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Mental Skills Toolkit:

The Best Mindset of an Athlete? Appreciating and Loving The Struggle

Published: April 15, 2022
Updated: February 21, 2023
By: Jenn Ireland

Category: Confidence, Growth-Mindset, Resilience, Team Culture

LOVE. THE. STRUGGLE. If you can wholeheartedly embrace this resilient mentality as a soccer player, you are setting yourself up for forward progression and future success.

Struggle, challenges, setbacks, obstacles, failure, disappointments. These situations are all difficult to deal with and can be extremely hard to work through. Meaning they must be impossible to love, right? No – not if you have the mentally tough mindset of an athlete, the GROWTH mindset of an athlete.

Injuries, getting cut from a team, not starting, reduced playing time, and struggling with new concepts and skillsets – these are all obstacles that you will most likely face at some point in your soccer career. The secret to being mentally tough and resilient enough to push through and grow from these situations is having an attitude of love and appreciation for the struggle.

When you deeply internalize this value, it completely changes you. When you embody appreciation and love for the struggle, the sky becomes the limit.

So, what does it really mean to love the struggle? Let’s break it down and let you know why ‘LOVE THE STRUGGLE’ should be your sports mantra, scrolled across your bathroom mirror in huge dry-erase letters so that you can see it every single morning and live by it every single day.

Hard, challenging things are good for you

The more challenging things you try and the more difficult the situations you have to work through, the more you will improve at soccer. Not only will you get better at soccer, but your confidence will grow as you learn to have your own back and trust yourself more. To put it simply, every time you overcome a challenge, you become a better, wiser, stronger, up-graded version of yourself.

Staying comfortable stunts growth and development. Soccer players have to be able to willingly put themselves into challenging environments if they want to push forward and reach higher levels fo the game. If you NEVER experience struggle it’s because you are always doing things that you are comfortable with, this is the opposite of having the growth mindset of an athlete.

Healthy competition is good for you

Contrary to what you may think, it’s good to not always be the best player on your soccer team. This is the perfect example of why you should learn to love the struggle: when you have to work hard to keep up with faster, stronger players, it creates internal drive and motivation to push yourself to gain the skills you need to keep up. This allows you the opportunity for CONSTANT growth and expansion of your game. Who doesn’t want that?

When you’re the best, it’s easy to get complacent. Your forward progression levels out and you don’t have to push yourself any longer. When you find yourself as the best player on your team, you need to GO SEEK OUT THE STRUGGLE.

This means trying out for a higher level team. Even if that lands you at the bottom of the roster – so be it. This is where the mentally touch mindset of an athlete comes into play. If you are a player that appreciates and loves the struggle, you’re EXCITED about the chance to not be the best so that you can strive and CHASE the best because you know that’s where the magic happens. You know that that is where you get better at soccer.

Failure and setbacks are good for you

As Abby Wambach said in her renowned 2018 Barnard Commencement speech, “make failure your fuel!” Setbacks and disappointments WILL happen to you during your soccer career. Mistakes and errors on the soccer field will also happen, and quite frequently. It’s part of the process.

Making friends with failure and setbacks, instead of always fighting against, is how to have the mentally tough mindset of an athlete, the growth mindset of an athlete. Realizing this and coming to terms with it early is life changing. Because when you understand this, you don’t shy away from failure. Instead, you lean into it and reframe obstacles as places for improvement and growth in your soccer game.

Grow your confidence through preparedness.

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Difficult training sessions are good for you

If you are feeling frustrated after a difficult training session, that’s good. I mean, feeling frustrated doesn’t FEEL good, but when you do a difficult training session and are pushing yourself to do hard things and learn, you are becoming a better player. And that should help you feel GOOD and take a positive perspective on the challenging practice session.

And here’s the truth – that frustrating, difficult practice is actually making you a way better player than a practice where you know how to do everything and come away from it feeling great about your performance. Doing hard things is where you grow – it might FEEL like you’re going backwards, but you’re actually going forwards.

When players understand that struggling with a new tactical concept at training is actually a good thing, they’ve hit personal gold in terms of mastering the growth mindset of an athlete and embodying a healthy striving mentality.

Confronting your personal challenges is good for you

Creating a habit of individual training is a challenge for some soccer players. It can be hard to find the dedication and motivation to do extra work on a regular basis. Confronting personal challenges like this is a MUST if you want to grow your game. Adopting the mentality of learning to love the struggle can help you reframe the situation and work to finally create good discipline and self-regulation skills that you never had before.

Here’s another example: tactical knowledge and general style-of-play awareness. It might be that every time your coach introduces a new tactical concept to the team, you have a difficult time understanding and instead of being interested in trying to figure it out, you just ignore the parts you don’t understand.

With the growth mindset of an athlete, one that ‘loves the struggle’, you can reframe how you look at this. You might find yourself wanting to confront this personal challenge by consciously making it a point to ask more questions, work harder to understand and really get invested in it. This is mental toughness, when you can face a tough situation and figure out how to make it work in your favor, when you can look hard things in the face and say bring it on!

The mentally tough, growth mindset of an athlete

Learning to love the struggle means understanding that with hard things comes growth. So, when challenging situations present, you can say, “Hey, I know this is going to be really hard, but I also know that I’ll be even stronger after this.”

There is so much freedom in KNOWING, beyond a doubt, that the current situation you are in (one that is hard and that you don’t like) is actually the path toward progression. The obstacle is the way. Every time.

The concept is simple when you think about it, but can be pretty difficult to fully embrace when you are in the midst of the setback and your emotions are taking over. You can find yourself reacting instead of responding, and not in the way you would want. Sometimes things in soccer, and in life, are just hard, and you don’t want to face them; you just want the road to be easy. Which is understandable and something that many soccer players can resonate with.

The truth though, is that this EXACT MOMENT is what sets certain players apart from others. In these hard moments, can you stand up to the challenge? Can you grow in the face of adversity? Can you have the mentally tough mindset of an athlete, a resilient mentality, a growth-minded outlook?

The players that can embody this mindset will be the ones that persevere. If you want to know how to get to the top and be elite, this soccer mindset is it. This is the best mindset of an athlete: Learn to appreciate and love the struggle.

This post has been amended and expanded from the original version, which was written by Jenn for Girls Soccer Network and published on November 3, 2021. You can read it here.

Hi everyone! I’m Jenn and I create content to help female soccer players and coaches maximize individual and team potential by developing healthy mindset skills. Join other subscribers and sign up for the newsletter for all my best tips and advice!

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Hi everyone!

I'm Jenn, a USSF C-licensed youth soccer coach, mental skills coach & founder here at Expand Your Game. I created this site because it is the site I needed when I was a soccer player.

About me: I am a former newspaper photojournalist who loves downtempo electronic music, guacamole and books of every sort. And of course soccer! On days off you can find me researching tiny farms in Portugal , tossing a frisbee for my dog, or tending to my growing collection of indoor plants.