Sign up for email alert when new content gets added: Sign up
In this world of high performance, setbacks are inevitable. The defining factor is how quickly one bounces back and views setbacks as an opportunity for growth. According Olympians and business leaders sustaining elite level performance and well being requires one to be optimistic, resilient, have high self-efficacy and confidence. Every individual has a way of coping with setbacks which they have learned through experience and the reinforcements received for this, helps them form a coping style. Fletcher and Sarkar recently defined psychological resilience as “the role of mental processes and behavior in promoting personal assets and protecting an individual from the potential negative effect of stressors” (2012, p. 675; 2013, p. 16). Research has shown that resilience can be shaped over the course of an individual’s life. Fixed aspects of resilience relate to an individual’s personality trait whereas changeable aspects would be the one caused due to interactions with the environment (Sarkar & Fletcher, 2017). Resilience training in employees has shown a positive effect on subjective well-being and performance outcomes such as decrease in symptoms of depression, stress, anxiety, negative affect. It increases emotional well-being, goal achievement, productivity, quality of life and reaching behavioural benchmarks like emotional control, communication, improved tactic. Based on the neuroscientific research on resilience, it is found that to cope with stressors, resilient individuals not only have moderating effects of absence of key molecular abnormalities which impairs their coping ability, but also by the presence of novel molecular adaptations which occur uniquely in them (Russo, Murrough, Han, Charney, Nestler, 2012). This presentation aims to educate scholars on resilience in the field of performance psychology and strategies to use improve resilience in athletes, organisations and other high performance domains. This would assist clinicians and others in audience with practical knowledge on how to recover from an injury, setback or adversity and facilitate rehabilitation. It aims to provide individuals with necessary knowledge and to equip them with techniques to become resilient even before facing a stressor, i.e. to be better prepared as we believe in the saying “precaution is better than cure.” Life may not accompany a guide, however everybody will encounter exciting bends in the road, from ordinary difficulties to horrendous mishaps with all the more enduring effect, similar to the passing of a friend or family member, a life changing mishap or a genuine disease. Each change influences individuals in an unexpected way, bringing a one of a kind surge of contemplations, forceful feelings and vulnerability. However individuals by and large adjust well after some time to groundbreaking circumstances and upsetting circumstances — partially because of strength.
