doing the actual work and making real connections.

The pursuit of self-esteem logically sets you up for low self-esteem. Mark Freeman · You Are Not a Rock

• A contingent self-worth is when our self-worth is dependent on outside factors – like what people think and how we are judged. We give over control to external factors. Idle praise and undeserved rewards create an environment ripe for developing contingent self-worth.
• Outward displays of confidence are much less powerful than confidence that comes from deep within.
• When we face a challenge, expectation and reality should have a high degree of overlap. If they don’t our likelihood to persist through a challenge or perform at our best is greatly diminished. We’re more likely to stop and quit.
• Take on challenges above your current ability, and you’re more likely to give up and quit. Those that are self-aware can calibrate their practice to the goldilocks zone of difficulty, and build momentum.
• Four steps to develop true inner confidence:
  1. Lower the bar. Raise the floor → As an athlete you want to step onto the track, and know you’re going to be able to achieve a certain standard, no matter the circumstances. When everything clicks you can still exceed expectations – you’re not lowering your ceiling. Confidence comes from knowing that a certain performance level is repeatable, as long as you do what’s in your control. You can’t accomplish a PB every time – don’t judge yourself against your all-time best. Beating the average of your last 5 most recent performances is a better goal. Understand what you are capable of, and set a standard that falls within that realm or just a touch outside of it
  2. Shed perfection. Embrace who you are → Real confidence lies in understanding who you are and what you are capable of. You don’t raise your floor by developing an unrealistic view of yourself. You do so by taking a hard look at where you are in the moment. Understanding what you are capable of, what challenges the task brings, and where your weaknesses might lie. Real toughness resides in being humble and wise enough to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses. When we come to terms with our shortcomings, we’re able to adopt a secure sense of self.
  3. Trust your training. Trust yourself → Trust your training, trust your fitness. True confidence is founded in doing the work. When the work is done in the name of getting better, of enjoying the process, of searching for mastery of the craft, then confidence gradually grows.
  4. Develop a quiet ego → Quiet ego is about being aware of our strengths and weaknesses, zooming out and gaining perspective. Too much defensiveness and protection are signs your ego’s too loud. Mix perception, awareness, and security together, we can move on from the false-bravado. Confidence is doing difficult things, sometimes failing, but seeing where you lie, and then going back to the work.

• How much we perceive we can control impacts how we respond to stress. When we lack control, our stress spikes. When we have a sense that we can impact the situation, our cortisol response is dampened.
• The desire to exercise control and make choices is paramount for survival. We have a basic underlying need to have some semblance of control over whatever we’re tackling.
• The key to improving mental toughness isn’t in constraining and controlling individuals but giving them choice.
• When we don’t have control, we lose the capacity to cope. It’s when we have a choice that toughness is trained.
• Four exercises that help to develop that sense of control in yourself:
  1. From Small to Large. Take a difficult situation that brings about discomfort – and instead of wrestling the giant monster, start with the smallest item that you can have control over that’s related to the problem. Identify a small manageable and feasible action – and that’ll help you get a foothold. Once you have a sense of control over the smallest item, then move to something slightly larger
  2. Give Yourself a Choice. When building habits give yourself a choice. For example allow yourself to miss two days per week if you need to. Allowing for a mulligan helps, all or nothing often leaves you with nothing. If you consider quitting you are now training toughness.
  3. Flip the Script. Throwing up with nerves? Where would you like to insert throwing up into your warm-up routine? What time should I schedule your puking for? It might suppress the urge. Notice what nudges you toward fear and avoidance. Those triggers are often a signal that we need to flip the script.
     1. Address the elephant in the room. Everyone in this room knows more than me, so this is a bit nerve-racking. But I do know about the science of performance, and if you give me a chance, I think it’ll help you → flip the script and take away the power of “the thing.” We give ourselves permission to do something
  4. Adopt a ritual. Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams have their particular quirks. According to the theory of compensatory control they are trying to establish order in the outside world in an effort to regain control. They shift our focus to behaviors that we are in charge of – helping us navigate situations we have have little control over. Rituals can help when doing activities with a high degree of uncertainty and a low degree of control
• Leading Others
  1. Learn to let go. When you dictate and control you’re sending a message that you don’t trust others to do their job. Trust but verify instead. Check in occasionally to make sure they are headed in the right direction.
  2. Set the Constraints and Let Them Go. Give away control but set up the boundaries. As a coach aim to make yourself obsolete. Coach them toward independence, not dependence. Gradually hand more and more responsibility to those you work with.
  3. Allow Them to Fail, Reflect, and Improve. Part of giving back control is allowing them to make mistakes. Start small but give away more control over time, then have system in place that allows for reflection and growth. Give people space to fail.

Pillar 2: Listen to Your Body

• Our body uses feelings and sensations to communicate the data of our internal status to our conscious self.
• The function of feelings is to update us to our condition and drive us toward a possible solution.

The better we can read and distinguish the internal signals that our body is sending, the better we are able to use feelings and emotions as information to help guide our actions, instead of missing the signal or moving straight from feeling to reacting.

• Our brain is a patchwork mess – it operates as a series of modules that have weak connections with each other. Our brain can get contradicting information – competing voices pushing us toward competing conclusions or actions.
• The three tactics that can help us win the inner debate:
  1. Verbalize your thoughts to get through. Coping statements were more effective when verbalized. Occasionally giving yourself an overt pep talk or instructions might be a way to reach a stubborn you that hasn’t been paying attention to your inner voice.
  2. Know what to listen to. Positive self-talk doesn’t increase but performance, but having less negative self-talk does. Those who believe self-talk is effective perform better than those who see it as irrelevant.
  3. In stressful situations, adopt a self-distanced inner dialogue to decrease anxiety, shame, rumination. Using second or third person creates distance between the experience and our emotional response. By creating space with a simple change in our vocabulary, we regain control instead of defaulting toward the easy decision.

Pillar 3: Respond Instead of React

• Toughness creates space between the stimulus and response.
• Meditators when faced with a challenge don’t distract or detach themselves they embrace reality and narrow the gap between perception and reality. They suppress exaggeration and can regulate emotions better as a result.
• Affective inertia is the inability to let go of a sensation or emotion that has taken hold in our brain → negative emotions or thoughts compound, triggering an increased reactivity and a more prolonged recovery tail.
• Have a conversation with exhaustion – think of it as feedback.
• Practice Meditation: Sit quietly in a room with minimal distractions. You’ll feel sensations that may turn into positive or negative thoughts. Sit with them without focusing or pushing them away. Notice where your mind goes and what it latches onto. Don’t resist; let it dissipate or grow over time. Experience sensations and thoughts without freaking out. Start with 5 minutes, gradually increase to 15 or 20 minutes.
• Practice experiencing without reacting: Observe thoughts and let negative ones pass. Feel the urge to quit, then use strategies like redirecting attention or positive self-talk. Create space between sensation and response.
• Practice avoiding spiralling: Practice your challenging task while allowing your mind to spiral negatively. As you do, try to pull yourself out using these strategies:
  • Zoom in/out: change your focus from narrow to broad
  • Label: name what you’re feeling to reduce its power
  • Reframe: view the situation differently, e.g. stress as positive
  • Adjust your goal: break it into manageable steps
  • Remind: recall your purpose for doing the task
  • Give permission to fail: free yourself to perform better
• Decide whether to zoom in or out:
  1. Visual Zooming: Portrait Mode vs. Panorama Mode Focus narrowly on details (portrait) or broadly on everything around you (panorama). Blurring your vision can help when overwhelmed.
  2. Cognitive Zooming: Narrow thinking aids focus, broad thinking aids creativity.
  3. Physical Zooming: Our mood follows actions, leaning forward encourages narrow focus, reclining encourages broad thinking. Alter your posture to change your perspective.
  4. Temporal Zooming: Imagine the future, consider how you’ll feel about current issues in the future. It reminds us that difficulties are temporary.
  5. Linguistic Zooming: switch from first person to second or third person to distance yourself from the situation. Journaling in second or third person can help process emotions.
  6. Environmental Zooming: Modern writers find quiet, distraction-free environments to be productive.

Pillar 4: Transcend Discomfort

• Controlling leaders use rewards, negativity, intimidation, and excessive personal control to create dependence.
• Self-determination theory identifies three key needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness for well-being and growth.
• A demanding dictator strips athletes of autonomy, using fear and punishment, which kills intrinsic motivation.
• Toughness comes from care and support, not control or punishment.
• In autonomy-supportive environments, leaders guide rather than dictate, helping individuals reach their potential while allowing them to take ownership of their actions.
• Supportive environments focus on choice ownership and control over the journey.
• Seeing progress is crucial for motivation; if goals seem unattainable, complacency follows.
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shows growth must be chosen repeatedly over safety.

• Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome. Fulfillment could be achieved in three ways: doing, experiencing, and suffering.
• When we are exhausted – we haven’t completely depleted our reserves. Our body warns us through the sensation of effort and fatigue, it tell us we’re at zero before we actually hit zero. There’s always something in reserve. Drive determines how close to empty we can push before our body shuts us down.
• The level of importance and the risk versus reward help us determine how close to zero we can push. Therefore purpose is the fuel that allows you to be tough. .

Real toughness is living in the nuance and complexity of the environment, bodies, and minds we inhabit. There is no one standard pathway to inner strength, no formula for making difficult decisions or dealing with the extremes of discomfort. Real toughness is about acceptance: of who you are, what you’re going through, and the discomfort that often comes with it. It’s living in that place of tension so that the needed space can be created to find the best path forward.