Defining Mental Resilience
When my calf tore, 8 weeks before my marathon, I had a decision to make, accept that running a marathon in 8 weeks was unlikely or accept that all I could do is keep trying but with a renewed view of my performance. I had to embrace recovery and keep moving forward. I ran the marathon, with a 42kg sandbag, in 7hrs 15min 29sec. I was resilient.
Resilience, in my words, is the movement forward in the face of adversity, or the friction and interference in your life. Its a foundational attribute we need to develop, learn and employ. It’s a precursor for any level of performance above non-performance.
Resilience is an attribute that can be aligned to inanimate objects just as much as humans. I’ve spent a long time working in and around technology projects. Amazon Web Services, the world’s biggest cloud provider defines resiliency as;
The ability for a system to recover from a failure induced by load, attacks, and failures.
This is a very different definition to the one the British Army uses;
Mental resilience is a person’s ability to respond effectively to stress, pressure, risk and adversity,
This blog and associated podcast look at the application of resilience to you, the human. It is worth understanding and thinking about how AWS defines resiliency though. In AWS’ world failure and recovery from failure is the focus of resilience, with reliability being a separate attribute. Reliability is a closer concept to mental resilience as we need to avoid complete failure at all costs, therefore recovery sits within the proposed definitions and concepts of mental resilience. We will pick up on the need to understand the role of recovery in our resilience at the tail end of this blog.
Our mental resilience is the ability to keep going despite what lands in front of us. To keep progressing forward no matter how small the steps.
In my mental performance and coaching work, I’ve done a lot of mental resilience-related work. It is either helping people, teams and leaders to understand their inner world through the lens of mental resilience or sessions orientated on performance and pursuing higher performance. Resilience is in all we do, a foundational attribute.
Why is resilience in all we do? We all live in an adversarial life and world, unfortunately, the line between you and your potential is blocked by interferences and frictions that will stop you if you let them. At times it can feel like the forces of life are even working against us.
4 ways to treat the crap life throws at us…
These interferences and frictions can be navigated, reduced, removed or even embraced. If we do nothing about them they will stop us, gradually creating fragility that leads to a mental resilience failure. Resilience is the act of deliberating treating interferences and frictions, to enable us to keep moving forward.
The interesting thing about friction in the natural world is that it has a purpose, for example, without drag [air resistance] we would have no flight. So the very thing that may prevent flight actually enables it.
Managing our resilience in the face of interference and friction is important to enable us to fly and realize our potential.
A Model.
People are simple and complex academic topics rarely bring about change, thats why I’ve developed a simple cartoon or story to help you land resilience and utilise it in your life and your relationships with others.
This model is informed by several books and my life experience, but a key academic study that has informed it is a study the British Military did on infantry recruits. They studied the successes and the failures of recruits and identified 7 pillars of resilience. These pillars are core to this model.
The Resilience for Performance Bridge.
To help land resilience in a practical fashion in your life this model is proposed. Imagine the following…
We have a bridge across a ravine, with the bridge held up and supported by 7 pillars, these pillars in turn supported by a foundation.
On the bridge is a train track, with a train travelling along it.
Start at the bottom of the image,
Foundations are important as they influence where you place emphasis across the pillars, we are all different and all have different; personalities, life skills and experiences which will mean we may have more dependence on a particular pillar. How well do you know yourself and those around you?
The pillars, holding up the bridge, you may be able to lose one or two but this depends on your personal foundations. For me, if I lose my sense of purpose or self-belief my resilience is likely to crumble, but I could probably do without social support having spent large parts of my life in isolated spaces.
The pillars:
Mental Control – our ability to control and use our mindset to best effect
Emotion Regulation – the ability to understand and express your emotions, to respond not react
Coping Systems – that we employ to manage stress and friction in our life, these are often very subject to us
Self Efficacy, or Self Belief – Our view of ourselves and belief in where we should be
Sense of purpose – the driving force for our activity, do we have a clear view of where we are going and why?
Positive Affect – the ability to interact with life positively, and to be optimistic in all situations
Social support – how the people around us support us through our lives and moments of stress and friction. Also how we use our support network. Think of this in two ways, how do people support us and how to we lean on people to improve our resilience?
The track represents the movement through your life, it’s hard to move through life if we don’t have clear goals and direction. A lot of the pillars will be stronger if you have defined where you want to go!
The train, is you moving through life. You want to keep the train on the tracks ideally, but if the train ends up at the bottom of the valley as long as you keep moving forward [left to right in the image]
Application:
This model is useful and graphically makes things fit together but the utility is yet to be explained.
To help you use this model Ive coined a phrase or concept known as the Resilience Loop. This loop is informed by the OODA loop, which is a mental and conceptual model used by militaries when they train military units for warfare.
Remember life is adversarial so understanding some military doctrine is useful.
OODA stands for:
Observe – whats happening and what detail of the situation can I absorb
Orientate to the situation – how do I analyse and position myself to the situation
Decide what to do – plan and decide on action to take
Act – put into action your decision
If you can do that faster than your adversary, be they an enemy on the battlefield, the sporting or business competition or even you own worldly mindsets, you will win.
The speed at which you can move through the OODA loop dictates the chances of you winning the war.
The resilience loop is that mindset applied to your mental resilience.
The Resilience loop consists of:
Resilience in Performance – moving forward through our performance
Fragility – the cracks appearing in our pillars, we are ok this may just be a natural result of the level of performance we are pursuing
Failure – pillars collapsing and the train leaving the rails. This may look like physical injury, its a specific moment where you cant continue performing at the same rate.
Recovery – moving forward back to the ability to perform as required
The key is identifying the fragility, the cracks in the pillars, within your mental resilience and then acting upon that knowledge to prevent failure and recovery, enabling you to continue to perform for longer.
THIS IS RESILIENCE IN ACTION!
Think of a time you have been under pressure or have had opposition in life, where did the cracks appear, was it a lack of self-belief or efficacy? Did your sense of purpose become compromised?
Visualise the cracks appearing in the pillars, enough cracks means the pillar will crumble and fall, reducing the support to the bridge.
The more fragile you become the greater the chances of your failure.
Interesting side note, to get into a high-performance space normally requires a high degree of resilience, and you may even have to compromise some pillars to get into that space. For example, I may have to forego some level of Social support to attain the level of physical performance required to realise my goal. This looks like going for that long workout rather than drinking with your social group on a Friday night…
Because high-performance spaces come with high interference and friction it’s hard to maintain our position within them. That’s why we need to plan our performance spaces, which is a previous blog//episode.
So what?
Listen to my podcast on this subject where I expand a bit more on these concepts and how this might play out in your life and has played out in my life.
Some questions for you to consider…
- Look back at your last 10-15 years, how has your resilience been tested and where did the cracks appear? What can you do to fix the cracks and learn from those moments?
- Do you know the people around you well enough to identify when they may have cracks appearing in their pillars, can you spot when they are struggling?
GBx
Dave