Mental Toughness: What It Is and How to Build It

Mental toughness is the capacity to keep performing and keep choosing your response when things get hard: under pressure, after a setback, or when stopping would be easier. It can be built. It is not the absence of fear, and it is not the same as hiding how you feel or refusing help.

Below: the 4Cs model behind the most widely used mental toughness questionnaire, how toughness differs from resilience and grit, and what it looked like for people who have needed it, from a fighter behind on the cards to an electrician with a fractured spine.

What is mental toughness?

The idea comes out of sport psychology. In 2002, Graham Jones, Sheldon Hanton and Declan Connaughton interviewed ten international performers and defined mental toughness as a "natural or developed psychological edge": what lets someone stay more determined, focused, confident and in control under pressure than their opponents.

Later research took it beyond sport. A 2015 paper led by Daniel Gucciardi ran five studies across sport, education, the military and the workplace. It concluded that mental toughness may be best understood as one capacity rather than a bundle of separate traits, and that it shifts with circumstances while also holding fairly steady over time. His team defines it as a personal capacity to perform consistently well despite everyday challenges and stressors, as well as serious adversity.

So mental toughness shows in what you keep doing, not in how you feel while you do it, and it responds to experience.

The 4Cs of mental toughness

The most widely used model is the 4Cs, from researchers Clough, Earle and Sewell in 2002 (summarised by Lin and colleagues). It added confidence to an older idea called hardiness, which already had the other three.

You will also see lists of five, seven or eight factors. The 4Cs is the most widely used, because it sits behind the MTQ48, the most common mental toughness questionnaire. Treat it as a useful checklist rather than settled science: Gucciardi has pointed out that studies, including some by the model's own authors, question whether the questionnaire really measures four separate things.

Mental toughness, resilience and grit

Mental strength and being mentally strong are the everyday names for mental toughness. Resilience and grit are different ideas that get used as if they were the same.

Lin and colleagues draw two differences between mental toughness and resilience. Resilience is a broad process you infer from how people and systems cope, while mental toughness is a set of traits you can measure. And resilience assumes the risk is already there, while mental toughness includes seeking challenge out. Gucciardi and colleagues treat mental toughness as one of the personal resources that feeds into resilience, alongside social and community ones. Grit, the term popularised by Angela Duckworth, is related but behaved differently when both were measured together (Denovan and colleagues, 2022).

For the wider picture, see how to build resilience at work and what adversity actually is.

What mental toughness is not

In Australia, "be tough" often gets heard as "harden up". Australian research links that version with poorer mental health.

In The Men's Project's 2018 Man Box study of 1,000 Australian men aged 18 to 30, 47% personally agreed that guys should act strong even if they feel scared or nervous inside. Men whose answers put them above average in agreeing with the study's full set of rules about how men should act were twice as likely to say they had had thoughts of suicide in the previous two weeks: 44%, against 22% of the others. That is an association in one survey, not proof of cause. Beyond Blue says only 28% of men will seek professional mental health support, compared with 50% of women, and lists being used to "pushing through" among the reasons men do not reach out.

If any of this is close to home: in Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14, Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636 and MensLine Australia is 1300 78 99 78, all 24 hours. Lifeline and MensLine also offer online chat, and you can text Lifeline on 0477 13 11 14. In an emergency, call 000.

None of that is what researchers mean by mental toughness. A 2017 review of the evidence in elite sport, led by Gucciardi at Curtin University in Perth, argues mental toughness may be a sign of good mental health, or a route to it, rather than its opposite. A study of 154 US college athletes found that those higher in mental toughness held less stigma about seeking help, though it was not linked to how they viewed mental health problems themselves.

Guests on the show describe the other version from experience. On episode 21, Dan Bailey looks back on years when he never put his own happiness first. He describes "doing the typical sort of macho thing of going she'll be right", putting his head down to "get it done and then get upset."

Lewis Offenburg's version nearly left him paraplegic. At 17, playing football for Claremont, he compressed his spine making a tackle. He stayed on for one more play before going to the bench. He saw a chiropractor the next day, did a full day of work lifting sleepers on the Monday, and at training that night told his coach it was "just a bit of a stiff back." His coach sent him to a doctor. Emergency cleared him, and the next morning, driving to work, he got the call: two fractured vertebrae and a snapped ligament. "I could have been fully paraplegic," he says on episode 22. Asked what he would say now to someone who is hurt and says she'll be right, he answers: "even if it's small and even if the doctors say it's all good, you know, you really want to make sure you double check that." If one of his own electricians got hurt, he says, he would make sure they were sent to a doctor.

Surviving a crisis also does not mean you are fine afterwards. Shane Hasler lost a kidney to cancer at 23. On episode 4 he says "after the cancer is when all the anxiety and everything come." For years, any illness had him convinced the cancer was back, even though a decade of checkups found nothing.

And toughness can tip into not knowing when to stop. Property investor Tyler Wood calls it a negative trait he shares with his dad. On episode 12:

We hold on to things a little bit too long. Like, we probably don't bail out on things soon enough.

How to build mental toughness

If you want to know how to be mentally strong, this is the practical part. None of these is a program. They are habits people on the show used.

1. Choose some discomfort on purpose
2. Go straight at the weak spot
3. Work on today's problem
4. Collect your own evidence
5. Separate who you are from what you do
6. Build your corner

1. Choose some discomfort on purpose

Take on something hard in a setting you chose, so the feeling of being near your limit is familiar when it comes.

Shane went back to boxing after his surgery and still spars. He says:

I love having those anxious, nervous feelings before sparring.

He does the same with running. His longest run had been about 13 kilometres when he entered a 12 hour event and covered nearly 94. Training for a 100 kilometre race when he recorded the episode, he said "I want to get to these breaking points." He is honest about what the long run felt like: "There was a few moments in that run for some reason, I just felt like I was going to burst into tears."

For most people the choice is smaller: the cold swim, the extra set, the conversation you have been avoiding, or a talk you are dreading, which these public speaking tips cover. This is for discomfort you pick in a safe setting, with an end point, that you can stop if something is actually wrong. It is not a reason to train or work through an injury.

2. Go straight at the weak spot

Find the thing you avoid practising because you are bad at it, and give it the most time, not the least.

On episode 16, professional boxer Jackson England says ego stops some fighters looking at what they struggle with, so they keep drilling what they are already good at. His rule runs the other way. When he finds a weakness, or his coach points one out: "There's an hour of me doing that."

At work, it is the task you keep putting off because you are not good at it yet.

3. Work on today's problem

When the whole thing is too big to look at, work on the part in front of you today.

Lewis left school at 14, was running an electrical business with his dad at 15, and is now building Trade Guru, an app for electricians, without a technical background. He says the biggest change for him was this:

I just kind of learned to let go of the results and just focus on the day to day.

Big problems overwhelm you from a distance, he says, but "fear is basically like a mile wide and an inch deep." Take one or two steps, and "you just keep finding out that it's never that bad."

4. Collect your own evidence

Much of confidence under pressure comes from evidence: things you have already come through.

Dave Clare has spent 30 odd years in leadership development. In 2017 he started his current business, and the first year went so badly it used up nearly everything he and his wife had left in savings. Sitting in the garage with her, around 50 years old, with a pizza box on the floor, he told her that "if I have to sleep in that pizza box or in a friend's couch or whatever I'm going to build this thing." He also asked whether she wanted to come on that journey with him, and said he would understand if she did not. On episode 1 he explains where his certainty came from:

I've always found a way. And so I knew when I looked at that pizza box that I could make that commitment.

Wes Capper, who has had more than 100 fights, won his first Australian Muay Thai title after his opponent split his face with elbows. He needed about 16 stitches, was behind on the cards and was fighting in his opponent's home town. It was named fight of the year. On episode 17 he says what it gave him:

It's more so like I know that I can go there. I know that I can go to the dark place if I need to.

He adds that he goes there less now, because he cannot recover the way he used to.

Dan Bailey makes the point that you only see this kind of evidence if you look for it: "it's only when you stop and reflect, you're like, oh, you know, that actually was pretty hard and I should sort of give myself a little bit of credit for doing it." Write the hard things down, and what you did about each one.

5. Separate who you are from what you do

If your whole identity rests on one role, losing that role can feel like losing yourself.

Lewis's number one goal as a teenager was to play AFL. After the injury, a doctor told him it was probably best not to go back to footy.

I guess it was a bit of an identity shift as well, because obviously your whole identity gets caught up in the things that you do. And that was probably a big lesson for me, is not to be so caught up in what you do.

He admits he got lost in it for a while. Levi Saunders, also on episode 1, looks back on parting ways with his business partner and puts some of his reaction down to ego tied to status: "I didn't want to be the best marketer. I wanted to be known for being the best marketer."

6. Build your corner

Nobody in these stories did it alone, the fighters included.

Before the last round of that title fight, Wes's corner gave him what he calls a "super generic" talk, something along the lines of: "This isn't about anyone here. This is for you. The next 3 minutes is for you." It worked because he knew the person saying it had been there himself. Wes describes a good coach as "your dietician, they're your bloody therapist, they're your shoulder to cry on." He has held off taking on fighters of his own, partly because he was still putting time into his own fighting and partly because he knows how much his own coach meant to him.

On episode 19, Vee Venture, who now runs her own coaching business, says she felt she was not good enough to coach others even after her own results. Her answer was not to push through alone: "I got a mentor to help me become a mentor."

Asking for help does not cancel toughness out. Dan, who used to say she'll be right, mentions on episode 21 that he now does therapy every week.

Your corner might be a coach, a mentor, a mate who will tell you the truth, a GP or a psychologist. What Is Mental Fitness? covers where everyday habits end and professional support should begin.

Mental toughness training: what the evidence says

Most of the research on training mental toughness comes from sport. A 2020 review by Stamatis and colleagues found 12 studies. Across the 10 it could combine, training programs had a large effect on mental toughness scores. By design it only covered athletes. It also found a high risk of bias in three quarters of the studies, and only three randomised controlled trials. The authors describe mental toughness as something that develops slowly over the long term.

Genes play a part too. Lin and colleagues estimate that about half of the variation in mental toughness comes from genes, with the rest down to experience.

That supports a modest conclusion: mental toughness can be developed, probably over months and years rather than a weekend course. Be wary of any program that promises more than that, especially outside sport, where there is little good research.

Signs of a mentally strong person

These are prompts for reflection, not a test:

• In a bad situation, you can name what is in your control and put your effort there.
• You move towards the hard conversation, the weak spot or the next step, rather than around it.
• A setback changes your plan without becoming a verdict on your worth.
• You can feel scared, nervous or upset and still do what you decided to do.
• You ask for help before things become a crisis.
• You know when to stop: an injury, a stalled project, a fight that is not yours.

None of these is a measure of your mental health, and missing some of them does not mean something is wrong. If you have been feeling low, anxious or overwhelmed for a couple of weeks or more, or it is getting in the way of work, sleep or the people around you, talk to a GP about what support would help. If you need to talk to someone now, Lifeline is 13 11 14, 24 hours.

Where to go from here

Each story here comes from a full conversation, with the transcript on the episode page.

• Episode 22: From a Fractured Spine to Trade Guru, with Lewis Offenburg, on identity, fear and taking the next step.
• Episode 17: 100 Fights and Building The Barn, with Wes Capper, on title fights and coaching.
• Episode 1: Pizza Box Commitment, with Dave Clare and Levi Saunders, on commitment when the money has run out.
• Episode 4: Cancer, Boxing and Rebuilding Life, with Shane Hasler, on the anxiety that came after surviving, and chasing breaking points on purpose.
• Episode 21: 11 Years in the Army to Building Tradie HQ, with Dan Bailey, on she'll be right and what replaced it.
• Episode 16: Pro Boxing and the Pursuit of Greatness, with Jackson England, on losing early and working on weaknesses.
• Episode 19: Moving Out at 13 to a Seven Figure Business, with Vee Venture, on getting a mentor before you feel ready.
• Episode 12: Slipping Through the Cracks, with Tyler Wood, on the traits families pass down.
• Self Discipline: What It Is and How to Build It, on routines that hold after motivation fades.