Game Planning for Resilience
The idea of game planning for resilience involves two steps. First, resilience requires the skills of immediately reacting to adversity in a way that prevents things from going from bad to worse. Secondly, resilience requires the skills of bouncing back after suffering pain, exhaustion, and/or loss to be equal or better than you were before the adversity.
The skills you develop to immediately react to adversity dictate the skills you will need to bounce back, or if a bounce back is even possible.
For example, if you wake up to your smoke detector going off what is your immediate reaction? Do you panic or do you behave calmly executing a plan to mitigate a potential house fire? If you panic, you may need to bounce back from your house completely burning down. Worse case death could eliminate your ability to bounce back completely. On the other hand, if you behave calmly and execute a mitigation plan you may put out the fire before there’s any major damage.
As you can see, it’s unwise to ignore the first step in building resilience. Before bounce back is even possible, learning how to behave with resilience in real time during an adverse event is an absolute must. Moreover, learning these skills require evaluating risk, creating a plan for dealing with those risk, and then practicing the execution of that plan.
Game Plan for Resilience in Life as if You were a Coach of a Sports Team
In sports, all great coaches go through this process of preparing their athletes to be resilient. Football coaches plan for what some call “sudden change” to prepare the defense when the offense commits a turnover or 2-minute offenses for when they need points fast. Basketball coaches have specific offensive and defensive strategies they practice when they are losing with minutes or seconds remaining. Collegiate wrestling coaches help their athletes develop strategies to score multiple points fast when they are losing by a large margin at the end of a match.
These are examples of evaluating risk, creating a plan to react when the time comes, then practicing how to bounce back. To game plan for resilience in real life you must follow the same due diligence that sports coaches practice. Unquestionably, the stakes are higher. So, it would be wise to plan to be resilient instead of hoping for it. As the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.