I read a recent article that highlighted the importance of conceptual clarity. My takeaway was if our understanding and definition of a term are not clear, then expecting to get groups of people to align their behaviors with that term is nearly impossible.
Resilience is a term that lacks conceptual clarity, in my opinion. I believe that we’d all like our teams to grow in resilience, but what is resilience? What does it look like in action? How do we model it? And how can we help our athletes and teams increase their capacity for resilience?
These are the questions I am to answer over the next few weeks, but first, let’s get clear on what resilience is…
In this week’s 3 Points, I’ll introduce resilience, what it is and is not, and bust some myths that exist around resilience in sport.
1. What is resilience?
Dr. David Fletcher and Dr. Mustafa Sarkar, leading experts in resilience in high-performance domains define resilience as “the role of mental processes and behavior in promoting personal assets and protecting an individual from the potential negative effect of stressors”
Further, Fletcher and Sarkar explain, resilience encapsulates both robust and rebound resilience:
Robust resilience (proactive) refers to its protective quality reflected in a person maintaining their well-being and performance when under pressure.
Rebound resilience (reactive) refers to its bounce-back quality reflected in minor or temporary disruptions to a person’s well-being and performance when under pressure and the quick return to normal functioning.
Let’s break it down:
2. What resilience is and is not:
3. Some common myths and misconceptions of resilience in elite sport from Dr. Sarkar:
Resilience is a stable personality trait:
Resilience is not something that one either has or does not have. It is contextual, people may display resilience in one area of their life and not another. Similarly, an athlete may display resilience at one point in their career, and that does not guarantee they will display the same level of resilience at a later point. Lastly, and as I have written about previously, environments matter. The coach-athlete relationship, social support, and motivational climate all impact an athlete’s resilience.
Resilience is always characterized by continued optimal functioning and a lack of (negative) emotions:
Resilience doesn’t mean that people are cool, calm, and collected at all times and unaffected by adversity and the stressors they are experiencing. In fact, resilience is often accompanied and sometimes enhanced by psychological distress:
Resilience is only relevant at the individual level
While we often focus on the resilience of an individual and all of the factors that impact it. Team resilience has recently received greater attention. Team resilience is more than just a group of resilient individuals, but cultivated within a team structure.
Resilience cannot be developed
It can. For individuals, coaches and teams. Stay tuned!