How do you get better?  You don't practice what you're good at.  You don't practice and not note or measure how or what you're getting better.  You practice what you're bad at, and measure your progress.  That may seem obvious, but how often do we do the same ole same old at practice, just going through the motions and drills without noting how we're getting better?

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

I attended a few football games this week and heard one coach talking to his QB.  "That was a terrible throw!  You need to settle down."  You'd probably hear those exact two sentences a thousand times from coaches all over the country this past weekend.  But do they really help?  Do they help the QB? No, he probably already knows that he's throwing poorly.  Does it help the team?  No, because those words just make the QB more nervous and makes his throws worse.  Do they help the coach?  Probably yes.  It makes him feel that he's actually doing something, some coaching, as if he's trying to solve the problem, but its just out of his control.

My argument is that its not totally out of his control.  Those two sentences symbolize a certain mental mindset of coaching that has negative consequences on a team.  Mental toughness is not always about being tough with your players.  It's about coaching resiliency, a quiet mind, an ability to handle pressure, and those things rarely come out of agressive judgment and criticism.

Instead, what if the coach could have figured out what was causing the mistakes.  It likely wasn't a lack of effort, lack of ability, or lack of desire.  It was probably that he was nervous and his mind was racing about all the things that could go bad (like the coach yelling at him.)  Thus, he didn't have the mental bandwidth to handle all the game inputs that he needed to compute.  Instead of telling the QB to settle down, the coach could have helped him settle down, whether through talking him through his anxiety, breathing excerises, and reducing the pressure of the situation.  The coach here just inceased those things.

Just another example of where mental toughness coaching can come into play.