A recent study by two UK psychologists has shed light on how resilience develops in elite athletes, providing new insights for enhancing both performance and mental health in competitive sports. Resilience, often conflated with mental toughness, hardiness or thriving, is the ability to withstand, and/or to adapt to, adversity (such as injury, funding problems, mental health issues, etc.). Resilience is the capacity to bounce back.
In their meta-study, Sahen Gupta and Paul Joseph McCarthy reviewed 92 studies examining psychological resilience in a high-performance sports context. They identified ‘biosocial protective factors’ contributing to an athlete’s resilience, including:
- The level of support received
- The motivational climate in the training environment
- Personal attitude and planned responses towards adverse events
- A sense of meaning and of belonging in the environment
- Emotional intelligence and self-regulation
- The athlete’s sense of control over their life circumstances
- Optimism
- Passion / love of sport
- Introspective capacity
Alibaba founder Jack Ma failed primary school twice and middle school three times. He also failed his university entry exam three times, scoring less than 1% in math. After eventually graduating, he applied for 30 different jobs but was rejected each time; he was the only aspiring policy officer of a cohort to be sent home; out of the 24 people who applied for KFC, Ma was the only one to be rejected.
The idea of creating an online store came when Ma discovered the lack of Chinese beer in online search results. Ma travelled to Silicon Valley in 1999 to pitch his idea of an online arketplace for small and midsized businesses, which was greeted with skepticism and rejection. Through persistence, Ma was eventually able to secure funding of $US 5 million from Goldman Sachs and $US 20 million from Softbank.
In 2003, however, the company was facing bankruptcy as in the three years since its creation it had not managed to make any revenue, let alone any profit. Members of his team began walking out on him.
“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine” – Jack Ma
And then the sun came up. Roughly ten years later, in 2014, Alibaba launched the world’s largest IPO to that date. The company has continued to grow from strength to strength, scaling its operations into various industries such as technology and logistics, turning the online business into one of the world’s largest conglomerates today.
Would You have persisted? Not me. I stubbornly believe in the rationale of cutting losses and starting over, leaving loss aversion and the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ (cf. my last post) to the suckers. Trouble is, noone rings a bell when it is time to cut one’s costs, or since this comes to you from Switzerland, blows an alphorn when one should keep on trying just a little longer. Nobody would have blamed Ma had he bailed out in 2003. In hindsight, he was obviously right to persist, but hindsight vision is crisp as mountain air whereas foresight vision is pretty blurred. (sandstorm)
Where are the borders separating resilience from mere stubbornness, obsession, narcissism, hubris, and even schizophrenia, the ultimate form of loss of reality? When does bouncing back turns pathological?
And can You train resilience? (Not me, all I have in common with Jack Ma are comparable levels of mathematical skills, and occasional teaching young aspiring leaders at the African Leadership University). I doubt it, as I would qualify resilience as an innate character trait, not a skill. In contrast, it is possible to teach and train mental and physical robustness, thereby enhancing one’s ‘immune response’ to adversity. That we can help with.
Thank you to my friend and colleague Jürgen Venzke for his thoughts on this topic. Over 30 years, Jürgen has trained and coached hundreds of international executives in organizations.
Do You agree that resilience cannot be trained ?
photo credit: Computing and Commerce Association (CCA