Positive Toughness: How 9 Core Topics Transform Your Game and Life

Mental toughness is not just about grinding harder or “wanting it more.” It is a trainable system of skills that shape how you respond when life and competition punch back. That is the heart of Coach Matt Thomann’s 100% Mettle framework—a practical way to build positive toughness that holds up under real pressure, not just in motivational quotes.

Episode 133 of The Mental Mettle Podcast unpacks nine core topics that Coach Thomann uses with athletes, coaches, teams, and leaders to forge this kind of toughness. Each topic stands on its own, but together they create a complete mental training plan you can apply in sports, school, work, and life.

1. Focus on Controllables: Where Real Confidence Starts

The first pillar of 100% Mettle is learning to separate what you can control from what you cannot. When your attention is consumed by refs, playing time, weather, politics, or social media, your sense of agency shrinks and frustration grows.

Coach Thomann links this directly to psychologist Albert Bandura’s concept of self‑efficacy—the belief that your actions can influence outcomes. When you believe your choices matter, you are more likely to stay motivated, take risks, and persist when things get hard. When you do not, effort feels pointless.

In practical terms, focusing on controllables means constantly redirecting your energy to things like:

• Effort, preparation, and recovery habits
• Communication with teammates and coaches
• Body language and response to mistakes
• How you treat people, win or lose

Over time, this focus builds a deep, earned confidence: “What I do today changes something,” even when the scoreboard or circumstances have not caught up yet.

2. Values and Shared Values: Toughness That Matches Who You Are

Many people can rattle off generic values like “family, faith, and friends.” But 100% Mettle goes deeper, helping you name the real values that drive how you show up under pressure—things like work ethic, fairness, responsibility, security, and independence.

When you know your values, several things happen:

• You understand why certain situations drain or energize you.
• You can make better decisions in gray areas because you know what you are protecting.
• You experience less internal conflict—you are not just chasing wins, you are competing in a way that fits who you want to be.

With teams and staffs, this work expands into shared values. Instead of laminating buzzwords, Coach Thomann helps groups identify a few non‑negotiables and then translate them into observable behaviors:

• What does accountability actually look like in practice, meetings, and games?
• How does humility show up in how we talk, celebrate, and handle roles?
• How do we define and measure competitiveness beyond just final scores?

When values are seen and enforced in daily behaviors, culture becomes something you live, not something you just talk about.

3. Voice: Transforming Self‑Talk from Saboteur to Wingman

Your inner voice is the constant background commentary on your life. Left unchecked, it can quietly become one of the most destructive forces in your mental game. Chronic self‑criticism is not just “how competitive people talk”—it is strongly associated with increased anxiety, shame, and avoidance.

In 100% Mettle, you learn to:

• Notice when your inner voice crosses the line from honest feedback into attack.
• Use third‑person self‑talk (“Matt, you’ve handled worse than this”) to create healthy distance and evaluate situations more calmly.
• Recast your inner critic as a Wingman instead of a Hater—someone who points out risks, helps you prepare, and then backs you up instead of tearing you down.

This shift changes the soundtrack in the moments that matter: before a big shot, after a mistake, in the locker room, or during hard conversations at work. Toughness becomes less about silencing all emotion and more about giving the microphone to a voice that is honest and on your side.

4. Confidence Built on Evidence, Not Hype

Fake hype does not survive the first mistake, bad call, or cold shooting night. 100% Mettle defines confidence as evidence‑based trust in yourself—a belief rooted in what you have actually done, learned, and endured.

Instead of asking athletes or leaders to “just believe,” Coach Thomann helps them build a personal case file of proof:

• Times they finished a workout they wanted to quit
• Moments they spoke up in tough meetings or huddles
• Situations where they bounced back from errors instead of imploding

You do not need a perfect record to trust yourself. You need enough evidence that:

1. You prepare.
2. You are willing to learn.
3. You have handled difficulty before.

That evidence becomes a stabilizing force. Confidence stops fluctuating wildly with each result and instead grows steadily as you stack reps of doing hard things well.

5. Mind–Body Connection: Training Your Nervous System

Mental toughness is not just “in your head.” Under stress, your nervous system floods your body with signals: racing heart, fast breathing, tight muscles, tunnel vision. This is the classic fight‑or‑flight response—useful for survival, but not always ideal for free throws, presentations, or difficult conversations.

100% Mettle treats this as a trainable system:

• You learn what is happening physiologically when you feel anxious or “tight.”
• You see that these sensations are not personal defects; they are predictable responses.
• You practice tools that activate the parasympathetic nervous system and vagus nerve, shifting your body toward a calmer, more focused state.

These tools include controlled breathing patterns, grounding through physical sensations, simple movement, and pre‑performance routines that cue safety and readiness. When you know how to intentionally down‑shift your system, you bring more of your real ability into big moments instead of getting hijacked by fear.

6. Growth Mindset: Turning Adversity into Training Material

Drawing from Carol Dweck’s work, 100% Mettle integrates growth mindset as a core ingredient of positive toughness. A fixed mindset says:

• “If I fail, it means I’m not talented enough.”
• “If I get criticized, it means I’m not good.”

A growth mindset reframes those same experiences as feedback and fuel:

• “This shows me exactly where to train next.”
• “If I can learn this, I’ll be better on the other side.”

In this framework, adversity stops being an interruption and becomes the curriculum. Questions change from:

• “Am I good enough?” → “What is this trying to teach me?”
• “Why is this happening to me?” → “How can I respond in a way that moves me forward?”

That shift makes it easier to take coaching, embrace challenging roles, and stay engaged through plateaus and slumps.

7. Perspective: Seeing Your Story from a New Angle

Sometimes the biggest breakthrough is not more effort—it is a new lens. The Perspective topic in 100% Mettle uses creativity, metaphors, objects, and imagery to help people reinterpret their situation.

Examples might include:

• Framing a season as a long hike with false summits rather than a straight sprint.
• Using a physical object in a meeting to represent boundaries or priorities.
• Drawing or mapping out a challenge visually instead of only thinking in words.

These exercises loosen rigid stories like “I always choke under pressure” or “our team is cursed.” When perspective expands, options multiply. People who felt trapped in a single narrative begin to see alternate paths and next steps, which naturally increases hope and action.

8. Conflict Resolution and Team Toxins: Protecting Culture from the Inside

No amount of individual toughness can fully overcome a toxic environment. Inspired by John Gottman’s research, 100% Mettle trains teams to spot and address the “Four Horsemen” of destructive communication:

• Criticism: Attacking the person instead of the behavior
• Defensiveness: Making excuses or firing back instead of owning your part
• Stonewalling: Shutting down, checking out, or going silent to avoid engagement
• Contempt: Eye‑rolling, sarcasm, or open disrespect

These patterns show up in locker rooms, group chats, film sessions, staff meetings, and family conversations. Left alone, they slowly erode trust and connection.

In training, Coach Thomann helps groups replace them with healthier alternatives:

• Specific, behavior‑based feedback instead of global character attacks
• Ownership and curiosity instead of knee‑jerk defensiveness
• Short, agreed‑upon time‑outs instead of disappearing
• Respectful questions and empathy instead of contempt

Cleaning up these “team toxins” is not just about being nice. It creates psychological safety, which research repeatedly links to better performance, innovation, and honest accountability.

9. Gratitude as a High‑Performance Practice

Gratitude might sound like the softest topic in this list, but it is one of the most powerful. Based on the work of Martin Seligman and others, 100% Mettle treats gratitude as a tool to:

• Increase positive emotion and optimism
• Reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression
• Strengthen grit and long‑term commitment

Gratitude shifts your mental spotlight from what is missing to what is present: opportunities, progress, relationships, and resources. That does not erase pain, but it prevents your brain from seeing only threat and scarcity.

In practice, gratitude is aimed in three directions:

• For others: regularly recognizing coaches, teammates, staff, and family.
• With others: building cultures where appreciation is spoken aloud, not assumed.
• For yourself: honestly acknowledging your own growth, effort, and integrity.

Self‑gratitude is often the missing piece. When you never recognize what you are doing well, your brain stops attaching reward to those behaviors—and eventually, you stop doing them. Gratitude keeps the internal feedback loop alive so that helpful habits feel worth repeating even under pressure.

How to Use the 9 Core Topics in Your Life and Team

Each of these topics can stand alone as a workshop or focus for a season. But the real power of 100% Mettle comes when you gradually weave all nine into how you train, lead, and live:

• Start each week by clarifying controllables and one or two key values you want to embody.
• Pay attention to your self‑talk, building an internal Wingman who is honest and on your side.
• Track small pieces of evidence that support your confidence.
• Use breathing, routines, and movement to manage the mind–body response to stress.
• Treat challenges as growth opportunities and consciously shift your perspective when you feel stuck.
• Address conflict and team toxins early, with clarity and respect.
• End days or weeks with gratitude—for others, with others, and toward yourself.

100% Mettle is not about pretending everything is fine. It is about developing the mindset, skills, and habits that allow you to keep moving, keep growing, and keep showing up as the person you want to be—even when life, leadership, or competition is not cooperating.