ABSTRACT
People, and young people in particular, will learn to be more resilient, confident, and risk taking if they try things, find they work and are encourage to repeat them until they find they work repeatedly. One important requirement for the selection of interventions is to know, with a good degree of accuracy, what the young person needs. This is where the mental toughness measure is helpful. The coaches working with the young people were seeking to boost their confidence — to little effect. Helping young people to be self-aware about their mental toughness and to show them how it explains a lot of their behaviour, performance, and wellbeing is becoming considered an area of intervention. Young people who were assessed as average and above average mentally tough would often require only a little further support. They responded well to new ideas and were more likely to go away and do something about them.
