Resilience is not a characteristic that we are either born with or without. We all have the ability to learn and develop resilience through our thoughts and actions.
Firstly, let’s not mistake resilience as never experiencing stress or difficulty. In actual fact, resilience is developed through adversity and the emotional distress we encounter throughout our lives, these are the challenging situations we not only have to get through, but our resilience enables us to overcome and grow from.
Bouncing back is a key term used for resilience, not only bouncing back from adversity or struggle, but coming back stronger with the ability to handle even tougher challenges in the future. Like learning any new skills, developing our resilience is a process, one that must be consciously and repeatedly worked on to improve.
The first step to building our resilience is accepting that it is inevitable we WILL endure hard times, but how we use these challenges as an opportunity to GROW is how we cultivate resilience.
“But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. It’s how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done” – Rocky Balboa
Did You Know?
Fear of failure is not a trait that’s inherited. There are many different reasons any of us can develop this fear. From critical parents, or a demanding coach to a traumatic past event. If you can relate to fearing failure, think back to what it is that caused this. Have you been in a situation in the past where you failed and felt completely humiliated? Are those feelings still with you Pin point why this fear lingers within, then begin the steps from our ‘How to’ Guide.
Habits of Resilient Individuals:
- Accepts and embraces obstacles/setbacks
- Loves a challenge
- Finds a lesson in every challenge
- Focus on “What’s next?” instead of “What happened?
- Strives for improvement
- Committed and determined to performing better next time
‘How to’ Guide:
How to bounce back from failure?
We cannot choose whether we experience failure or not, but what we can choose is how we respond to failing.
When we are faced with a challenge, we have two choices: we either fall at the first hurdle and give up or we face the challenge, learn from the challenge and keep moving forward. Challenges, also seen as ‘failures’ are inevitable. We can try our best to avoid failing, by playing it safe and not taking risks but this will only hold us back from success. If you want to be GREAT at something, you are going to fail first.
The main problem when we fail is we often chose to dwell over what’s happened, we chose to relive these moments because we think it’s the right thing to do “If I let this mistake go it will look bad, like I don’t care about what happened”. Actually, the only thing reliving our failures does is prevents us from trying again. If we don’t learn to accept the setbacks and move forward promptly, it’s highly likely that failure will consume us and we’ll end up carrying it into our next performance.
Here are a few steps you can first take to bounce back from failure:
- Accept
First things first… Failure is going to find you. Step one, we must accept that we are going to fail at some point. If we want to succeed and reach our MAXIMUM potential, we have to try new things and we have to accept that the first time we might fail, we might even fail again the second time but third times the charm and suddenly all the failing was worth it.
- Learn
Every time we fail, we learn something new. Let’s remind ourselves of when we learnt to ride a bike – did you hop on your first ever bike and off you went riding into the sunset? Probably not. There were many challenges you faced along the way: “How do I pedal?” “How do I brake?” “How do I steer?” “How do I stay balanced?”. After falling off time and time again, did you give up and stop riding your bike because of this? No, you kept going and kept trying because you knew you would eventually get it. Once we accept falling as part of the process, we aren’t scared to try again, because we know we’re one step closer to succeeding.
Learn. From. It.
- Be Grateful
I get it, this sounds silly. But it’s not. Every time we fail at something and get upset about it, this means we are working hard towards something important. Failing is an indication that we’ve had the courage to push ourselves beyond our own expectations.
Every time you fail, you are one step closer to succeeding. Be grateful for that stepping stone, you’re getting closer to the best bit.
- KEEP GOING
It’s totally natural after failing to think retreating is the best thing to do, asking yourself “why did I even bother doing that?” Well… Why did you bother doing that? If you choose to hide back in your comfort zone afterwards, what was the point in trying in the first place?
Instead of putting yourself down for failing, ask yourself “what did I learn from this experience?” the answer to this question will give you a helping hand when you try again, it will tell you what you can do better to get closer to succeeding next time.
The longer we hold onto the negatives, the more reasons we find not to try again. Be QUICK to discover what you learnt from this experience, then BE QUICK to let go of the negative thoughts and feelings and move on.
Game Day Tips:
What can we do after a game that will help motivate us for future games?
It’s important post game we learn to evaluate our performance, PROPERLY.
Do you often finish a game and instantly think about the mistakes you made? Or are you one that focuses only on your best moments?
Evaluating our performance is essential for confidence building and motivation for the future. Evaluating does not mean JUDGING. When we judge our performance we focus a lot on the negatives and mistakes we made, which for a start is a good way to knock our confidence and increase our fear of failing again in the future. When we focus on our mistakes we become fixated on not making those mistakes again, which naturally makes us play fearfully, this will prevent us from playing at our best. Equally, it’s important we don’t come away from the game only looking at our best moments, becoming blind to the areas we could learn from. Instead, we want to focus on future orientated thinking.
Here are a few steps to inherit an effective post game evaluation:
- Take Some Time
When we finish performing, our emotions, positive or negative are at their highest. This has a huge impact on the way we view our performance.
Although this may seem strange, give yourself time after the game to relax, spend time with family or teammates. This will allow you to clear your mind and calm any emotions. Now you can better reflect on your performance; the best moments and the moments you can improve from, without getting caught up in how you feel.
- Think About the Positives
Often we ask ourselves “What did I do wrong?” Instead, first ask yourself “What did I do right?”
There are significant psychological consequences that come with asking ourselves what we did wrong, ultimately we are training our mind to focus on the mistakes that we made. Let’s train our minds to focus on what we did right, pick out the positives from our performance first, this is a good way to maintain and build our confidence.
- Think About Improvements
We learnt in the previous newsletters that how we speak to ourselves can have a huge effect on our mental game.
Simply making the shift from “What mistakes did I make?” to “Where can I improve?” is a step in the right direction to future orientated thinking, not fixating on mistakes, but alternatively, looking at the areas we would like to improve for our future performances.
- Create a Plan and Move On
The only way we’re going to reach our goal is if we make a plan and move on from our previous performance. We’ve discovered what we did well and what we would like to improve, now we can create a plan of action to move forward.
Remember, your plan can be whatever YOU want. You don’t have to focus on only the physical areas, it can include anything from better managing your emotions, to spending some extra time developing your mental training skills, with the aim of improving your confidence, resilience, and all that other good stuff. Once you’ve created your plan, let go of the past and get going on the road to future success.
As an athlete we are constantly performing, week in, week out. Every game is not the end of our journey, every game is an opportunity to learn and develop. Take pointers from your last game, create a plan to move forward and put that plan into action in your next game.
