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So as I moved over to start working with Angela on trying to find out this answer,
I had a fair idea of what I thought was the case, that for
a given level of talent, for two equally talented athletes, if there was one
that had more mental toughness, is what we call them in the industry.
And I guess when we broke it down is,
can I persist under pressure even despite setbacks.
Is if they're able to do this, they'll maximize their talent, or they've better
chance at maximizing their talent than the other athlete who perhaps doesn't persist,
when they have a bad game, or a bad month, or coach yells at them.
Or have an injury or a setback.
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And so, to explore that we had to find out,
a whether we could measure the mental toughness of separate athletes.
B, whether we could shift the mental toughness of separate athletes, and
see whether those two indicators correlated with their actual performance
as an athlete.
So within the industry, in most performance industries.
And most people, practically, know how to measure performance in their area.
It was quite easy for me to say, the statistics should improve.
Those who score more points or do better on normal statistical indicators.
Or perhaps are more consistent or are promoted up through levels quicker.
Generally, indicates that they're performing above average.
And so, that was quite easy to quantify.
What I didn't have a greater idea around
I was, how do we measure the mental toughness?
Obviously, Angela's group scale is quite simple and it's very easy to access.
So that's was going to be one that we used.
But another area that was quite important, that came up after we talked about how to
operationalize or how to actually train it was measuring optimism.
So reaching out to other practitioners or other researchers, trying
to find ways to actually improve someone's mental toughness or their resilience.
I came across another set of research or
another group that had done a lot of work actually at UPenn as well.
And that was a resilience program that was over a scale,
first from education areas, right up to the US Army.
And Karen Reivich and her group, obviously building off of Martin Seligman's
work on optimism from decades ago, have been able to
build a program that's quite comprehensive in teaching the skills of optimism.
That help buffer individuals against the hardships of life, and
particularly in a high performing and high stress environment like the army,
it seemed to be really connected to what athletes might jive with, as well.
And so, we went ahead and adapted some of those exercises.
They had found that by teaching optimism and teaching some other skills around
character strengths, they were able to help soldiers and commanding officers
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AWOL incidences, other disciplinary things,
and obviously incidences or at least the symptoms of depression.
All of these were decreased as a result of individuals going through this
resilience training program.
So I met with Karen, spoke with her about the elements that might transfer.
And took segments of that back to this athletic population, and
we went about training.
And let's see what happens.
And so, we did a pretest baseline reading, I guess, of grit and
also optimism, using the attributional styles questionnaire.
It's a fairly well-established method that comes out of UPenn and Marty's work.
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And then, we also looked at these statistics from a year before
as a baseline.
We delivered the training before the season took another
post test of the same measures and then let them play an entire year and
watch what their performance was like this year compared to the previous year.
And when they actually sat down and then analyzed that, and
looked at whether there were correlations between the mental toughness and
how they performed and also whether we could shift it, and
whether we could change things year to year, the results were really exciting.
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Ph.D.Director, ImpactED
Angela Duckworth, Ph.D.Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology
