Mental toughness and resilience are powerful tools for sports stars but can benefit others too. Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi discusses how employees, athletes and defence personnel can maximise their performance.
When it comes to winning gold medals, we know the mental game is as important as the physical. Many research hours have been poured into understanding the psychology behind athletic performance, but the research findings may reach further than elite sport.
In this episode, David and Associate Professor Gucciardi discuss the concepts of mental toughness and resilience, and how they may apply not only to sports stars, but also the workplace and even the battlefield.
Associate Professor Gucciardi is currently involved in several projects spanning topics such as doping in sport, mental toughness, life skills development, resilience, workplace well-being and stress.
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You can read the full transcript of the episode here.
Jess (intro) (00:00): This is The Future Of where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
David Blayney (00:09): I'm David Blayney. The old saying "get your head in the game" has never been more appropriate, with research proving that mental toughness is an even bigger factor in athletic success than we'd previously thought. Of course, it's not only sports stars who could benefit from this research. Mental resilience is a powerful asset from the battlefield to the work site to the office. To discuss this topic with us today is Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi from the School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science at Curtin University. Thank you very much for coming in today, Daniel.
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (00:42): Thanks for having me.
David Blayney (00:43): Daniel, what does psychology tell us about high performance?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (00:48): Well I guess psychology is, well at least the way I think about it is, how you pull all the different pieces together. So if you think of sport, for example, once you have a baseline or a solid foundation of physical skills, technical skills and tactical skills really it's about how you pull that together when you need to pull it all together in the heat of competition or whatever it is. And so I guess that's where psychology plays a major role in terms of pulling all that together, but equally in terms of yeah, optimising the training processes in learning and building those foundational skills.
David Blayney (01:26): What does it mean to have mental toughness and what's the difference between an athlete with mental toughness and one without, or without as much?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (01:36): Oh, well, I think a common misconception is you kind of have it or you don't. But looking at the evidence, and certainly from talking with people in high performance, but any, you know, anyone who has an interest in getting the best out of their own abilities I would say it's a, it's a matter of degrees. So how much mental toughness do you have. And so in that context, I guess the evidence and the research over the past decade or so has been quite fuzzy around what exactly it is over the past few years, you know, with some colleagues of mine, we've tried to clarify some of that work and we've nutted it down to sort of three common features I guess. So, if you think, well I guess firstly if you think about mental toughness as a personal resource, so something that an individual owns and uses in terms of their potential for action. So having some capacity to perform in a particular way. And so then if we look at what is kind of the exact nature of mental toughness, and there's three things that stand out for us. And the first one is purposefulness. So that essentially reflects someone's energy and direction in terms of where they're working towards their own goals or objectives. The second part is flexibility. So the extent to which they make modifications or adjustments to the way that they think and behave in response to stresses and adversity. And then the third part is efficiency, which we all hopefully aim for. And I guess the way we think about that in the context of mental toughness is a congruency between our behaviours and our, what we're setting out to do.
David Blayney (03:18): What's the difference between mental toughness and resilience? Are they the same thing?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (03:23): Yeah, it's a good question. And it's one that often people throw them together in the same basket, but you know, as I've just said, mental toughness, looking at the evidence and the way we conceptualise it and think about it is it's very much about the person. It's a resource that they own. If we look at the literature on resilience, resilience is a much bigger beast in terms of the academic literature. And again, it's been defined in different ways, whether it's a capacity, someone has a resilience capacity, people often talk about it as a resilience process or it's kind of, you know, this kind of trait that people either have or they don't. But the, over the past five to 10 years, I guess people have moved towards a different conceptualisation of resilience as being this, an emergent outcome. So if you think of how people interact with their environment, and so what we see from a resilience perspective, the sort of the contemporary understanding is, we conceptualise resilience as a trajectory of functioning over time, within the context of adversity. So if you think of times yourself, when you've experienced adversity, do you sustain your functioning in response to that adversity? Or do you take a hit and do you bounce back quickly? Ideally, you know, that's what we want to see in a resilience perspective. And so if we, you know, for me the key part with resilience there, sorry, is around this idea of functioning. So what is functioning For an athlete, that's high performance. You know, being able to perform on the moment, in the moment when you need to do what you want to do. For you know, a young kid who's migrated to Australia, that might be about social connectedness, you know, how well do they integrate with the new culture. Um and you know, typically people, there's lots of work on resilience from a mental health perspective. So how well do we sustain or bounce back in terms of our psychological wellbeing in response to stress and adversity. So if we, coming back to your question, if you see resilience as kind of this trajectory of functioning over time, then mental toughness is one factor that may optimise the degree to which people sustain their functioning or bounce back quickly. But it is quite different from this idea of the trajectory of functioning over time.
David Blayney (05:37): Can you give me an idea of the sort of research that's been going on in terms of mental toughness and sport?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (05:45): Uh yeah, there's been quite a bit. A lot of the work, a lot of the early work was very much around chatting to athletes, coaches, sports psychologists, working in high-performance settings, with the assumption that they are the best people to really comment on what is mental toughness Over the past few years that's broadened to take a wider perspective. And I guess the goal of that work was really trying to figure out what are the key characteristics, I guess, of people who have demonstrated high degrees of mental toughness. More recently people have yeah, taken a more of a numbers based approach where they've tried to operationalise those perspectives of mental toughness through self-reported questionnaire tools. And so they've used those tools to assess mental toughness cross-sectionally looking at how it relates to other things that it should relate to: coping, stress, perceptions and so forth. And then there's a body of work that's looked at how it relates to, or how it determines behaviour. So some of the work that we've done, for example, over the past few years has looked at how the degree to which reports of mental toughness predict or determine behaviour in certain contexts. And one area that we've been quite interested in is perseverance, perseverance in isolated situations or across multiple tasks. So some of the work I did through my postdoc looked at mental toughness as a determinant of university students' academic and social goals over a university semester. And some of the work that we've done in defence setting has looked at mental toughness as a predictor of passing a highly rigorous selection test into special forces units. And so generally what we see is that it's, it is a good thing. And generally those with higher levels do better in terms of their perseverance.
David Blayney (07:40): Can you tell us about how mental toughness applies in the workplace and indeed in the, one of the toughest workplaces that is in the defence force?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (07:49): Yeah, I guess the way I see it is this idea of mental toughness is relevant in any context where stress and pressure is prevalent. And so, there are different types of stresses for different types of jobs. And so in, you know, if you're talking workplace, it could be anything from people wearing suits and dresses, you know, their pressures come from. It might be meeting sales numbers, or it could be, in my context, it's how many papers are you publishing. How many, how much dollars are you bringing in, in terms of research funding. So I guess any context where stress is, an important consideration to how well you perform in your role, mental toughness is relevant.
David Blayney (08:35): And how is the research on mental toughness being applied in industry today?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (08:41): Well, a lot of the work has been done in sports settings naturally because coaches talk a lot about it. So, if you watch AFL coach interviews, they're often, you know, banding around that term in their post-match conferences, their written reports in newspaper articles. So naturally that's where researchers have gravitated. And in my instance, I love sports, so it was a matter of trying to mix work with pleasure. But in the workplace context the degree, the amount of research has been less prominent I guess, but certainly there in the UK and some of the work we've done has started to look in that setting. I guess the view there from a scientific point of view is to look at kind of the robustness of the findings that we've found in sport. And so really is it a, is it a useful concept scientifically? And so generally what we're seeing in terms of some of the initial work is that, yeah, we're seeing similar trends across different occupational context. If you want to refer to them in that way.
David Blayney (09:44): How can people build their own resilience and mental toughness better so then they can perform better at work or in sport or in any other aspect of life?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (09:55): That's the million dollar question. But I guess if I had to summarise it in a couple of key areas, I guess if you think of human development or human performance across three circles within a Venn diagram, there's the person the environment in which they're embedded and their filter of the environment. And so typically what we've seen in the past for mental toughness and resilience development interventions is a lot of that work is focused on building resilience or mental toughness skills in individuals, equipping them with the skills and knowledge required to deal with stress and adversity. One of the criticisms of that approach is that it's to some extent defers the blame or the requirements to the individual. And so there might be things systemically in the environment that need to be changed. So, you know, for example, workplace bullying is a major stressor. Um...
David Blayney (10:56): Or if you've got a bad boss for example.
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (10:57): Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, having all the skills and knowledge in the world to deal with that is great, but ultimately there needs to be something systemically changed in that environmental context. And so certainly, you know, we can build skills in individuals, but we also need to look at the environment in which people are embedded. That that can range from, in a sporting context, it's how do coaches facilitate experiences in which individuals are learning how to integrate and utilise those skills, those personal skills that they've learnt. Even more broadly from an organisational perspective around policies for team selection. That sort of stuff influences certainly in the elite world athletes stress levels and what might seem like inconsequential to an external person can be quite a major factor for an individual. So a lot of the work has been focused on building individual skills the environment, there's some work starting to happen in that place, but one of the key areas that has had a bit of work but certainly is an area that we're focusing on is kind of that filter. So how do people filter information in their environment? So information comes from the stressors. So, if you think of what are the major stressors in your little bubble of your world, of where you work, what you do, how you operate. Do see those stresses as threats to your functioning? So are they bad or do you see them as opportunities to learn and develop? And so really helping, a lot of the intervention work we're doing at the moment particularly with a colleague over at Macquarie University is equipping people with the skills the foundations to engage with stress proactively. And so rather than seeing stress as a bad thing it's something to utilise and engage with in ways to learn, well, how do I cope well, what are the things I need to acquire? And how might I use them in the future.
David Blayney (13:00): So I guess if we flip that question around then, what can, well, for the managers and for the coaches listening and people who manage people and manage performance, what can be done to improve the environment that people are in, so then they can perform at a higher level so they can be better.
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (13:19): Oh, look, yeah, there's, that's a very complex question, but I think ultimately if we're talking about engaging with stress proactively the first thing there really is around what are the types of stresses you're exposing your employees or your performers to. And so we want people exposed to good stresses. So you know, time demands you know, challenging them with complex projects. They're the kinds of things that interest people and energise them. You know, the example I talked about, workplace bullying, if that's a major stressor for people, you need to act on that as a manager or a business leader. So I guess firstly the types of stresses that your employees or the people you work with are exposed to. And then the second part is really engaging them in a way well encouraging them to engage with stresses proactively. So that can be done informally in terms of I guess the culture that you create within your organisation or your team do you encourage people to see stress as a good thing? As a learning opportunity? And then more formally we might engage people in systematic processes. So some of the work we're doing is around systematic reflection. So once you have experienced stress, it's reflecting on your encounter with that experience. And so, you know the classic analogy in sports psychology is a 'good, better, how' approach: what did you do good, how could you do it better next time and what you need to do it better next time. And so they're pretty, I guess, it's really a simplified view of how managers might go about doing that.
David Blayney (15:02): Where is the research in this area going? What research are you looking forward to and what research is being done right now?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (15:10): I think the stuff that I'm most interested in, what is fascinating me when I'm reading literature is taking the research beyond self-reports. And so really looking at how that translates into behaviour. So what are the, how does mental toughness relate to behavioural acts? And so, like I said, some of the work we're doing in the perseverance space. So looking at how people actually engage with tasks and actions, looking at some of that stuff. I think we need to look at more experimental design. So trying to manipulate things that we think are of interest. So for example yeah, I guess like as I was talking about in terms of trying to optimise that psychological filter, looking at comparing different types of reflection processes when people have engaged with stresses and how that has a flow-on effect for their performance, psychological wellbeing. Um and then I guess more of a long-term view looking at testing interventions. I think we're, we've jumped the gun a little bit. And you know, I'm guilty of that in my work as well. We've been a little bit too excited about some of the foundational work and we've probably jumped a few steps ahead to where we need to be. So I think building the foundational work around, linking it with actual behaviours as well as testing some experimental protocols will provide us with some nice evidence that we can then translate into some behavioural interventions.
David Blayney (16:41): What sort of behavioural interventions are you talking about?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (16:45): Anything from changing the culture within an organisation. So there's some work in the, recently in the mental toughness space, particularly in AFL that's kind of questioned the...
David Blayney (16:57): It's quite difficult to change a culture.
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (16:59): It is, yeah. So yeah, there's some work in, that's come out recently looking at AFL context that perhaps mental toughness is not necessarily an attribute of an individual, but more about how like a socially constructed concept. You know, it's more to do with the environment in which they're embedded. And so if you think of those classic sayings, you know, 'no pain, no gain', 'pushing through injury'. But you know, I look at that and at least the people I've talked to in terms of when they've talked about mental toughness is very much you know, generally the people who are high in mental toughness will make the tough decision to pull themself out if they're going to be a detriment to their team. But again, you know, it depends on context, right? And so I think, yeah, you know, interventions might focus on changing culture. Uh that's hard, as you said, it's quite challenging. But then, you know, we can think more closely related to the individual, equipping them with the skills and perhaps the more immediate architect of the environment in which they're embedded. So in a sporting context, that's equipping coaches with the knowledge and skills to create safe environments in which to engage people with stress experiences and learning from those stresses, that'd be a manager in a organisational context.
David Blayney (18:21): And what's next for you, for your work?
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (18:25): Um trying to find some time to do some work. But yeah, I guess for me at the moment, a lot of my work is in the resilience space. And so we've been, we're about to finish up a project on team resilience in army. We're extending that, looking at how we can optimise team debriefs to facilitate the likelihood of a resilient outcome, as I talked about previously. So often. So team debriefs, we conduct an activity, teams debrief on what they did, how they did it what they need to do better next time. And so a lot of, in defence, in medical settings, certainly, you know, emergency settings, emergency medicine context. These are quite common processes that teams engage in. And currently, or at least from the people I've talked to, a lot of it is done based on how a leader or a manager did it when they were young and a young employee or young soldier or whatever it is. And so the work we're doing now is trying to leverage information from the literature around best practice and trying to incorporate that with recommendations as to how people can optimise their team, team debrief processes so that they are learning task work and teamwork based factors that optimise their engagement with those stresses in the future.
David Blayney (19:49): Well that sounds interesting, best of luck with that, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you very much, Daniel, for coming in and for sharing your knowledge in this area.
Associate Professor Daniel Gucciardi (19:56): No problem. Thanks for having me.
David Blayney (19:57): You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about anything we raised today, you can get in touch by following the links in the show notes. Bye for now.