A Background to the C’s in Sports Psychology

 Professor Peter Clough is a renowned figure in the psychology field. He currently serves as the Chair of Applied Psychology for Manchester Metropolitan University.

In 2012, he and colleague Doug Strycharczyk released “Developing Mental Toughness: Improving performance, wellbeing and positive behaviour in others”.

The book is designed to teach people to be able to deal with and react to stress better in order to improve mental toughness. In the book, they refer to four important traits of mental toughness which they refer to as the four C’s: confidence, challenge, control, and commitment.

While not specifically designed with sport in mind, each of these four C’s can be applied to pretty much every sport played at an elite level.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Confidence

It is something that the top athletes around the world do not lack. To be the best you have to believe you are the best. Having confidence in your own abilities will provide constant reaffirmation that you are doing the right thing.

In high-pressure moments, having the self-belief that you will be execute whatever you need to execute is massively important.

Confidence is rarely something that you have at the start. If you do, then it is blind confidence which is not substantiated by any evidence that it is justified. Top athletes like LeBron James, Serena Williams, or Lionel Messi, will have the confidence to perform in high-pressure environments because they have spent many years dedicated to perfecting their craft and preparing for those kinds of moments.

Challenge

Mental toughness cannot be achieved without going through adversity. How we deal with challenges defines who we are. Defeats are as formative of our character as a victory. The vast majority of elite athletes will taste defeat, and on a regular basis at that.

It is easier to grow and learn from our failures than from our success. Michael Jordan had to lose in the playoffs multiple times and wait seven years before he first held the NBA title. Jordan Henderson lost in the 2018 UEFA Champions League final before he was able to lift the trophy the following year. Max Verstappen watched Lewis Hamilton win his seventh title before he was able to clinch his first a year later.

Being challenged is a fundamental building block to becoming mentally tougher.

Control

Control is one that takes an extra bit of study and understanding but nevertheless will contribute to you becoming mentally stronger. What Clough was referring to here was learning what is within our control and what isn’t.

People who are not as mentally tough will fixate on things that, no matter what they think, will be outside of their control. They will do this instead of concentrating on things that they can control. They then end up spinning their wheels but inevitably go nowhere.

Elite athletes will focus on things in their control like how hard and how often they train, their nutrition, and their recovery.

Commitment

A quote that is often attributed to Albert Einstein is that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. If this was the case, a lot of elite athletes would be deemed insane.

To compete at the highest level, in any sport, involves repeating the same processes over and over again, each time trying to improve on the last iteration. Stephen Curry has spent thousands of hours shooting the basketball to the point where is pretty unanimously considered the best shooter in the history of the NBA. That could involve standing in the same spot, shooting the same shot, hundreds of times, before moving to a different spot and starting the process all over again.

To be the best, elite athletes had to make huge commitments, physically and mentally to their craft. They dedicate their bodies, their minds, and their lives to their discipline so that they can be recognised as one of the best among their peers.

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