Mental Toughness by M and T Horne Summary - With Notes and Highlights
A journey of sport psychology techniques. This book teaches athletes how to develop a tough mentality and achieve success in their respective sport.
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🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Write your goals down as specific as possible, and then share them with people aware of your capabilities.
Follow your sports icons and do what they did. Learn from their journeys and trust your gut.
Visualization is a powerful tool for success. Visualize yourself performing successfully and watch your rivals in order to know them better.
🎨 Impressions
In Mental Toughness by M and T Horne, readers are taken through a journey of sport psychology techniques. This book teaches athletes how to develop a tough mentality and achieve success in their respective sport. It covers a range of topics, from setting goals to visualization techniques, and provides actionable steps for readers to implement in their own lives.
🧭 How I Discovered It
I was looking for an interesting read on Kindle Unlimited. Specifically, for a book that could help me develop my own "edge" in sports performance.
👤 Who Should Read It?
🙇 Athletes looking for ways to develop a tough mentality.
🏔 Athletes who like to think outside the box.
🏆 Those truly committed to success and excellence.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
I started implementing various mental training techniques to determine what works best for me. Since every athlete is unique, it is important that we explore different methods and find the techniques and routines that best complement our personality and lifestyle.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
“Introduce constraints and you get an athlete that is creative. Train with constraints and limitations”.
“Seeking your dreams will limit the people that you associate with, but that is part of the game”.
“Failure I can live with, not trying I can't handle”.
📒 Summary + Notes
1. 🎢 Your Ride
To become mentally tough, one must learn to free themselves from any belief that limits self-trust and interferes with potential accomplishments. Simultaneously, they should embrace the fears that stop them short at their edge. While certain athletes naturally possess the ability to discard judgment and take relentless risks, others must cultivate this trait. It's crucial to recognize that both innate talent and cultivated skill lead to the same destination.
Nevertheless, the journey toward mental toughness is lengthy and not one that everyone embarks on. You will have special people who will accompany you through your journey, but there won't be many of them. The more disciplined and serious you get about being the best, the more you will have to limit the number of people you surround yourself with. It's important to appreciate those who are on this journey with you, including family, friends, coaches, teammates, and rivals. In the quest for excellence, this group of people is your ride; don't forget that. Through accomplishments and failures, they got your back.
Bonus tip:
What if failure strikes? What if I fall short of the goals I've set for myself? In such moments, consider the wisdom of Kobe Bryant: "Failure is a tremendous teacher! The objective is to experience failure often, as it illuminates the paths not to take. Failure, in essence, does not truly exist. Just pick yourself up and try again, perhaps on Tuesday."
2. 🤯 Your Sub-Mind
I’ve talked a lot about the subconscious mind in my blogs, and the reason behind is that your subconscious mind is the heart of all. Decide who you are going to be and practice saying ONLY WHAT YOU WANT YOUR REALITY TO BE. The subconscious mind doesn’t understand good or bad, it just accepts what you believe to be true about yourself.
Surround yourself with the reality that you want to see. Be around people who remind you of who you are and can help you make progress. Seek out coaches who have accomplished what you desire to achieve, athletes who play the way you aspire to, and opponents who bring out the best in you.
Don’t use the word don’t or can’t, use positive language. Tell yourself that you are great! Decide what the goal is and go after it 100%
Never allow other people’s doubts and fears to enter into your mind.
Teach yourself to guard your thoughts. Defend your subconscious mind from negative thoughts like Richard Venus did for Venus Williams. You can watch the video below…
3. 👓 The Visualization Workout
Your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between your imagination and what reality can be. Visualization is the process of feeding your subconscious with mental images of what you want to create in your physical reality.
Numerous studies have investigated the effectiveness of visualization techniques in improving sports performance, and although the correlation between mental imagery and enhanced motor skills is not always significant, incorporating visualization exercises into training routines could be helpful.
In my personal experience, visualizing a new movement before practice, or creating a successful event before competition, has been effective. Give it a try, it might work for you and your young athlete!
Actionable Visualization Exercise.
Arrive early to the game, practice, or competition.
Create the whole event in your mind.
See yourself performing successfully
Relax and replay the event over and over again.
4. 🎯 Write Your Goals Down
Neuroscience has shown that writing goals, has the ability to boost an athlete's motivation, focus, and inspire him or her to dream bigger.
According to Forbes, this technique is effective because it has an impact on two psychological levels: external storage and encoding.
That is, when you write your objectives down, this serves as a tangible reminder to work towards them. Your goals get stored in a physical location that can be accessed anytime (external storage). Furthermore, writing helps to reinforce ideas into your brain and transition them into your long-term memory (encoding). The more you write, the more you'll remember and the more you'll truly believe in the objectives you've set for yourself.
"Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible." - Tony Robbins
5. 🗿 Engraving Technique - Watch the Pros
The engraving technique is the practice of watching professionals perform the skills that you want to improve. It engraves a mental blueprint of how to do the skill in your mind and helps you perform the skill better.
Seeing your favourite pro do an amazing skill is always great for young athletes. Watching a pro athlete play with confidence is a great way to engrave mental toughness. It shows young athletes that the things that they thought were hard are doable.
Five Minute Engraving Technique Exercise
Find videos of an athlete who is great at doing the one desired skill that you need to work on.
Have your young athlete watch the video every night.
Make sure that the video is only 5-10 minutes long.
Make sure that the video is of current athletes (contemporary techniques).
6. 🧘 Meditate
Meditation is so awesome! And it is super important for mental toughness. It is the exercise of clearing your mind of all distractions and focusing on the here and now. Meditation and mindfulness is so important that Athletes like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant both hired a guy by the name of George Mumford to help them increase their mindfulness and improve their meditation practice.
Meditation is not an instant thing. It takes practice, practice, and more practice! Here’s how.
Actionable Meditation Exercise:
Meditate twice a day for five minutes each.
Find a quiet space
When you have a thought, allow it to come and then refocus on your breathing. By being present with your breath, the thought will naturally fade away. If another thought arises, return your focus to your breath once again. This loop of thinking and breathing is like a bicep curl for your mind, as it helps to train your mindfulness. The objective is to gradually increase the duration of your ability to remain present and mindful.
Set a timer so that you have one less thing to think about.
Use meditation to achieve mental clarity, reduce sports anxiety, achieve a zone state, and gain mental toughness!
7. 🛑 Constraints = Creation
Practicing small is one physical practice that can help your inner athlete become mentally tough. Find a way to shrink or constrain practices. Some methods used by professional athletes include:
Practicing on a smaller field.
Professional goalies practice with ping pong or tennis balls.
Basketball players will shrink the balls too.
Soccer players will shrink the ball and the soccer pitch.
Practicing small is a game changer. It makes playing the game a lot easier when everything is larger. Practice small and watch your mental toughness get stronger.
8. 🐢 Slow Down
Slow training is one of the most effective training techniques available. Taking the time to break down a skill and perform it over and over again slowly will actually add to your speed, ability, and confidence.
Slow practice gives your brain a very detailed map of what needs to be performed, teaching it to do the task over and over again.
The faster things move, the less you can notice the details. So give yourself an advantage and master skills by practicing slowly.
🚨 Before speeding up and doing the drill at game speed, slow it down and pay attention to how well or poorly you are doing the task at hand. Slowing down will fortify the neural pathways in your brain that are assigned to helping you complete this task.
9. 🤕 Train Rough
Muhammad Ali went to the woods, and Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out in dusty gyms with old equipment and rusty weights. Training rough tells your subconscious mind to get to work.
The point is to add an old gym, practice field or training facility to your regiment. Practice on an outside court or on a dirt field. You know the drill. Train rough!
10. 💪 Mental Toughness
The journey to mental toughness is a challenging but rewarding path that requires dedication and commitment. Surrounding yourself with the right people, guarding your subconscious mind, practicing visualization, setting goals, and learning from professionals, are techniques that each provide value towards solving your own mental toughness puzzle. Good luck in your journey and remember to stay consistent with any of the techniques that you choose.
Works cited
This booked helped me become more creative with my training practices. By incorporating these techniques into the equation, I introduced diversity into my training, resulting in a shift in my mindset.