PURPOSE
Mental resilience is about the ability to bounce back, but if you don’t know what you’re bouncing back for, the road to recovery can feel steep. One thing that makes this road easier to travel is having a sense of purpose.
Simon Sinek calls this “finding your why.” In his famous TEDx speech, he said that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” It’s not just other people. It’s your subconscious, as well. If that voice in your head doesn’t know why you’re fighting so hard to get up when you get knocked down, eventually it will lose interest or throw in the towel.
Finding your purpose has several benefits related to resilience. It gives greater meaning to your life. It provides extra motivation to tackle the toughest tasks life puts in front of us. And it changes your perspective on adversity. On its own, failure can sometimes feel catastrophic. But when you’re guided by a goal or a mission, failure is less likely to feel like the end of the road. Because quitting just isn’t an option when you’re working toward something that’s bigger than yourself.
My purpose has been fairly simple for a long time: to get the best out of myself and to be the best for my teammates every day, in every aspect of my life–personal and professional. That’s all it’s been about for me. It got me up early every morning and kept me up late watching film every night for nearly thirty years. It got me everything I have, in a sense.
If you don’t have a purpose yet, you need to find one. I know that’s easier said than done, but no one said life is easy. Do the work.
If you already have your purpose, hold onto it tightly. Write it down. Make it a daily reminder. So that the next time you get knocked down, you don’t need to think about why you should get back up. You already know.
OPTIMISM & SELF-CONFIDENCE
When a mentally resilient person faces failure or loss, their purpose is why they bounce back, but their belief that things will get better and their confidence that THEY can be the agent of positive change in their own life is how the process starts.
Mental resilience can’t develop if you won’t believe in your capacity for learning from setbacks and getting better as a result. One of the things I’ve been blessed with is natural confidence. Some people are born with height or with a gift for speed I have always been a confident person for my age. Failure and losing never really rattled me. I did, however, struggle with positivity when I was younger, especially when it didn’t feel like I was getting a fair shake. It was a mindset issue, and something I had to learn.
In college, I met Greg Harden. He taught me to focus on the things I could control, where I could bring my confidence and abilities to bear. He showed me how to make the most of my chances. In the beginning, if I barely got any snaps in practice, it might send me into a mini-spiral, staring into the bathroom mirror wondering if Michigan was for me. Working with Greg, I started to view every snap I got with enthusiasm. It was a chance to prove myself. Every mistake I made was an opportunity to learn and improve.
It was a complete paradigm shift and one of the greatest learning experiences of my life. By focusing on what I could control, Greg not only showed me that things would get better, he taught me how I could make that happen. He equipped me with an optimistic mindset and a skillset to handle whatever life and sports might throw at me. If you can stay positive and trust that you have what it takes to fight through adversity, you can bounce back from anything.
STRONG NETWORK
Developing mental resilience is a personal journey, but it shouldn’t be a lonely one. No one makes it through this world alone. I was blessed to have a strong support system around me from an early age as I pursued my dreams. My parents, my sisters, Tom Martinez at College of San Mateo, then Greg Harden, and a number of others. Whenever things got tough, I always had someone to talk to, to console me, to teach and guide me, and when necessary, to kick me in the ass.
There are times in life when we need to outsource our strength to people like that. People with expertise and knowledge and wisdom, who can get us turned around, on our feet, and through our hardest moments. Not all the time. But sometimes. We all need a network of loved ones and mentors who model mental resilience for us as we learn how to develop it ourselves. (This is what Greg Harden did for me.)
A good, supportive network won’t save you from adversity, obviously, but when you get knocked down, your network can give you a safe place to land. It can break your fall, so the fall doesn’t break you. This doesn’t just happen on its own, though. You need to have the humility to reach out for help or ask for advice when things are difficult.
There are some who will argue that this is a sign of weakness, or that it shows a lack of mental resilience. I think the opposite is true. It’s an indication that adversity hasn’t broken you. You’re still dedicated to your purpose, confident that things can get better, and you’re willing to listen to advice and do whatever it takes to get back on the horse.
What does your network look like? Who makes up your support system? If you know, use this message as a reminder to touch base and express gratitude for their continued support. If you don’t know, take an inventory and identify 3-5 people you trust and respect, who you might be able to reach out to and start a conversation.
SELF-AWARENESS & ADAPTABILITY
One of the traps people fall into that makes mental resilience difficult is the inability to understand themselves and an unwillingness to change how they do things. If you don’t understand your psychology–your biases, triggers, and patterns–you can really struggle when adversity strikes unexpectedly.
It’s easy to be caught off guard when you don’t know what to guard against within yourself. It’s hard to know what to do when you hit a rough patch if you don’t know why it happened or how you might be responsible. Knowing yourself is one of the best ways to prepare yourself for what life is going to throw at you.
Ask yourself:
When things go wrong, how do I respond?
When things go right, how do I respond?
What does my inner monologue sound like?
What are the primary emotions I feel most often?
Am I quick to overreact? To downplay? To judge?
Am I scared of new things or excited for them?
What do I do most often when faced with uncertainty? With the unknown? With a challenge?
If you have a tough time evaluating yourself from a distance like this, that’s where your support system comes in. Ask them to answer for you, and then listen to what they have to say. You may not like what you hear, especially since it’s coming from someone you trust, but it’s going to be the closest thing to the truth you will get, and it will tell you what needs to change in order to be more resilient.
I know this from experience. In the last decade or so, I’ve had the privilege of becoming a person that people seek out for advice. When someone asks me for feedback, or to critique something they’re doing, I always say to them: “would you like me to lie to you and tell you what you want to hear, or would you like to hear the truth?” Most people say that they want to hear the truth, which gives me an invitation to be absolutely candid and help them understand EXACTLY what they need to do to improve.
I cannot overstate the importance of adaptability with this. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result each time. If what you have been doing to this point has led you into troubles that you struggle to find your way out of, you have to be willing to try new approaches, adjust strategies, and do things differently. It can be scary, and it’s never easy at first, but if you can be open to a new process and commit to this kind of self-evaluation and self-improvement, you will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of yourself and the most effective toolkit I know of for batting back from misfortune.
THE LAST PIECE
There’s one final element to mental resilience that is so important, but also so complex, that I think of it as its own separate kind of resilience. Emotional regulation: the ability to acknowledge, feel, and manage the emotions that rise up in response to adversity. If you can’t deal with your emotions effectively, no amount of physical or mental resilience can protect you from the damage that persistent, negative emotions can create. This is what I am calling ‘emotional resilience,’ which we will dive into next week as we wrap up this series.
