“It’s a grind physically during the season every week, dealing with the hits and the physical pain that goes with playing in this game. But mentally it’s probably more taxing, so you need that ability to find that escape.” Aaron Rodgers

Two-time professional football league MVP and Super Bowl XLV MVP Aaron Rodgers knows the nuances and necessities of having strong football confidence both on the field and off the field.

In football, mental toughness is a fundamental part of achieving success in the league. A smart, savvy, durable and proven champion, Aaron Rodgers demonstrates the proper football psychology with his quote about the necessity to remove one’s self from the gridiron and retire to everyday life, which makes achieving proper balance in order to arrive at a healthy perspective for a keen football mind.

Modern day mental game coach and football psychology articles lean heavily on the dangers of high-impact physicality and the havoc it can wreak on battered bodies and brains.

Today’s mental preparation for football relies on dealing with the lights, the charisma, and the occasional cult of personality that gains strong public favor and cultivates professional football superstars.

The less-publicized and romanticized aspect of success in football is the need to step back from the bright lights and post-game podiums in order to take to task the everyday tasks of life, whether it is domestic responsibilities, parenting, and maintaining friendships outside of the hustle and bustle of professional locker rooms.

The mental game must be strong in order to ground rising superstars, a task that is becoming harder to achieve in today’s evolving sports landscape: Mental toughness in football is as much about restraint and a humble football mind as it is for hard hits and copy-selling quotes.

Sports psychology in football should – now more than ever – educate incoming league players about the pitfalls of buying into their cultivated media image and the egoism that it can create. Within the past few years a large number of current and former players have been suspected of or convicted of a wide range of crimes ranging from public intoxication, domestic violence, sexual misconduct, and even murder.

This supportive culture of violence and lawlessness is not the proper psychology for football today; remaining an upstanding and consummate football professional does not have to include a laundry list of criminal offenses in order to satisfy a demanding fan base, and it doesn’t provide a model example for young players on the rise of how to conduct one’s self on the biggest stage of professional sports.

Being a person and not a mere athlete can be hard, but sometimes being a parent, teacher, son, husband, and good samaritan can be harder to achieve.

Professional players cannot define themselves on the sport that they play, or even define themselves according to their physical football confidence.

An evolving sport should support an evolving football mind and football mental toughness, and one not founded in blood and grit – today’s younger athletes need good role models that tout the balance of life that an emerging football psychology is prescribing.

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