The Importance of Resilience in Sports
Resilience is a very important skill in all sports. Athletes have to deal with the stress of competitions and the pressure of being the best in their respective fields. You must also add the worrying they experience about working with their very bodies which is something often hidden behind medals. Elite sports punish the body, push it to the maximum, and are far from being healthy. In turn, this idea is related to another source of pressure – injuries.
How does resilience work outside of sports? The truth is that athletes aren’t the only ones who have to overcome obstacles. We have all had to suffer solitude and touch rock bottom. Usually, this is accompanied by the feeling that it’ll be very difficult to pick yourself back up again. In fact, this is something we all go through with more or less intensity in our everyday routines.
Following this parallelism, sports, for individuals who don’t practice them professionally, can become a training ground for certain psychological variables. Resilience, obviously, can be found among these variables. Plus, an accident or the death of a loved one are experiences that one is rarely prepared for. During these situations, having good resilience marks a big difference between overcoming them successfully or not.
If there’s something that sets athletes apart from the rest of us it’s that most of their pressure is self-imposed. At the same time, many have no other choice but to self-manage themselves. However, this pressure grants them the maturity which allows in sports to develop and strengthen their resilience. Thus, they become people who are committed, have a great deal of determination and, above all, have the faith that comes from having experienced many storms and witnessed how, over time, the clouds retreated.
