What does resilience mean to you? – Being mentally tough?
For many of the top performers I have worked with, their perception of building mental toughness has often involved them being mentally tough on themselves.
But think about that for a moment.
You are anticipating challenge, dealing with adversity or coming to terms with a performance failure. And within these difficult experiences you are adding self-criticism, self-loathing, berating yourself for not being good enough, comparing yourself to others, and telling yourself that your skills are not up to the job.
This is a mix that will lead to emotional distress and a belief that you don’t have the resources to meet with challenge in the future.
There is a growing body of evidence that developing a compassionate response is a crucial element in developing healthy resilience and being able to maintain top performance levels.
How do you build resilience?
Experiences of failure are inevitable in high performing domains and new research would appear to demonstrate that compassionate responses can be valuable to developing healthy resilience. We think of resilient performers as having a tenacity to battle through adversity or challenges while at the same time able to maintain high levels of performance. There are some, which research of multiple medal winning Olympic athletes demonstrates, who have experienced childhood adversity and through these experiences developed a resilient quality. However, resilience is a skill like any other that can be developed. But the conditions you create will determine whether you develop healthy resilience or unhealthy resilience.
Resilience is often thought as that quality of being able to bounce back after adversity or challenge. Research shows it is more than that as top performers typically experience difficulty and challenge building up to important events, during important events and in the aftermath of important events. The common theme here is that resilience involves meeting difficulty and challenge.
Yet, the paradox here is that contemporary influencers (modern media and the Instagram pseudo-psychologists) would have you do everything you can to alleviate difficulty and challenge in your life. To pursue happiness, and avoid adversity. The result of this being your tolerance to difficulty and perception of control within challenging experience diminishes, and emotional distress increases.
The solution to building resilience is turning towards difficulty and challenge.
Taking the small steps to building resilience
I should be clear here to say that I am not inviting you to jump into the deep end of taking on huge difficulties and challenges. Instead, think of building resilience by means of marginal gains. Taking small 1% steps towards facing difficulties and challenges that will accumulate to building resilience.
First of all, consider what your usual response to small difficulties and challenges is. This could be a small chore at home, a pile of paperwork, an awkward conversation, for example. Does the chore keep getting put off, the paperwork continually put aside, and the conversation sidelined for the ‘right time?’
It seems inconsequential in the moment, however what you are teaching yourself by avoiding even small difficulties and challenges is that you don’t have the capacity to cope. You are building an habitual tendency to avoid difficulty and challenge.
Procrastination is a perfect example. In the moment, you have an unpleasant task (difficulty and challenge) and you avoid this to pursue a more rewarding task (e.g. scrolling social media).
Resilience requires self-awareness and mental discipline. Self-awareness to your experience of wanting to avoid difficulty and the discipline to turn toward the unpleasantness and push through.
Action point: consider the things you have been putting off because they come with a sense of unpleasantness. Try your best to turn towards these and accomplish 2 or 3 of these this week.
Flipping the coin – responding with compassion
‘Flipping the coin’ is a term I have developed with the performers I work with. What it relates to is bringing awareness to the uncomfortableness or unpleasantness of the difficulty they are experiencing on one side. But then ‘flipping the coin’ to see what they are adding to that experience from their own inner narratives, mental stories and attitude response.
It is a very mindful way of approaching difficult experience. The unpleasant feeling that comes with difficult experiences is the inevitable one side of the coin. What you add to that experience, the other side of the coin, is not. The added element of inner narratives, mental stories and attitude response is what you can change and add a more compassionate response
So, when you are confronted with difficult experience (just small difficulty to practice!), what is currently the other side of your coin?
Are you adding harsh self-criticism, self-loathing, attacking narratives, negative outcome mental stories and unhelpful attitudes?
‘I can’t stand this’, ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this’, ‘I’m rubbish at this’, ‘I bet I won’t even do well’, ‘other people are better than me.’
OR
Are you adding supporting, befriending inner narratives, positive outcome mental stories and helpful attitudes?
‘This is tough but I can get through this’, ‘I’ve been here before and I know I can do this’, ‘come on, you’ve got the skills to do this’, ‘this will show me that I can build resilience’, ‘I’m not alone in this, and I know others experience this difficulty too.’
What you are NOT doing is avoiding the experience or adding self-imposed elements to the experience that exacerbate the difficulty.
What you ARE doing is changing the context that that difficulty exists within. Creating a more compassionate context that evokes more functional emotions.
Cultivating self-compassion requires:
- Awareness to your unfolding situation and bringing a helpful attitude to it
- A recognition that you are not alone in experiencing this difficulty, others find turning toward difficulty challenging too
Action point: when anticipating, dealing with in the moment, or pondering on how you dealt with difficulty and challenge – flip the coin. What are you adding to this experience and respond with compassion.
Updating the brain – reflect on your experience
When you experience difficulty and challenge it often comes with feelings and emotions. Feelings and emotions that may be unsettling or tough to deal with (e.g. anxiety, anger, disappointment, frustration). And when you manage the anticipation well, deal with the in-the-moment challenge, and respond functionally to the possible failure or mistake it may come with feelings and emotions too. (e.g. sense of achievement, pride, contentment, satisfaction).
The way that the brain functions to process experience means that it puts priority to distressing emotions. The brain is designed to keep you safe, not to keep you happy.
Therefore, even if you have pushed through, met the challenge and dealt with it, leading to functional emotions, your brain is automatically predisposed to register the dysfunctional emotions with the experience. What this results in is any memory or similar experience in the future will now be associated with and attached with dysfunctional emotions.
So, to register that your efforts to push through difficulty and challenge have been worthwhile – reflect and register it!
Action point: As you reflect on how you were anticipating difficulty and challenge, dealt with it in the moment, or what the mistake or failure was, as best you can, highlight what you got from this experience.
- What inner qualities did you draw upon that helped you get through this? – make a note of these
- How could you learn and adapt from this difficult challenging experience?
- How has pushing through and meeting challenge affected you emotionally in a functional way? – (e.g. ‘it feels satisfying’, ‘less anxious than I thought’, ‘I’m more confident than before.’)
Mental toughness is a skill that can be learned, but it requires the discipline to turn towards difficulty.
It requires responding with compassion so that the difficult experience is not any harder than it needs to be.
And it requires reflecting on your experience to update your brain that you have the resources to meet challenge and that it is worthwhile doing so.
Stuart is a performance psychologist with an expertise through research and applied work with top performers of integrating performance psychology and mindfulness psychology. Individual work in the form of an 8-session program, called Munro Performance Empowerment ProgramWhat does resilience mean to you? – Being mentally tough?
For many of the top performers I have worked with, their perception of building mental toughness has often involved them being mentally tough on themselves.
But think about that for a moment.
You are anticipating challenge, dealing with adversity or coming to terms with a performance failure. And within these difficult experiences you are adding self-criticism, self-loathing, berating yourself for not being good enough, comparing yourself to others, and telling yourself that your skills are not up to the job.
This is a mix that will lead to emotional distress and a belief that you don’t have the resources to meet with challenge in the future.
There is a growing body of evidence that developing a compassionate response is a crucial element in developing healthy resilience and being able to maintain top performance levels.
How do you build resilience?
Experiences of failure are inevitable in high performing domains and new research would appear to demonstrate that compassionate responses can be valuable to developing healthy resilience. We think of resilient performers as having a tenacity to battle through adversity or challenges while at the same time able to maintain high levels of performance. There are some, which research of multiple medal winning Olympic athletes demonstrates, who have experienced childhood adversity and through these experiences developed a resilient quality. However, resilience is a skill like any other that can be developed. But the conditions you create will determine whether you develop healthy resilience or unhealthy resilience.
Resilience is often thought as that quality of being able to bounce back after adversity or challenge. Research shows it is more than that as top performers typically experience difficulty and challenge building up to important events, during important events and in the aftermath of important events. The common theme here is that resilience involves meeting difficulty and challenge.
Yet, the paradox here is that contemporary influencers (modern media and the Instagram pseudo-psychologists) would have you do everything you can to alleviate difficulty and challenge in your life. To pursue happiness, and avoid adversity. The result of this being your tolerance to difficulty and perception of control within challenging experience diminishes, and emotional distress increases.
The solution to building resilience is turning towards difficulty and challenge.
Taking the small steps to building resilience
I should be clear here to say that I am not inviting you to jump into the deep end of taking on huge difficulties and challenges. Instead, think of building resilience by means of marginal gains. Taking small 1% steps towards facing difficulties and challenges that will accumulate to building resilience.
First of all, consider what your usual response to small difficulties and challenges is. This could be a small chore at home, a pile of paperwork, an awkward conversation, for example. Does the chore keep getting put off, the paperwork continually put aside, and the conversation sidelined for the ‘right time?’
It seems inconsequential in the moment, however what you are teaching yourself by avoiding even small difficulties and challenges is that you don’t have the capacity to cope. You are building an habitual tendency to avoid difficulty and challenge.
Procrastination is a perfect example. In the moment, you have an unpleasant task (difficulty and challenge) and you avoid this to pursue a more rewarding task (e.g. scrolling social media).
Resilience requires self-awareness and mental discipline. Self-awareness to your experience of wanting to avoid difficulty and the discipline to turn toward the unpleasantness and push through.
Action point: consider the things you have been putting off because they come with a sense of unpleasantness. Try your best to turn towards these and accomplish 2 or 3 of these this week.
Flipping the coin – responding with compassion
‘Flipping the coin’ is a term I have developed with the performers I work with. What it relates to is bringing awareness to the uncomfortableness or unpleasantness of the difficulty they are experiencing on one side. But then ‘flipping the coin’ to see what they are adding to that experience from their own inner narratives, mental stories and attitude response.
It is a very mindful way of approaching difficult experience. The unpleasant feeling that comes with difficult experiences is the inevitable one side of the coin. What you add to that experience, the other side of the coin, is not. The added element of inner narratives, mental stories and attitude response is what you can change and add a more compassionate response
So, when you are confronted with difficult experience (just small difficulty to practice!), what is currently the other side of your coin?
Are you adding harsh self-criticism, self-loathing, attacking narratives, negative outcome mental stories and unhelpful attitudes?
‘I can’t stand this’, ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this’, ‘I’m rubbish at this’, ‘I bet I won’t even do well’, ‘other people are better than me.’
OR
Are you adding supporting, befriending inner narratives, positive outcome mental stories and helpful attitudes?
‘This is tough but I can get through this’, ‘I’ve been here before and I know I can do this’, ‘come on, you’ve got the skills to do this’, ‘this will show me that I can build resilience’, ‘I’m not alone in this, and I know others experience this difficulty too.’
What you are NOT doing is avoiding the experience or adding self-imposed elements to the experience that exacerbate the difficulty.
What you ARE doing is changing the context that that difficulty exists within. Creating a more compassionate context that evokes more functional emotions.
Cultivating self-compassion requires:
- Awareness to your unfolding situation and bringing a helpful attitude to it
- A recognition that you are not alone in experiencing this difficulty, others find turning toward difficulty challenging too
Action point: when anticipating, dealing with in the moment, or pondering on how you dealt with difficulty and challenge – flip the coin. What are you adding to this experience and respond with compassion.
Updating the brain – reflect on your experience
When you experience difficulty and challenge it often comes with feelings and emotions. Feelings and emotions that may be unsettling or tough to deal with (e.g. anxiety, anger, disappointment, frustration). And when you manage the anticipation well, deal with the in-the-moment challenge, and respond functionally to the possible failure or mistake it may come with feelings and emotions too. (e.g. sense of achievement, pride, contentment, satisfaction).
The way that the brain functions to process experience means that it puts priority to distressing emotions. The brain is designed to keep you safe, not to keep you happy.
Therefore, even if you have pushed through, met the challenge and dealt with it, leading to functional emotions, your brain is automatically predisposed to register the dysfunctional emotions with the experience. What this results in is any memory or similar experience in the future will now be associated with and attached with dysfunctional emotions.
So, to register that your efforts to push through difficulty and challenge have been worthwhile – reflect and register it!
Action point: As you reflect on how you were anticipating difficulty and challenge, dealt with it in the moment, or what the mistake or failure was, as best you can, highlight what you got from this experience.
- What inner qualities did you draw upon that helped you get through this? – make a note of these
- How could you learn and adapt from this difficult challenging experience?
- How has pushing through and meeting challenge affected you emotionally in a functional way? – (e.g. ‘it feels satisfying’, ‘less anxious than I thought’, ‘I’m more confident than before.’)
Mental toughness is a skill that can be learned, but it requires the discipline to turn towards difficulty.
It requires responding with compassion so that the difficult experience is not any harder than it needs to be.
And it requires reflecting on your experience to update your brain that you have the resources to meet challenge and that it is worthwhile doing so.
Stuart is a performance psychologist with an expertise through research and applied work with top performers of integrating performance psychology and mindfulness psychology. Individual work in the form of an 8-session program, called Munro Performance Empowerment Program™ , has been shown to help performers feel more equipped to turn towards difficulty, deal with it and learn from it. Working with a national sports team, Stuart has been helping to cultivate team climates and cultures that cultivate compassionate responding.