Train your athletes to be resilient |05 March 2022

What are resilient athletes?

Resilient athletes are confident in their abilities to recover and overcome challenging situations.

The ability to adapt and bounce back from poor performance.

Resilience is a skill athletes can benefit in the stages of their career development.

When you are not resilient it's very difficult to adapt with challenging situations and solve simple things, at times you just blame the whole world.

You lose interest and all your preparation goes down the drain.

Let us go through the three types of resilience and you will understand their importance.

• Natural: Natural resilience is something you're born with. It often relates to an enthusiasm for life and tendency to try new things.
• Adaptive resilience is a powerful tool in competition. Adaptive resilience comes from difficult circumstances that impel you to adapt and grow stronger than before.
• Restored. Restored resilience develops out of learning and deliberate techniques to strengthen your skills.

If your athletes don't have resilience skills, the coaching staff should ensure they get access to training in resilience skills. Some organisations and Seychellois living in Seychelles and abroad are ready to help. Douglass Pierre in Australia is one of them and he is waiting for someone to contact him.

Let me share a few techniques to control your emotions:

a) control your breathing,

b) reframe your ideas of failure into positive ones

c) keep a diary identifying which emotions are healthy in competition and which are not.

We don't need a rocket scientist to teach resilience to our athletes. If you observe a baby who want to grab something, he/she will never stop until he/she succeeds. Therefore, young athletes can't learn how to succeed in life without experiencing occasional setbacks.

Young athletes should be helped to see things in perspective. For example, losing a match or competition is not the end of the world.

An athlete who is able to bounce back from disappointment and mistakes is more likely to persevere when learning new skills in sports and become proficient at them.

What can we do as the coaching staff to develop resilience in our athletes?

Instill valuable life skills that can build resilience in the athletes and positive youth development.

Avoid fixing the challenges of your athletes in sports and life. Instead help him create their own plans.

Our athletes should start learning to adapt to challenging situations; at times athletes have already lost their match or fight even before entering in the competition venue. When you complain about transport, food, accommodation, training venue, your opponents who are resilient get the advantage of winning against you.

A resilient athlete should be ready to face challenging situations.

My fellow coaches, preparing for high level sporting performance places great demand on positive character. With only physical skills it will be difficult for your athletes to achieve their dream.

Mental preparation should walk side by side with physical training.

Together we can make it happen.

Maurice Denys

Certified Mental Coach

S.N.H.S. Dip (Sports Psychology)

S.N.H.S. Dip (Life Coaching)