RESILIENCE: “the ability of an individual, community, or system to withstand, adapt to, or recover from adversity, challenges, or significant sources of stress.”
According to high performance running coach Steve Magness in his book Do Hard Things, the sporting world actually misunderstands resilience. When we imagine someone who is a resilient athlete, "chances are that visions of individuals overcoming adversity and some sort of pain or suffering lead the way. That's how we traditionally view toughness; perseverance, discipline and stoicism...and if we're honest, many of us picture a strong brute of a man."
This definition runs true across most sports, as the media portray resilient athletes as 'brave', 'mentally tough' and 'fighters', and those who perhaps didn't achieve what the world expected of them as 'failures', 'quitters', or 'soft'.
Magness believes that this misunderstanding of 'resilience' leads to abusive, very demanding and controlling coaching from coaches and perhaps even parents of young athletes.
Using the example of controversial NCAA basketball coach Bobby Knight, Magness describes the methods Knight used to create 'tough athletes'; "his methods to achieve [toughness] were questionable at best and downright abusive at worst' which included; hanging tampons from lockers of players he thought were soft, screaming expletives, questioning his players manhoods and even choking out a player at practice.
Other examples include the case of 19 year old Jordan McNair, the football player at the University of Maryland who in 2018 tragically died after coaches ignored his extreme fatigue and screamed at him to "get the f**k up". Or the many cases in British Gymnastics in which some coaches were found to be emotionally and physically abusive, making gymnasts train on broken bones, punishments for needing the toilet, sat on and subjected to excessive weight management.
Whilst these are extreme (and hopefully) rare cases of abusive coaching, they do demonstrate that the misconception of 'resilience' is alive and well in sport. So how should we be reframing 'resilience' and what do we need to be doing as coaches to ensure our athletes master this undervalued skill?
Firstly, we need to understand that resilience is far more than a fear driven concept. Having true resilience is about maintaining a clear head when the pressure hits, being self-aware, learning to sit with the pain instead of pushing through it, learning to respond not react, and understanding the notion of having a greater purpose
This concept of resilience is exactly the example super athlete Simone Biles taught us all during the Tokyo Olympic Games. After admitting to getting the 'twisties' she shocked the world by pulling out of the women's gymnastics team final saying:
"I have to focus on my mental health. We have to protect our minds and our bodies and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do. I didn't want to go out and do something stupid and get hurt."
This takes a lot of self awareness, maturity and experience for an athlete with so much pressure on her shoulders to reach and then make that decision. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Simone has even gone as far as saying “If I don't make it to Paris, it won't absolutely crush me.”
Traditional coach education neglects the critical importance of resilience, undermining its significance not only for athletes but also for coaches. While the majority of education emphasises the ‘what to coach’ skills, it leaves the 'how to coach' to the coaches, leading to a reliance on their own experiences and potentially perpetuating the behaviours, whether positive or negative, learned from their past coaches.
Coach Paul Bryant, the well known college football coach from the 1950s who spent his pre-seasons trying to harden his teams through the infamous “10 days of hell” in later years actually apologised to his former athletes saying:
“I don’t know if I was doing it right or not, but it was the only way I knew how to do it.”
Coaching resilience involves working with a coach who supports and guides individuals in developing the skills and mindset necessary to face life's uncertainties and challenges. It's about supporting the athlete to adapt and be flexible to the challenges thrown their way, and understanding that how we respond to is our own responsibility.
Check out our interview with Olympic Diving Coach Jane Figueirdo who explains in detail how to care for and create resilience in high performing athletes.
One of the best places to find formal resilience coach education is through Gazing Performance, an organisation who aim to equip people to develop their capabilities and manage their way through high pressured situations. They do this through their Red2Blue framework, which supports attendees in developing emotional self-control when they need it the most. Tactics taught on Red2Blue courses include; recognising where attention is in the moment, understanding what can be controlled, what can be influenced and what can't be controlled and whether they are lost in the RED brain, or thinking clearly in the BLUE brain.
This Red2Blue training is so effective in building resilience in high performing athletes that the world famous All Blacks rugby team but their incredible streak of World Cup wins down to it, as former Captain Richie McCaw explains:
“Over time we changed the way we dealt with pressure. In 2011, the match was touch and go, I felt I was going into the red like 2007 but I didn’t.”
Find out more information on Gazing Performance here: https://gazing.com/
So with a true understanding of what resilience is, and a toolkit full of tactics to embed these skills into athletes, could resilience training be the way forward for a more efficient, effective and safer high performance arena?
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