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