Resilience and Sports

Life's challenges never really end, and the ability to cope with and recover from them — the spoken and unspoken encounters of life — is known as resilience. A resilient person is one who can adapt to life's challenges by drawing on a wide range of traits, habits and skills.

Resilience can be described in a few complementary ways:

• it is one's ability to bounce back emotionally in the face of adversity;
• it is the ability to bounce back from adversity, trauma, tragedy, danger or other sources of stress in life;
• it is the force within an individual that drives a person to confront and overcome adversity — often described as an innate 'righting mechanism' and as the human capacity to face and overcome hardship.

When stress is present, a person can learn to deal with it and bounce back quickly. Becoming more resilient in the face of inevitable stress can significantly improve one's outlook and health. In other words, resilience is one of the strategies psychology offers for dealing with trauma, threats, adversity or major stressors — such as problems in an athlete's personal or professional life, health challenges and performance-related stress.

Sport is no different: everyday life in sport involves a certain amount of stress, whether it is learning a new skill, coping with injury, fearing the training load or facing the challenge of winning. In hard situations it is easy to lose composure, and despite one's best efforts the results can be unfortunate — a high chance of failure, dropping out, loss of interest, lack of confidence, self-harm, aggression, or an inability to perform learnt skills. Developing resilience is what helps an athlete withstand all this.

Types of resilience

1. Natural resilience — a natural ability bestowed on a person at conception, marked by openness to new experiences, an eagerness to learn and a wish to have fun. …