We are all biased.

Humans are a bundle of biases and contradictions that we live with happily. It's hard to recognise and you think you are being fair and reasonable when you are often far from the truth. While many times a useful bias is useful, it can backfire.

Take the common "positive expectation bias".

Quick, if I asked what is your goal for the cricket season, what would you say?

Maybe it's 500 runs, or 50 wickets. Perhaps it's getting selected for a higher team. Maybe it's something else totally.

These are fine ideas. They are not goals, they are dreams. So, you need to be careful with how you try and reach them. Goals and dreams are handled differently.

How important is a speech to rally your players?

According to Jolyon Finck, it's crucial. Jol is the Director of Swimming at Millfield School and was the successful coach of the England Squad in the Commonwealth Games of 2014.

Recently Jol spoke about having to deliver those "Golden Moment" speeches to his athletes ahead of each heat, semi-final and final.

In total, Jolyon gave 57 speeches.

In these moments the coach aims to focus, relax, motivate or positively distract the athlete to help them get into their ideal performance state.

Does this story ring true with you?

Round here, Christmas is a time for families and presents rather than fours and wickets. The festive period gave me more time to do some things I wouldn't normally try.

And I got slightly obsessed with a game called Crossy Road. The game is simple: You try and get your character across an endless road and get a point for every move forward. Being the badger that I am, I realised it's teaching something about cricket.

Crossy Road is a lot like batting. You the longer you play the more you score but if you make just one mistake your game is over and you go back to zero next time. So, how you respond to the frustrations of this game will tell you a lot about your mental make up with the bat.

We all have parts of our personalities we like and dislike. What's great is that whatever your personality, you can use it to motivate yourself to train better harder and longer.

And you know what that means: More runs and wickets!

You might be lucky and be the sort of person who loves training and playing all the time. This type of person tends to have an orderly, organised mind and high levels of resilience to call upon during hard and boring parts of training. Although that's not always the case.

But what if you are not like that? What if you have some barriers to training?

The final piece in the mental toughness jigsaw is resilience. Players scoring high in resilience have a great ability to bounce back strongly after any disappointment. Their confidence remains bulletproof for a long period of time, which protects them from the ups and downs of self-belief.

These players have a positive attitude towards the future. Resilience high players are focused on finding solutions and taking steps forward: Dwelling on problems is not something you will see in these characters.

These players experience disappointment, but they quickly move their focus on to regaining control and taking positive action.

The next element in our guide to recognising and developing mental toughness in our players relates to "Critical Moment Control" (CMC).

What is CMC? It's often described by the quote "heart in the oven and head in the fridge".

Players high in CMC always make the right judgements under pressure. Not only do they make the right decisions, they also follow through and deliver the goods: Clear mind, clear thinking, and unwavering execution.

These players control the situation with a strong mind: The situation does not control them. They show skilful thinking, skilful risk taking, and skilful execution. Each one is a great player to have around when it comes to finishing games off.

Last week I introduced the 4 elements that define mental toughness. Today we move on to understanding and developing "Inner Drive".

Players scoring high on inner drive are completely self-motivated individuals in any given situation.

When someone says that a player is or isn’t mentally tough I always reply with "what is mental toughness"?

This was a question that was asked to England's best players back in the mid-2000s by Dr Steve Bull and his Sports Psychology team. The findings of those discussions ultimately split the subject of mental toughness into 4 sub-categories: Fight, Inner Drive, Critical Moment Control and Resilience

By breaking the huge subject down, we are able to attribute characteristics that define each of these 4 sub-categories. As coaches, we can make interventions and build strategies into our planning that help to develop and challenge these capacities with our players and teams.

So let's take "fight" and delve a little deeper into the associated characteristics: