Biography

Dr.Stephen D. Ross is a licensed Performance and Clinical Psychologist with over 12 years of experience working with professional, college and elite athletes, coaches and teams.

He is the principal of OPTIM, based out of Fort Collins, Colorado. His areas of expertise include:

Mental skills/toughness training

Achieving, optimizing and sustaining optimal performance states;

Mindfulness;

Team chemistry;

Recruiting assessments;

Designing and maintaining mental training rooms.

.
Dr. Ross also specializes in working with players/athletes, coaches and support staff to foster environments that maximize motivation and trust, while decreasing fear-based learning and anxiety.

Dr. Ross utilizes a research based approach to creating and nurturing optimal team chemistry and individual mastery and confidence.

As a licensed Performance and Clinical Psychologist with over a decade of emergency training and experience, Dr. Ross is an expert in dealing with substance abuse issues, anxiety, depression, season/career ending injuries, and other major career and life transitions.

"Whatever you do or dream you can do - do it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." ~ Johann Goethe


"Make no small plans. ... they have no magic to stir men's blood." - Daniel Burnham


David Pauley

David Pauley

Tuesday

Mental Toughness

Mental toughness. A term that gets bounced around sport circles pretty widely. But what does it actually mean to be mentally tough? Physical toughness we can see. Mental toughness is a term that most often gets used to describe athletes who do better as the challenges increase. The ones that consistently bury the three pointers in the finals. The ones that want the ball in the final seconds. The ones that feed off the energy from the stands...loving the power to quiet the crowd or raise the noise level to deafening decibels.
So here's the question. Do athletes come to the planet with mental toughness? The field of psychology makes a pretty good argument that this is at least partially true. And, we've all seen those kids who are fearless. The ones that seem oblivious to the fact that they could get hurt...badly. The ones that just love the challenge of testing themselves...ever higher, ever faster, ever riskier. The ones that give their parents nightmares and their peers a view of where the bar is set.
In sport psychology, we call this x-factor resilience. A great deal of research has been done on this in twin studies and the prevailing wisdom is that about 50% of resilience comes to us through our DNA. And from studies in Positive Psychology led by Dr. Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/ , about 10 to 15% can be added to our baseline resilience through the awareness and practice of some core positive principles that elevate mind, body and spirit.
So, can mental toughness or resilience be taught and/or learned? We definitely have a little wiggle room to add to our baseline resilience in sports and in life. And, it needs to be stated that it definitely is not true that tough coaching makes mentally tough athletes. The resilience rock stars generally come to the planet with a big chunk of resilience hard wired in. And, they maximize that other chunk through mental skills training, healthy relationships, mindfulness (an upcoming blog) and looking for meaning in everything they do.
Posted by