High Performance Library: “The Resilience Factor”

Resilience is one of those things that everyone feels they understand—we know resilient people when we see them. However, if we were to ask people what resilience is and what skills comprise resilience, we would get a multitude of different—and perhaps conflicting—answers.

A dictionary definition of resilience is “the capacity to withstand or to recover from difficulties.” In their seminal paper on the topic, sports psychologists David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar define resilience as “the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure.”

For those working in sport, it’s clear that, using both definitions, being resilient is crucial for both athletes and coaches. We all have to deal with adversity from time to time, and in sport, this could include injury, underperformance, or non-selection. Being able to withstand these adversities is therefore critical for athletes, as is being able to deal with the pressure to deliver a good performance when it counts. Coaches are not immune to either adversity or pressure—the pressure of supporting athletes to perform or the adversity of a job loss (or even its perceived threat).

Being resilient is crucial for athletes and coaches. We all have to deal with adversity, and in sport, this could include injury, underperformance, or non-selection, says @craig100m. Share on X

As such, a thorough understanding of how we can be resilient is essential for all involved in sport: for athletes and coaches when dealing with adversity and pressure, but also for athletes, coaches, parents, and support staff to create environments where athletes can develop the skills required to be resilient when it matters. This is where The Resilience Factor,  by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte, comes in.

Reivich and Shatte are lecturers at the University of Pennsylvania and deliver resilience training to various groups, including sports and military teams. In their book, they outline their belief that everyone can develop resilience, primarily by changing the way they approach and think about adversity.

A large body of research now demonstrates that how individuals analyze and think about the stress and pressure they experience has a large influence on their resilience response. Resilient people don’t view their failures as an end-point—instead of feeling shame, they are able to derive meaning from their failures and then use this knowledge to develop themselves into something better. There’s a link here to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, and it does appear that being able to reframe adversity as an opportunity—a feature of the growth mindset—assists in developing resilience.

Reivich and Shatte have developed seven key skills that we can all cultivate to ensure we can withstand and recover from adversity and pressure. These are:

1. Learning your ABCs.
2. Avoiding thinking traps.
3. Detecting icebergs.
4. Challenging beliefs.
5. Putting it into perspective.
6. Calming down and focusing.
7. Developing real-time resilience.

Let’s take a closer look at these.

1. Learning Your ABCs

This is the foundational skill that Reivich and Shatte have in place for developing resilience. It’s built on the idea that our emotions and behaviors are triggered not by events but by how we interpret them.

ABC stands for adversity, beliefs, and consequences. Adversity is an event that triggers a reaction in us; in sport, this could be an injury, but outside of sport it could be something your wife/husband does at home. Adversities can be big or small, but it’s our perception of them that matters. When we experience adversity, our belief around it triggers our emotions and behavior. If we get injured, if we believe that this is something that will always happen to us, and we can’t compete at a major championship as a result, we will have a different emotional and behavioral response than if we consider it as something that requires some additional ongoing management but can easily be handled.

Adversities can be big or small, but it’s our perception of them that matters, says @craig100m. Share on X

When it comes to learning our ABCs, the first step is to identify the adversities that challenge our resilience. Then, we need to identify our in-the-moment beliefs—when we’re experiencing these adversities, what are we thinking? This can be difficult to do in real time and may involve taking a step back after an event and analyzing our thoughts.

According to Reivich and Shatte, there are two main types of in-the-moment beliefs: causal beliefs (which they term why beliefs) and implication beliefs (which they term what-next beliefs). With causal beliefs, we attach blame to someone or something for the adversity (“I’m injured because my coach gives me training that is too hard”); in the moment, this causes an emotional response. With implication beliefs, we consider the next step of the adversity (“I’m injured now, which means I won’t get picked for the Olympics”), which also causes an emotional response.

Understanding the drivers of these emotional (or behavioral) responses allows us to better control them, respond appropriately to the circumstances, and, in turn, develop our resilience. It’s not a case of switching off our emotional response but having emotions and behaviors that are productive and appropriate to the facts (and not our perceived facts) of the situation, and not a knee-jerk reaction.

The crucial aspect in utilizing the ABCs is to separate our beliefs about the event from the facts of the event and then use these facts to update our beliefs. In doing so, we will be able to control our behavior and emotions better when facing adversity—an essential cornerstone of resilience.

2. Avoiding Thinking Traps

Cognition is an important part of performance, yet we’re easily tricked by our brains. There are many popular books on the subject—such as Thinking Fast and Slow and Decision Traps—but Reivich and Shatte have identified eight thinking traps that they view as commonly undermining resilience:

• Jumping to conclusions – When we have an immediate emotional response to a situation, we often jump to conclusions without having all the facts. This can drive non-resilient behavior. For example, we can think someone is deliberately doing something to undermine us when actually they are doing something that might benefit us in the long run. This can be battled by slowing down our thinking and examining the evidence we’ve used to form our conclusions.
• Tunnel vision – We tend to focus on the cues from the environment that suit our narrative rather than getting the full picture. To combat this, we need to focus on the bigger picture, ensuring we take in more information than we’re biased toward.
• Magnifying and minimizing – We tend to magnify certain pieces of information and minimize others to suit our narratives or motivations. As an example, an athlete who is anxious may magnify sensations of hamstring pain while minimizing information that suggests they don’t have an injury. To guard against this, we need to ensure we consider both the good and bad in each situation and weigh both accordingly.
• Personalizing – Here, we tend to attribute problems to our own doing. This is particularly damaging to resilience because resilience requires us to believe we have the power to control events in our life—personalizing causes us to miss external cues that we might be able to leverage to maintain our resilience. To prevent this, we need to ask ourselves whether anyone else, or any environmental issues, contributed to our adversity.
• Externalizing – This is the opposite of personalizing; here, we tend to think that everything is outside of our control. To minimize externalizing, we need to hold ourselves accountable: was there anything we did to contribute to this situation?
• Overgeneralizing – With this thinking trap, we tend to utilize “always and everything” explanations, extrapolating an isolated event into something bigger than it is. For example, an athlete who experienced performance anxiety once runs the risk of believing they’re never good at performing under pressure, which isn’t the case. To reduce the impact of this thinking trap, we need to look more closely at the behavior involved—is there something specific that explains the situation?
• Mind reading – With this thinking trap, we believe we know what those around us are thinking or expect others to know what we’re thinking. We see this in arguments all the time—one party is annoyed that the other person isn’t taking their feelings into account when they haven’t communicated their feelings effectively. It’s also easy to jump to conclusions when you think you can read someone else’s mind—a double-thinking trap. To prevent this, ask yourself whether you spoke up and made your feelings or beliefs directly and clearly known—and did you ask others to do the same?
• Emotional reasoning – Here, we draw conclusions (often false) about the world based on our emotional state. To limit the effects of emotional reasoning, we should practice separating our feelings from the facts of a situation to ensure we’re making clear decisions.

3. Detecting Icebergs

Like the Titanic, we can often come unstuck by things that sneak up on us. In their book, Reivich and Shatte call deep values and motivations that influence how we respond to adversity icebergs. The problem with these icebergs is that they are often outside of our awareness and deep within our consciousness. There are three main categories of icebergs:

• Achievement – Here, an individual is primarily driven by achievement, believing that comments such as “failure is a sign of weakness” are true. Achievement beliefs can also lead to perfectionism, which might initially sound positive but has a dark side within sport.
• Acceptance – These iceberg beliefs drive individuals to strive to be accepted, with an associated need to be liked, accepted, praised, and included by others. People with an acceptance iceberg may stray into narcissism, believing they should be praised for what they achieve and then using that praise to put down others.
• Control – Control-oriented people have beliefs that place great importance on being in charge and in control of events. They tend to be uncomfortable in situations where they experience a loss of control.

Our iceberg beliefs are largely set during childhood and so are strongly influenced by our families. We learn our worldview through the attitudes and core values of our parents. Being aware of this is crucial, as it can help us identify some of our primary icebergs—which is important given the four key problems that can arise from iceberg beliefs:

• They can become activated at unexpected times, leading to disproportioned emotions and reactions.
• They can lead to emotions and behaviors that are mismatched to the situation.
• They can be contradictory, making it hard to make decisions.
• They can be rigid, driving us to repeat the same behavioral patterns time and time again.

This last point is important; resilient people experience a range of emotions and experience these emotions at the appropriate time and to the appropriate extent—they are, in essence, emotionally flexible and adaptable. People who aren’t resilient, however, often get stuck in one emotion or emotion type, harming their ability to respond accordingly to adversity.

People who aren’t resilient often get stuck in one emotion or emotion type, harming their ability to respond accordingly to adversity, says @craig100m. Share on X

Identifying iceberg beliefs can be challenging, but it requires us to reflect on our behavior following adversity, utilizing the ABC model discussed previously. When reflecting, we can ask ourselves prompting questions, such as why we found such an adversity upsetting, what in particular caused the issue, and what that might say about our beliefs. By labeling them, we can then take steps to reduce their impact when we experience future adversity.

4. Challenging Beliefs

This key resilience skill allows us to better understand and clarify our problems and find better, more effective solutions. There are seven steps involved with challenging beliefs:

• Step 1 – ABC an adversity. Picking a recent adversity, we use the ABC skill discussed earlier. Name the adversity and describe the beliefs that contribute to the emotion and behavior you experience as a result.
• Step 2 – Pie chart the causes. Here, we break down the key aspects contributing to the adversity and then assign each a percentage of the total cause. Finally, we determine whether each aspect is not changeable, somewhat changeable, or highly changeable.
• Step 3 – Identify our explanatory style. There are three dimensions when it comes to explanatory style: me-not me (ranging from totally due to me to totally due to other people or circumstances), always-not always (ranging from will always be present to will never again be present), and everything-not everything (ranging from influences everything in my life to influences just this one situation). Each style biases our beliefs around an event.

As an example, someone with an always-not always explanatory style might believe that because they suffer from performance anxiety that harms their performance, they always will, and it will also hurt their performance. This then affects their behavior, in turn harming (or improving) resilience. For instance, research suggests that pessimists tend to use a me, always, everything explanatory style, while optimists use a not-me, not-always, not-everything style.

• Step 4 – Being flexible. Often, we have a set strategy for trying to solve a problem. We assume this strategy is effective, but what if it isn’t? If we’re an externalizer, we often attribute adversities to other people; this way of thinking creates blind spots, which can limit our ability to respond with resilience. Being able to have a flexible explanatory style is, therefore, crucial.
• Step 5 – Being accurate. Our biases are a huge obstacle to being accurate in our beliefs about an adversity, especially when we suffer from confirmation bias. To guard against this, when we have an initial thought regarding an adversity, we should look for information that supports and refutes it as a way of testing our thought process.
• Step 6 – Create a new pie chart. Having reviewed steps 3–5, we can then build a new pie chart of aspects that contribute to an adversity—this time having challenged our beliefs before doing so.
• Step 7 – New solutions. Having reformulated the pie chart, the next step is to reformulate what is changeable and what isn’t and then take steps to mitigate some of the more changeable aspects to improve our future resilience.

5. Putting It in Perspective

A significant challenge to our resilience is our tendency to catastrophize, where we dwell on an adversity and then imagine a chain of disastrous events leading into the future. The adversity doesn’t even have to be true—it can be imagined, leading us to become anxious about a future situation that might not even happen. Putting it in perspective—the fifth resilience skill—guides us to more accurate thinking by examining our beliefs around the causes of adversity and then the future implications of this adversity.

Putting things in perspective guides us to more accurate thinking by examining our beliefs around the causes of adversity and then the future implications of this adversity, says @craig100m. Share on X

Similar to challenging beliefs, an individual’s explanatory style will influence their ability to put things in perspective; those with always and everything explanatory styles tend to be at a higher risk of catastrophic thinking. Being able to put things in perspective allows us to reduce the chances of jumping on future threats and spiraling from there, enabling us to blunt our worst-case scenario thinking and begin to cultivate optimism—a key driver of resilience.

It’s also worth noting that some people are overly optimistic and underestimate their future risks. Overly optimistic people fail to identify genuine risks and issues and so end up underprepared for when adversity hits. The skill of putting things in perspective allows these individuals to better identify risks and then take steps to mitigate them.

When it comes to putting things in perspective, Reivich and Shatte recommend writing down an adversity (real, in the future, or imagined) and then listing the worst-case beliefs, how likely these are, the best-case beliefs, the most likely outcomes, and then some solutions. As an example, I used to get very anxious about missing a training session when I was an athlete. My worst-case beliefs would go something like:

Missed training session, so I’m going to lose fitness, so I’m going to underperform, so I won’t get picked for the Olympics, so I’ll lose my sponsorship, so I’ll have to stop doing sport and get a “real” job.

Writing this down, I can then start to truly consider how likely each of these things are. If I miss one training session, the chance that I will lose fitness, built up over years of training, is very low. As such, missing this single training session likely has no real influence on whether or not I underperform, and so doesn’t really affect my Olympic selection. Having determined how likely things are, it’s clear that the relationship between missing one session and having to retire from sport is non-existent. If I then write down best-case beliefs, I can make the following connections:

Missed training session, so I’m going to improve my recovery, so I’m going to be able to tolerate more load next week, so I’m going to be fitter, so my performance is going to improve, so I’m more likely to qualify for the Olympics, so I’m more likely to hit my sponsorship goals, so I’m more likely to be able to continue competing in sport.

I’m now starting to feel a bit more positive about this, but, of course, this is an overly optimistic reading of the situation. Now, I need to consider the most likely outcomes, which are:

Missed training session –> no negative impact on performance –> possible positive recovery outcomes –> at worst, no negative effect on performance.

In terms of solutions, it’s clear that the key things to do about missing this training session are to not panic and to maintain my discipline to avoid doing too much training in the future to “catch up.” I can then take other steps to further enhance my recovery—perhaps an afternoon nap or a walk. I’ve now gone from panic to optimized, and I’ve managed to develop resilience in the process.

6. Calming and Focusing

Being able to challenge beliefs and put things in perspective is great, but when we’re experiencing adversity—in that here-and-now moment—our emotional response can be difficult to control. That’s why Reivich and Shatte’s sixth skill—calming and focusing—is so important. It allows us to control and quiet our emotions when they’re out of control, focus our thoughts when they are intrusive, and fight back against counterproductive beliefs as they’re happening. In essence, this skill allows us to be resilient to stress in the moment.

Resilient people can better tolerate stress than non-resilient individuals through three critical factors:

• Control – Resilient individuals believe they can directly influence events in their life; conversely, feeling powerless can lead to developing a victim mentality, causing you to become overwhelmed by stress.
• Commitment – Resilient people tend to be more committed to what they’re doing, which provides some additional motivation to weather the storm.
• Challenge – Resilient people are more likely to see a change as an opportunity for growth; non-resilient people tend to view it as a stressor.

Aside from these three critical factors of control, commitment, and challenge, resilient people can also better manage their emotional response to acute stress, says @craig100m. Share on X

Aside from these three critical factors—which can be cultivated over time—resilient people can also better control their emotional response to acute stress. The skills they can utilize to support this include:

• Controlled breathing – When we’re stressed, we tend to switch to short, shallow breaths, which creates a physiological response that may increase our feelings of anxiety. When utilizing slow breaths that come from the diaphragm, we can modify this physiological response and maintain our robustness to stress.
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) – During periods of stress, we can become tight. PMR involves tensing and then relaxing muscle groups to create awareness of this and reduce the tension we feel when under stress.
• Positive imagery – This technique involves using our imagination to create a relaxing image to focus on, guiding us through acute moments of stress. As an example, I really dislike turbulence when I’m flying, and so when it happens, I close my eyes (removing some of the visual stressors, like things bouncing about) and conjure up a relaxing location in my brain (such as sitting with my daughters). This allows me to push through the acutely stressful situation and control my emotional response.
• Managing intrusive thoughts – Intrusive thoughts harm our ability to focus and solve the problems we’re facing. They are often very negative and can tend toward catastrophizing, and rarely do we solve our problems by ruminating. Rumination is particularly damaging for resilience as it gets us stuck in monitoring our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors instead of generating solutions.

When we experience intrusive thoughts, one strategy is distraction—taking our mind away from them—utilizing some of the strategies listed above. We can also play mental games, such as the alphabet game (naming someone for each pair of initials) or singing a song in our heads.

A second strategy is problem-solving: working on solving the issue at hand. Rumination prevents this because, in general, those more prone to rumination rate problems as more severe than non-ruminators; they have higher levels of self-blame and self-criticism and rate themselves as having lower levels of control.

7. Developing Real-Time Resilience

The seventh—and final—resilience skill put forward by Reivich and Shatte is that of real-time resilience. Real-time resilience involves changing our counterproductive thoughts the moment they appear—essentially, taking the skills required for challenging beliefs and putting things into perspective, and packaging them up to be deployed during adversity.

Real-time resilience has three key taglines that we can use during an adverse situation:

• “A more accurate way of seeing this is” (alternatives) – A goal of real-time resilience is to come up with another way of explaining the situation that is more accurate than your initial belief. For example, instead of saying, “I’m so nervous, I can’t race,” a more accurate way of seeing this would be, “I’m pretty nervous, but I know everyone else is too. I can control this and perform to my best.” It’s important not to be overly or unrealistically optimistic with this skill—the goal is accuracy.
• “That’s not true because” (evidence) – Fighting our initial beliefs about a situation by highlighting that the current adversity is not “me, always, everything.” For example, instead of “I’m so nervous, I can’t race,” we would say, “That’s not true, because I was nervous in my previous race and still ran well.”
• “A more likely outcome is… and I can… to deal with it” (implications) – In real-time resilience, we identify one of the most likely outcomes and then one step we can take to deal with it. For example, “I’m so nervous, I can’t race” becomes “A more likely outcome is that I’ll be able to still race, and I can do my controlled breathing to deal with it.”

Perform Better Under Pressure

As stated in the introduction, resilience is something we all need, especially in sport. Reivich and Shatte’s seven key skills can help us develop resilience, allowing us to be better placed to deal with pressure and adversity. Therefore, taking time to develop each of these seven skills is crucial for all those who want to perform under pressure.

Reivich and Shatte’s seven key skills can help us develop resilience, allowing us to be better placed to deal with pressure and adversity, says @craig100m. Share on X

Given the importance of resilience in both sport and life, I recommend reading The Resilience Factor and developing the skills within it for all involved in performance.

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