Resilience

Resilience is the ability to cope with adversity and it is a skill that can also be learned over time.

We are not born resilient, we become resilient! Research shows that resilience can be taught and can be applied in various fields.

To enhance performance and the ability to be resilient it is necessary to gradually raise the "bar" by placing performers in the forefront of new challenges. It is also necessary to help them manage associated emotions such as fear, and the frustration that is part of life’s path and the learning process in order to consequently achieve excellence. Going forward does not exclude "going backwards".

In fact, personal and professional growth often implies doing the so-called "one step forward and two steps back". This absolutely must not be interpreted as a failure.

Stumbling helps the learning path and understanding what factors have created the "fall" allows you to transform an emotional pain into an opportunity and something that teaches.

Even re-evaluating what has been learned, what is positive about that event, or how can I use these situations to my advantage and what can I learn from them, is all part of the resilience path.

This way of thinking helps to develop a quality like optimism that contrasts feelings of sadness, powerlessness and fear.

Understanding how an optimistic mind thinks and interprets defeats, favors the development of inner resources.

In effect, the pessimistic person interprets negative events as permanent and generalizable. For example, phrases such as "I'm wrong and I'll never improve" can be transformed into a constructive inner dialogue such as "I was wrong this time, now I'm not good enough yet, but I will improve".

The optimistic person evaluates the defeats as temporary and links them specifically to that task performed.

A pessimistic person sees a situation as pervasive and tends to make "sweeping" statements such as " mistakes everywhere and always".

On the other hand, an optimist interprets events as situational; "I need to improve in this specific situation, at this specific time, now"

Teaching the differences between optimists and pessimists to our performers helps towards learning for a more functional mode of thinking. Therefore in the case of a failure, focus should be on a specific, temporary performance in the present, without being conditioned to generalize the error for subsequent performances. The consequence of this could be setting the mind to an anticipatory failure.

Another fundamental characteristic of resilience is that of responsibility. Accepting responsibility for a failure allows you to take full control and not be at the mercy of external events or dynamics.

It is important to be aware that we cannot change what has happened and we cannot always anticipate the unexpected, but we can choose how to interpret what happens to us and what to do with that experience.

Muscle relaxation techniques, or even visualization for example where we imagine to gradually reduce the problem by closing it up in a container can be used.  In addition, for more complex situations in which the performer experiences traumas, sophisticated reworking techniques are used to develop resilience that only specialized therapists at high levels can apply, such as Brainspotting and EMDR, www.performanceexpansion.com.

The performance expansion program aims to create resilience by transforming a blocked mind into a clear, operational, light but solid mind that faces life with an open, curious and proactive vision.

Turn your challenges into opportunities and expand the resilience that is within you!