How Olympic champions use resilience to cope with stress

If you want to manage stress and perform under pressure, you've got to cultivate one psychological characteristic: Resilience Here's how Olympic champions do it, and you can, too: This model is from Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012. They broke down resilient responding by asking 12 Olympians about performing under pressure. These Olympians said that, under stress, these are the things they needed to manage the pressure and perform: 1. Positive personality Being open to new experiences, innovative, and optimistic seemed to help the Olympians see the stress adaptively. They also proactively trained their mindset, so that any negative experience was easier to deal with and staying positive came naturally. 2. Motivation The Olympians were driven by multiple forces: - Passion - Achieving more - Social status - Being their best As a result, challenges became opportunities to act on those motives. If you want to be more resilient, have multiple sources of inspiration. 3. Confidence For the best athletes in the world, confidence came from: - Preparation - Experience - Self-awareness - Imagery - Coaching - Teammates This confidence helped hem believe they could win, and thus a stressor was simply an obstacle to overcome - nothing more. 4. Focus World-class athletes stay dialed into themselves and their process. They don't worry about what other people are doing or outcomes they can't control. In the case of resilience, this helps everything feel controllable and manageable, and as a result, respond better. 5. Perceived social support If the Olympians felt supported, by teammates, family, and coaches, they responded more resiliently to stress. That's true for all of us. Social support boosts our sense of what we can handle. It makes us feel like we're in it together. If you add these 5 factors together, you tend to respond to stressors as a challenge, instead of a threat. That challenge response leads to a better psychological and physiological response. That leads to better performance. If you want to do that for yourself, then, here's what you can do: 1. Identify your values and goals - boosts motivation 2. Mindfulness - boosts focus 3. Social cohesion - build deeper connections to those around you 4. Take risks - boosts creativity and innovation 5. Ask for feedback - boosts self-awareness 6. Reflect on past success - boosts confidence 7. Gratitude journal - boosts hope and optimism There are more, of course, but this is enough to get started.