10 Easy Ways To Build Resilience for Yourself and Your Team

 

Building your resilience in the face of adversity is an important part of developing as an athlete and as a human. Passing that knowledge and these practices on to your teammates can also help the team navigate tough moments and get through challenging situations!

Here, board-certified family physician and TrueSport Expert Deborah Gilboa, MD, explains how to improve your resilience and practice resilience as a team.

1. Resilience isn’t a static trait

There’s good news and bad news: Resilience—the ability to bounce back from something and adapt to change—isn’t something that you’re born with, or something that you naturally will or won’t have in every situation. It’s a moving target. “Resilience is something that goes up and down in different situations,” says Gilboa. “You may adapt to change well overall, and then you get to practice one day and for some reason, every little thing is setting you off. This doesn't mean you aren't inherently a resilient person. It just means something is draining your resilience.”

2. Frame what’s happening around you

Resilience is built on how we perceive the world around us, which is our outlook. "Outlook directly impacts our resilience, because our outlook is the story we tell ourselves about what's happening to us,” says Gilboa. “The first part of building resilience is understanding how we frame what we're going through.” This doesn’t mean reframing absolutely everything in your life as opportunities or positive situations, but it does mean being able to understand your emotions, zoom in on what’s within your control, and look for opportunities whenever possible.

3. It’s OK to feel upset

Resilience and finding opportunities in tough times can often be associated with being an optimist or always being positive—sometimes to the point of toxic positivity. But Gilboa says that having resilience means first recognizing, acknowledging, and legitimizing your emotions, even the negative ones. “You don’t need to be relentlessly positive about everything in your life to be resilient,” she says. “First, acknowledge how you actually feel in a situation. There are benefits to saying to yourself, 'I don't like this. That was embarrassing, and I’m angry about that.’ It's reasonable to feel that way and your emotions are legitimate."

4. Manage your emotions

“When you ignore or repress your emotions, you cause your body and your brain harm,” says Gilboa. "Being able to acknowledge and then manage your emotions will make you stronger. If you try to repress that negative emotion rather than working through it, you’ll end up with a stream of negative self-talk, and it will be hard for you to consider a different narrative. Owning your emotion allows you to manage it and move through it."