Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

by Steve Magness

“Coaching can easily become . . . a technocratic procedure invested less with a coach’s understanding of all that training does, and more with his or her power to control, monitor, intervene, regulate, differentiate and correct his or her athletes. Yet, paradoxically, there is nothing structured and certain about a race. What happens over the course of a distance running race is open to constant change; athletes have to make untold decisions that relate to their many bodily states.” Denison and Mills continued, “What concerns us, therefore, is how effective a training plan can ever be if the body in the stands—the coach—not the body on the track—the athlete—is in total control of the training process?”

When athletes compete, they are alone in the competition arena. They make the decisions. Yet, in training, the coach takes on the decision-making mantle. Denison and Mills suggested flipping the concept on its head. No, not by making the athletes in charge of designing...

Denison and Mills’s model, the coach shifts from dictating to putting athletes in a situation where they are challenged, but then giving them free rein to find, search, and choose how to cope with the scenario.

A study of over two hundred men and women found that when athletes trained in an autonomy-supportive environment, there was a correlation with the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs for well-being. Controlling environments were associated with thwarting an individual’s basic needs and with lower overall satisfaction. Furthermore, they found that those in a supportive environment tended to have higher levels of mental toughness and better performances.

TOUGHNESS MAXIM When we don’t have control, we lose the capacity to cope. It’s when we have a choice that toughness is trained.

If you’re leading, you bear the burden of training and empowering control.

As those in the Special Forces often say, “Trust but verify.” It’s a balance between trusting and overmanaging, but we often fall too far on the side of overmanaging.

Instead, let go of the reins a touch, teach them the skills, and then let them go. Check in occasionally to make sure they are headed in the right direction. Over time, the reins should get longer and longer. Your goal is to put people in a position to do their job.

Create conditions that allow for people to mess up and make mistakes in a way that doesn’t cause you to lose the big client or big game.

We often equate toughness with persistence, but in some cases, it’s the exact opposite. Toughness is navigating the inner turmoil in order to make a good decision. Sometimes that’s to persist. Other times it’s to quit.

Robert Wright wrote in the book Why Buddhism Is True, “What emotions do—what emotions are for—is to activate and coordinate the modular functions that are, in Darwinian terms, appropriate for the moment.” In other words, they are the first step in a cascade designed to prepare us for action.

TOUGHNESS MAXIM Feelings are subject to distortion. They depend on context and interpretation. The better we’re able to interpret, the better our ultimate decision.

TOUGHNESS MAXIM Feelings send a message, conveying information and nudging us toward a behavior.

“Pedigree gets you in the door; thoughtfulness and self-awareness are what separate you.”

When we lose the capacity to distinguish the nuance of the experience, we jump straight to the easy decision. Part of being tough is fine-tuning your ability to experience and decipher what you’re feeling.

Poor interoception → Poor predictions → Lower toughness and worse decision making

Toughness is about accurately reading these signals—knowing what your body is saying and being able to decide whether or not to respond.

researchers found that self-critical dialogue activates a part of our brain linked to error processing and resolution, while self-talk related to reassurance activates areas related to expressing compassion and empathy.

TOUGHNESS MAXIM If the messenger (feeling) shouts loud enough, a corresponding thought will enter our awareness to motivate us toward a behavioral response or action. Our inner speech serves to integrate our variety of systems or selves. To bring concerns and motives to awareness and decide what to do with them.

When it comes to winning the inner debate, there are three tactics that we can utilize and develop: Change your voice: inside versus outside Know what voice to listen to: positive or negative Decrease the bond: from me to she

A group of scientists found that coping statements were more effective when they were verbalized.

researchers out of the University of Waterloo found that positive self-talk worked as long as the subject had high self-esteem. If they had low self-esteem, positive self-talk could be detrimental. In other words, your brain isn’t going to be fooled by false bravado. We need a degree of belief that what we are saying is true. When it comes to self-talk, if you fake it, you don’t make it.

winners and losers didn’t differ in the amount of positive self-talk they used. However, match winners utilized less negative self-talk than their less successful peers. When they dug further into the data, they found that it wasn’t so much whether someone had positive or negative self-talk but how they interpreted it. Those who believed in self-talk’s effectiveness lost fewer points than those who saw self-talk as largely irrelevant.

Davidson surmised on The Ezra Klein Show, “In some sense, the average person is getting a triple dose of pain (before, during, and after). Whereas the long-term meditator is simply responding when the painful stimulus is delivered.”

Respond to reality. For most of us, we are not only responding to the actual stress but the reverberations of it. Tough individuals learn to match perception with reality so that they marshal the appropriate response instead of an exaggerated one.

Opening oneself up to experience whatever thought or sensation enters our conscious awareness does not give that sensation power; it drains it of its control. Research shows that when we practice opening ourselves up to discomfort, we are better positioned to handle it. Our brain dampens down the tendency to jump straight from feeling a sensation to sounding the alarm. Acceptance creates space, allowing us to let the sensation float away or evaluate and reframe it.

The skill of being alone in your head is a foundational piece of developing toughness.

Exercise: Mistake Watching Watch a video of yourself performing at whatever it is you do. As you feel embarrassment or frustration in watching yourself fail, take note of the sensation. Evaluate the emotions that come with it. Sit with the feelings and sensations. Try to create space and keep your mind from spiraling. Practice labeling the emotions, using psychological distancing, or any of a number of strategies we’ve discussed so far. Watch where your thoughts go and gently pull them back away from the “freak-out” stage. Utilize the strategies you’ve learned, from breathing exercises to mindfulness training to redirecting your attention.

The broaden-and-build theory of emotions states that positive emotions expand our cognition and our opportunities for action. According to Fredrickson, when we experience positive emotions, we’re more likely to have novel thoughts, take on new challenges, and embrace new experiences.

negative emotions tend to make us narrow our possibilities. Negative emotions constrain our thoughts and behavior. Our options become limited when we’re swamped by anger. Whether it’s attention, cognition, or emotion, the pattern is clear. Broad is the way to go; narrow is to be avoided.

Suppression is a short-term solution. Eventually we have to deal with the experience.

The best performers tend to have a flexible and adaptive coping ability. They can bounce between different strategies, depending on the demands of the situation.

Sheppes and Gross offered the following summary: “Healthy adaptation is the result of flexibly choosing between regulation strategies to adapt to differing situational demands.”

They weren’t just using one strategy; they were changing their focus at different times in response to the demands of the event. Fatigue and a rising uncertainty about whether they could finish? Flip the switch and home in. Are those around them starting to make tactical moves? Shift attention to their surroundings and competitors.

Our journey toward real toughness is much the same. We start with only one solution: grind it out, ignore much of what’s going on inside. It may help us get through minor difficulties, but eventually it fails. We have to adopt a way to navigate the complex feelings, emotions, and thoughts that swirl whenever we are faced with a challenge. Over time, we gain the ability to pay attention to our inner world, navigate the experience without freaking out, and ultimately make better decisions. As adults, we all have the machinery and capacity to develop that ability.

If our only hope to stop the snowball is to stand in its way, put our hands up, and yell, “Come at me!” chances are slim that everything will turn out all right. That’s old toughness. A simplistic solution to a difficult situation. Real toughness is about having a myriad of potential options. Many will fail, but the chances are a lot higher that we’ll find a way to stop or minimize the damage of a careening snowball.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a state where “the ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Flow states contained effortless attention, optimal arousal, and an automatic/effortless experience, while clutch states contained complete and deliberate focus, heightened awareness and arousal, and an intense effort.

With clutch states, there was a conscious decision to increase effort and intensity. They had to flip the switch. How they did so varied, but when they were at the toughest part of the performance, they figured out how to choose to increase their effort. Clutch required choosing; flow required experiencing.

there are four key elements that controlling leaders utilize to create individuals who are dependent on them: Controlling use of rewards Negative conditional regard Intimidation and isolation Excessive personal control

We have this idea that people need to be pushed or have a carrot dangled in front of them, or else they’d all sit at home watching Netflix. That’s wrong. The inner drive matters more than the outer.

Internally driven athletes experienced more positive emotions and an increased willingness to repeat the task after its completion. The alternative, a motivation based on control, is fragile. It might appear powerful at the beginning, but it quickly fades. In the throes of despair between continuing and stopping, fear as the driver falters. In the aforementioned study, individuals motivated by external pressure were more likely to disengage, give up, and see the endeavor as a threat.

The ability to reengage, to shift your goal elsewhere, is a vital skill that tough individuals possess. After putting so much work into a singular pursuit, it can be nearly impossible to let it go. No one wants to fail, to come so close but turn away. But tough individuals possess the self-awareness to evaluate and weigh the contrasting pulls of the desire to continue to reach their goal and the reality of the demands they face, and the risks that come with those. All so that they can make the best possible choice. Instead of blindly persisting, if the right move is to “quit,” they are able to reframe their goal, or find a new one and reengage with the activity.

Tough people don’t live in a black-and-white world of success or failure. They are able to adjust and pour their ability to persist into a new worthwhile goal.

Self-determination theory (SDT) was born. It includes the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Or stated another way, to feel in control, like you can make progress, and to belong.

When we have autonomy and support, we have higher self-esteem and better emotional intelligence. Satisfying our basic needs seemed to help with every attribute that underlies toughness.

If the atmosphere was supportive and fostered autonomy and a sense of belonging, then the athletes were tougher and performed better. As Mahoney concluded, toughness resulted from “coaching behaviors that promote psychological needs satisfaction.”

When we satisfy our needs, we are allowed to fulfill our potential. Satisfying our basic needs is the fuel that allows us to put to work all of the tools we’ve developed to be tough.

abusive leadership, which refers to when a coach utilizes ridicule or blame in an effort to motivate or teach those under their charge. Think: a coach telling players that they aren’t competent or tough enough to perform. In other words, the behaviors and methods that we often ascribe to creating old-school toughness.

In evaluating almost seven hundred players’ performance, those who played under a coach who utilized an abusive leadership style saw a clear drop in performance, as measured by a player efficiency score. But the effects weren’t limited to the season in which they played under a coach who relied heavily on such tactics. The impact stretched to the player’s entire career.