Resilience and Success

Article by Giuseppe Mingrone

When an athlete has all the characteristics to move forward and does not break through, what does it depend on? Many "sit down", they are demotivated. One of the determinants can be resilience, that is the ability to face obstacles.
Being motivated is not an exceptional condition, it is a normal condition.

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"Our greatest fear is not that of being inadequate, our greatest fear is that of being powerful beyond all measure, it is our light not our darkness that scares us the most.

The term resilience originates in the engineering field, where it is used to denote the ability of a metal to withstand pressure.
This term was transferred to the humanities some thirty years ago by French authors.
Resilience is part of the motivational field, it is a quality of motivation.
The quality of motivation makes the difference between who quits and who continues, who fails and who achieves goals.
Those who have lived through terrible experiences (sexual violence, loss of parents, etc.), and manage to metabolize what happened, usually perform exceptional feats.

We can define resilience as:

ability to stay motivated in the face of obstacles and difficulties encountered in pursuing a goal.

There are athletes who, despite injuries, stalls and disagreements with their team, manage to move forward. The ability to cope with these factors is crucial

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without losing the" enthusiasm " - Winston Churchill

Don't motivate, but assist

Incentive and compulsion are extrinsic motivational factors; these models have major limitations: They have a limited duration in time, the person concerned does not undertake to reach the goal, but to reach the motivation.
The human brain is able to motivate itself and does not need to resort to external motivational sources. Man is the animal with the most powerful motivation in existence.
True motivation is intrinsic and is generated by pleasure and enjoyment. Commitment creates a sense of competence and is rewarded with pleasure and enjoyment.
A good trainer should perceive the needs of his client - rarely the client externally immediately what they really want - after a few minutes of conversation in the first meeting.

Sensory stimuli for interaction with the environment

Have you ever enjoyed the rain that wets you during a swim in the sea or in your jogging session?

Often motorcyclists run with the helmet visor open to better hear the wind in their face and the roar of the engine, Have you ever wondered why?

Sensory deprivation experiments (http://it.wikipedia.org).

When the subjects of the studies were placed in sensory deprivation tanks - soundproofed, no light, water at the same temperature as the body - they lasted a few hours at most before having hallucinations, anxiety and depression. In the absence of stimuli (sensory connections), the while creates reality automatically.

The puppies play, the adult animals do not play. Men play all their lives. Playful behaviors are linked to non-specialized species. Highly specialized animals do not even play when they are small (eg bird that lives in a specific area and feeds on that specific insect that lives in a specific area). Generalist animals play a lot. Playing is a way of making connections with the brain. Animals adapt by playing in the environment.
Man is born without connections with the external environment. The childhood years are dedicated to learning. Being born in a dependent environment is a limitation. Man goes into the sea, into space and into all environments.
We look for sensory connections to tickle our mind and provoke a sense of pleasure

By stimulating the vicious circuit of pleasure and fun, great feats can be accomplished.

Look for the dimension of pleasure in your sport and realize that we all have the tools to trigger this virtuous circle (commitment, competence, pleasure and fun).

Generally, unfamiliarity with fatigue holds back an athlete's potential even before it has reached its limits. A good coach should never minimize fatigue: "whatever you want it to be". To minimize means to demotivate.
Each of us has his own model of sensory interpretation: The Gross brothers, winners of the longest Trail running race in the world at Tor des Géants, had a paradigm of fatigue inherited from their father, who walked 60 km every day on foot carrying a very heavy trolley to go to the workplace and sell the products he carries. The brothers Ulrich and Annemarie have a different perception of fatigue than most people.
Understanding what clients find acceptable is important, as fatigue must be personalized. It is about cognitive mediation and cultural influence.

Resistance and success

Walter Mischel, analyzed the behavior of 200 US school children (www.ilsole24ore.com).The children, one at a time, alone, were ushered into a room, with only the marshmallows inside. The child was asked to wait a few moments alone in the room before being able to consume a marshmallow. The room was filmed by a hidden camera. W. Mischel has drawn up a ranking according to willpower and has followed the children as they grow up.
He studied the correlation between outcome in the study and the incidence with resistance to temptation.
Those who are able to resist temptation have higher academic achievement and brighter growth in work (based on earnings). Those who resisted temptation earn more.
After 20 years he subjected his brain to computerized analyzes and noticed the correlation between resilience and activation of the brain areas.

Resisting a temptation involves a large consumption of glucose.
When you see a high-calorie, good food, the instinct to eat it is strong: it is the frontal areas of the brain that consume glucose to inhibit the desire to eat.

Self-efficacy

The perception of fatigue is determined by the areas that develop specific adaptations to prolonged physical activity. Those who run the marathon have developed adaptations not only physical, but also cerebral.
The trainer should work on self-efficacy to motivate his clients; those with a low sense of self-efficacy feel incompetent, make little effort and don't enjoy themselves.
To improve the sense of self-efficacy, work on objectives calibrated according to the possibility of the subject. They must be reachable, but challenging. Challenger means something achievable, but not without effort.

Relationship maintenance

Do not standardize the relationship (you cannot ignore what kind of person you are dealing with. Introverted and extroverted subjects must be treated differently).
Distance communication creates distortions, we have brain structures, mirror neurons, so non-verbal communication is very important.

Factors that influence emotionality.

Make you feel capable

Pygmalion effect or self-fulfilling prophecy (http://it.wikipedia.org/). Influencing others.

The subjects of an experiment had to go from middle school to high school, and a staff of psychologists swept through all these individuals, studying their profit and ability. They divided the test subjects into two groups: donkeys and future geniuses. The high school professors, however, were invited to consider the boys by reversing the results, genes passed for donkeys and vice versa. After a year the team took the same boys and repeated the profit tests, the surprise was that the behavior of the teachers shifted the results: those who were previously donkeys, thanks to being considered as geniuses, improve a lot.

From this we deduce that people's performance is influenced by expectations. "If I make you feel capable, get in."
Leave autonomy: Being too descriptive, demotivating. (Don't be too didactic: extra-rotate the femur better, flex the thigh and inhale ...).