Building individual and team resilience

In sport, and perhaps particularly in elite sport, athletes deal with immense pressure that has the potential to undermine their performance. While it is necessary to build the required technical skills and physical fitness, this is still insufficient in attaining peak performance. Instead, it is the development of mental resilience that helps athletes overcome adversity and thrive under challenging conditions.

One fascinating paper translated recent research on resilience into practical recommendations for athletes, coaches, and sport psychologists. Here, we outline ways in which both individual and team resilience can be built. These can be applied not just to the performance of sport, but also to the performance of individuals and teams that make the wider organisation function.

Individual resilience

Based on the widely used mental fortitude training programme, four ways can be suggested to help build individual resilience: 

1.     Be clear about what resilience is

Resilience has become a buzzword in the world of sport (and beyond), but is often misused and confused with other concepts, which can lead to misunderstandings. Hence, the first step in helping build resilience is to clearly define it and dispel common myths.

Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity while maintaining high performance and well-being in the face of pressure. Crucially, it is not a fixed trait found only in a select few. Rather, resilience depends on the context, and can be developed over time. Clearly defining resilience fosters a shared understanding between sport psychologists, coaches, and athletes , or leaders, employees and teams, in developing resilience.

2.     Develop personal qualities

Personal qualities are psychological factors that shield people from negative outcomes. Developing personal qualities involves identifying the individual’s personality traits and getting them to work on the relevant mental skills, including self-talk, goal-setting, and self-awareness. Importantly, these mental skills should be trained with specific and measurable outcomes in mind, such as boosting confidence and improving motivation. 

3.     Cultivate a challenge mindset

Individuals with a challenge mindset perceive the pressure they face in a positive manner. To cultivate a challenge mindset, an effective tip is to try learning one’s ABCs:

• Activating events that trigger negative thoughts and emotions
• Beliefs about the activating event
• Consequences these thoughts have on emotions and behaviour

Learning their ABCs helps people manage and challenge irrational beliefs when faced with difficult situations. This subsequently places them in a better position to succeed in their pressure-filled environment.

4.     Foster a facilitative environment

A facilitative environment is one with high levels of challenge and support. While challenge involves everyone having personal accountability and high expectations for each other, support involves a culture of trust and learning that facilitates personal development. 

Research suggests that one way to achieve such an environment is through pressure inurement training. This approach gradually increases training pressure by raising challenges and manipulating the environment. In a sports performance context, coaches should monitor athletes' responses, offering motivational feedback and reducing difficulty if needed. If athletes adapt well, challenges can be progressively increased with continued support. This prepares them for the pressures of competition.

Team resilience

Other than individual resilience, it is also important to develop resilience on a more global team level. This is not just applicable in team sports, but also in individual sports where individual athletes are likely to be working with a team of coaches and sport science practitioners, and also in any environment in which a team of people operate together in order to achieve a shared objective. Let’s take a look at five practical recommendations to facilitate team resilience:

1.     Inspire when leading

Transformational leadership involves leaders inspiring their team members and increasing motivation, morale, and performance especially in times of adversity. Practically, leaders could focus on three main elements:

2.     Share ownership of the team 

Having a team of individuals that lead one another in their own capacity can increase team resilience. One way to encourage shared leadership is through creating leadership groups. Leadership groups can help clarify the different roles members may hold in a team. This distributes responsibility and ensures everyone is held equally accountable in difficult times, thereby promoting collective action against adversity.

3.     Construct a unique social identity

When individuals start identifying themselves as part of the same group, they are more likely to rely on and support one another when facing major obstacles. One way to establish a distinctive social identity is through the 5Rs approach:

4.     Learn together as a team

When teams learn together, they collectively acquire common knowledge which leads to them having a shared mental model. Teams with shared mental models interpret situations similarly, hence allowing them to anticipate each other’s needs for better decision making and coordination. This is crucial when teams are faced with pressure as it promotes adaptability among members, thereby improving team resilience.

Here are three questions that can help improve the effectiveness of a team’s shared mental model:

5.     Create opportunities to have fun together

When team members experience positive emotions together, they are more likely to be motivated to stick with each other when dealing with setbacks. These positive feelings can also be a great way to combat stress and bond team members especially in times of adversity. Here, we recommend that teams organise social events and celebrate instances when they successfully came together to overcome challenges.

 
Final thoughts 

Just like any physical skill training, developing mental resilience requires substantial time and effort. While we have provided nine ways in which resilience can be developed, they remain superficial measures until athletes, employees, volunteers and the teams to which they belong commit to deliberately practicing and implement them into their everyday routines. Only then will the rewards that resilience affords be reaped.

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Sean Yue is a Psychology Research Assistant at InnerDrive. He has a strong interest in sport psychology, in particular focusing on skill acquisition and pedagogy.

Find out more about InnerDrive

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Check out more SGA resources on resilience:

Essay - Organisational resilience: sports bodies in times of change and uncertainty Webinar - Organisational resilience in sports bodies