Concepts for Coaches: Grit

I spent 3 years in graduate school researching grit. So you could imagine my disappointment when some more legitimate scientists told me that grit was just conscientiousness, a construct that’s been around in personality psychology for decades, dressed up.

But whether you call it grit or conscientiousness - it’s still something you should care about and try to cultivate. Coaching can make a difference between someone being gritty and mentally flimsy. The tendency to be orderly, and dutiful, and to care about your work and performance is a big advantage.

Being gritty isn’t really about being tough. It’s also not an innate trait that people either have or don’t. Being gritty is a skill we can build, and is a reflection of caring deeply about our craft.

We think about grit as toughness because genuine care about performance shows up in the most difficult moments.

If we didn’t care, we’d give up.

So how can we help people become grittier?

It boils down to two factors:

• Passion
• Perseverance

This is the grit formula.

Passion comes in two forms: obsessive passion, which we typically view as maladaptive and shows up in ways like perfectionism, and harmonious passion, which we typically view as adaptive and looks a lot like working with a growth mindset.

In fact, if you want to build up a harmonious passion, it helps to start by cultivating a growth mindset in the specific performance context.

For coaches, that means:

• Focusing feedback on effort
• Explaining performances as a function of hard work
• Emphasizing development over time versus static talent

Each of these leads athletes to focus on the effort they put into their craft, instead of their natural gifts (which they all have). Harmonious passion can emerge from this focus since the players are paying less attention to being evaluated and paying more attention to their progress.

Progress is inherently rewarding and intrinsically motivating, and thus the passion is self-sustaining.

Obsessive passion results from an obsessive focus on outcomes. Since perfect is evaluated by external standards, obsessive passion orients athletes to care about things that others can evaluate. It creates an internal pressure to live up to a standard outside our control, and ultimately we either flame out or become disconnected from what brought us to the activity in the first place.

The second grit ingredient is perseverance. For the conscientious performer, this looks a lot like continuing to strive for improvement and working hard in the face of adversity. The tendency to be dutiful, combined with caring about work, means that the gritty (conscientious) performer is going to appear deeply dedicated.

If you want to build this sense of dedication, you need to help athletes stay connected to what brought them to sport in the first place. Often, this is something like the opportunity to play a game they love, work together as a team, and build their own individual competence. Many athletes also enjoy competing, but not because they’re singularly focused on winning. Rather, competing gives them a chance to fully express themselves and push themselves to be the best they can be.

This means that coaches who want to create a conscientious and gritty performer will regularly talk about opportunities to improve. They’ll link improvement to consistent, daily effort. They’ll talk about working together as a team and how much fun each game can be. They’ll emphasize how the growth athletes are working toward can best be developed by working through obstacles instead of giving up, and how to put themselves in a position to manage obstacles effectively.

So the next time you’re thinking about how you can make your players just a bit grittier, think about how you can get them to care deeply about their performance and the team. Ask questions that orient them to the value of effort. Help them stay connected to the progress they’re making, and help them set goals that reflect what they’d want to get out of the experience (not the goals you’d set for them).

This also points a bit at what not to do. If you want your athletes to be gritty, you’re not likely to get there with a “break them down to build them up” philosophy. That’ll lead to obsessive passion, burnout, and disengagement. If you obsessively focus on the outcome, you’re likely to get athletes who care less about how to win and more about getting there by any means necessary. Often, those “any means” are not the means coaches would condone or prescribe in their system.

Reflective Questions:

• Are there times as a coach when you are too focused on the outcome?
• How much do you praise individual and team effort?
• Do you focus on the dutiful details?