High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 83: The Resilience Factor with Dr. Mustafa Sarkar

Episode Date: December 22, 2016

In this interview, researcher and lecturer, Dr. Mustafa Sarkar, describes his powerful and cutting-edge findings on resilience with high achievers and Olympic champions. He defines resilience as the ���the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure.” He discusses 6 personal qualities that resilient people have which include: 1) positive and proactive personality, 2) experience and learning, 3) sense of control, 4) flexibility and adaptability, 5) balance and perspective and 6) perceived social support. Dr. Sarkar provides practical tips including “learning your ABCs” on how to build resilience in yourself, your clients, or your team.

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to an interview with Dr. Mustafa Sarkar. A few weeks ago, I had the great privilege of interviewing Mustafa from England via Skype. And I learned so much from this interview in terms of what is resilience and how I can help my clients and

myself become more resilient. So Mustafa is a cutting edge researcher on the topic of resilience. He's also a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. And his research is really focused on how high achievers and Olympic champions build resilience. There's a lot of reasons why I was really excited about bringing Mustafa on in terms of when I think about you and the listeners and who listens to this podcast.

And I know that you want to improve yourself. You're interested in being at your best and reaching your greater potential. You wouldn't be listening to this interview if you weren't. Mustafa provides a lot of excellent points about how to develop resilience and what actually it is. So again, he defines resilience in this interview. He talks about six personal qualities that resilient people develop. And I think one of the really important points about this interview is he talks about how adversity

is not only beneficial, but it's essential to our success. And you can't be resilient, you can't bounce back without experiencing adversity. He also talks about how high achievers have what's called a challenge mindset, where they view adversity and pressure as an opportunity to learn and grow. So that's just a few things that, you know, I'd encourage you as you're listening to listen for. But he provides incredible tips and just really practical applications in terms of how we can develop resilience in ourselves and those who we lead or those

who we work with. So we'd encourage you to head over to Twitter and let us know what you thought about this podcast, how you might use it, or maybe there's a point that really stood out to you that you don't want to forget. If you head over to Twitter, my Twitter handle is at mentally underscore strong. And Mustafa's is the first three letters of his first name, M-U-S, and then his last name, S-A-R-K-A-R. So we'd encourage you to head over to Twitter.

Let us know what you think about this interview. And as always, we'd be so incredibly grateful if you'd have a few minutes to head over to itunes and rate the podcast by doing that it just helps us reach more and more people each week and thank you again for joining us here today so without further ado let's bring on mustafa mustafa i'm so excited that you're here with us on the High Performance Mindset. So welcome. I look forward to hearing more about your research. Thank you very much, Cintra, for the invite and look forward to our discussion.

So tell us a little bit about your passion and how you began to study resilience. I guess in terms of my passion, I've of been interested in the psychology of performance excellence so looking at from a psychological perspective how people perform at the highest level and my teaching my research and my consultancy is really very much focused on that area particularly looking at how high achievers thrive on pressure so in terms of my passion that's really what I'm really interested in is the psychology of excellence. What is it about high achievers that enable them to perform at the highest level? Well, I think we are going to have a good

discussion because I'm just thinking about how everybody experiences adversity, whether you're an athlete, a leader, an entrepreneur, a coach. So tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are in your career. My kind of initial kind of education, I studied sports and exercise science at Loughborough University in the UK. I then did a psychology course, a one-year kind of postgraduate diploma in psychology at Middlesex University and then specialized I went back to Loughborough University and specialized in sport and exercise psychology that's when I really got my first taste of resilience research so my master's project was looking at resilience in Olympic champions and was really kind of my first experience of

doing research in that area and then after my master's program I did a PhD in sports and exercise psychology also focusing on resilience but this time we were looking at developing a questionnaire or an assessment tool to actually measure resilience in athletes so that's kind of a bit of background in terms of my education um i kind of after my time at loughborough university i've um now kind of um been at nottingham trent university for just over a year um i kind of i'm a lecturer there in sports and exercise psychology and i i teach and do research um in in that kind of area um And before my time at Nottingham Trent University, I was at the University of Gloucestershire for two years as a research fellow. So kind of my background has predominantly been in research and teaching. And I've also got an

interest in consultancy. So I do a lot of work with coaches and with athletes about performing under pressure and the psychology behind that. So yeah, been a bit of background around kind of what I've been up to beforehand and what I'm what I'm doing at the moment. You know, one of the reasons I'm just so excited about having you on the podcast is because of the quality of your research. I've read many of your research studies. One of your studies is the foundation of our research about the runners who are at the Boston Marathon bombing that's coming out this spring and the sports psychologist. But you are the expert on resilience. So tell us how you define resilience and what that means to you. Yeah, so resilience as a term has been defined in a variety

of different ways. I'm not going to get necessarily bogged down in terms of the academic definitions but if I were to kind of put it simply how I would define resilience is the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure and here we're talking predominantly about psychological resilience so the ability to use personal or psychological qualities to withstand pressure. And I guess when we use the term resilience, what I refer to is the ability of individuals to maintain functioning. And this is in contrast to other terms that you might have heard with things like recovery and coping, where individuals experience, I I guess dips in levels of

functioning before they return to baseline levels so resilience really is the ability to to maintain functioning after let's say a potentially stressful situation rather than dips in levels of functioning and then returning to baseline I guess the other thing in terms of how I would describe resilience is the interaction between the person and the personal qualities, but also the environment that individuals are in. I think one of the myths around resilience is that resilience is a personal quality and it's only kind of confined to individuals but actually the environment we're finding more and more with the research that the environment that individuals

are placed in whether that's the social support or or kind of other support kind of members where we're recognizing that the environment is also really really important so it's personal qualities are really important but the environment is equally important as part of that. And I guess lastly around resilience and how we would maybe not define resilience is the ability to bounce back. You kind of hear that term being used quite a lot in the media with athletes and with businesses.

I think for me, particularly when we're talking about high performance, whether that's in sport or business or other kind of professions, rather than resilience being about bouncing back and responding to a setback, kind of using a quote from the Harvard Business Review, where they talk about resilience being the ability to change before the case for change becomes obvious. So it's a very proactive way of dealing with stress rather than a reactive component. And that's kind of where I make the distinction between resilience and stress management. Stress management is the ability to manage stress when stress has already occurred. Resilience for me is that proactive nature where you're having got skills and things in place before stress actually occurs. So for me,

yeah, I've kind of expanded on that in terms of what resilience is, but I think it's important to make that distinction between resilience and things like coping and stress management. Mustafa, I like that. That's really good. So you say that resilience is the ability to change before the case for change becomes necessary. Can you give us an example or two of where you see high achievers who are able to do that? And just help us think through that so we can apply that to our lives. Yeah, So if I give one example from sport and maybe one example from business, a sporting example might be a situation where an elite athlete is kind of going through training. They've got a coach in place. But for whatever reason, that coach isn't giving them the needs that, you know, the things in place that they need whether that's technical

support tactical support emotional support whatever that might be um and in terms of resilience in terms of being proactive that's the kind of the real component of one of the key components of resilience is um potentially even changing that coach before it becomes too late let's say for example in the lead-up to a competition um you know it might be two you know two or three weeks before the competition it might be late to actually change your personnel but if you have got that self-awareness and that proactivity um it's the ability to change that coach and recognize that that coach isn't giving that support um or the coach isn't kind of maybe not doesn't fit with

your personality and your kind of your strengths so you actually change that coach and actually change before it becomes obvious or the the need for change become obvious so that's i guess kind of a sporting example a similar kind of example in business where maybe where you um are kind of let's say a manager and have got variety of different colleagues um and uh you know this particular um kind of colleague um is um kind of becoming quite difficult and quite troublesome um it's actually having that conversation quite early on before it becomes too late when that that colleague may be um kind of getting involved in behaviors that you're not happy about or um is actually affecting the productivity of your team but actually having that conversation really early on before it becomes too

late before actually productivity starts to decrease um so again, just changing and being proactive in the conversations that you have with people before things become too late. I think those are hopefully two examples in sport and business. So it's being proactive before the case for change is needed. Let's actually go back to your definition of resilience. And you said it's about using personal qualities or personal resources to withstand pressure. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what you mean by personal qualities and give us some examples and also what you mean by and how you define pressure and give us some examples of what you mean by that? Yeah, so personal qualities, what I refer to there are qualities, characteristics, attributes that an individual may possess. If I kind of give an example from some of the research that we did, we did a piece of research looking at personal qualities or resilient qualities in high achievers across a range of different professions,

so sport, business, law enforcement, politics, the entertainment industry. And we identified a number of resilient qualities or personal qualities that help these individuals to withstand pressure. I'll go on to talk about what I mean by pressure. But in terms of these personal qualities as some examples, if I list them out and then maybe go into them in a little bit more detail later on, but in terms of the list of resilient qualities that we identified in this study with high achievers, first of all was a positive and proactive personality.

Second of all was this idea of experience and learning. Thirdly, having a sense of control. Fourthly, balance and perspective. Fifth was being flexible and adaptable. And lastly, this idea of perceived social support we found to be really important. So kind of a variety of qualities that are needed to help individuals to withstand pressure. And I guess in terms of pressure, very broad definition, how we kind of look at pressure, the demands, the kind of situations, events, circumstances that an individual might experience or encounter in their life and those could be kind of day-to-day pressures that you might encounter so conflicts with your coach, conflicts with your manager to really quite highly demanding adversities like the death of a family member or kind of quite serious financial difficulties or serious problems so pressures can be wide ranging from sort of day-to-day hassles to kind of extreme

adversities um but pressure yeah any kind of events or demands or circumstances that you might encounter as an individual and what we kind of did as part of this research was to identify qualities or characteristics that high achievers possess that help them to actually function under these kind of pressurized situations. Let's look at these qualities a little bit more carefully. Which one of these would you want to start with and tell us a little bit more details about? So if I guess, if we take them kind of in turn, first of all um a positive and proactive personality um in particular um one of the things that we identified with these high achievers and actually

this this idea of of having a positive and proactive personality we also identified with some research that we did with olympic champions um was it kind of goes back to the kind of the quote I mentioned in the Harvard Business Review about initiating change yourself rather than waiting for things to happen. Actively seeking out challenging situations and actively putting yourself under pressure so that actually you can react positively to pressure when it when it occurred in the future um and also um taking initiative i think that was also really really important as being proactive is when you recognize that things weren't quite right or recommend recognize that there was areas for improvement taking initiative to to do something about it rather than waiting for things to happen so i think that that was a kind of key aspect of kind of having a positive and proactive personality.

The next kind of theme with the high achievers was this idea of experience and learning. And what was really, really interesting was the high achievers recognized the importance of actually going through adversity, of actually facing pressure, of going through some really challenging situations. And they recognize that particularly earlier on in their careers, they went through some really, really challenging situations. But that really helped them in their future because they learn a lot of the things that by going through those challenging situations they learn a lot about themselves but also the environment that they were in so the kind of the theme of experience and learning were really kind of quite closely knit together

the experience of going through adversity the experience of going through pressure but also the ability to learn from those experiences and what was really interesting about experience and learning as a theme was those who used purposeful reflection so that could have been things like writing in a blog actually taking the time to to actually do some purposeful reflection sitting down taking time to think about what actually happened, those who reflected quite deliberately seemed to learn a lot quicker than those who just kind of learned and did learning on a superficial basis. So reflection is really quite a key part of experience and learning. So tell us a little bit more about how they did this

reflection can you tell us just about more details on you know if it was formal informal was it in a journal just because i'm thinking of one of the really practical things people can take from this interview is just how to be more reflective yeah so i think i think the really key thing with learning and in particular with reflection is there there wasn't particularly with the research that we did there wasn't one one right way of doing it i think you've got you've got to find a technique that works for you um but kind of some of the examples that we came across were uh writing writing in a journal um in some cases some of the high achievers actually wrote blogs and they found that to be quite an interesting and useful experience to do that um reflection also didn't necessarily need to be on you on on their

own so sometimes they having a mentor or a significant other um particularly in a work environment having a mentor who was in a similar kind of high achieving position managerial type position and reflecting with someone else they found found that to be really, really kind of quite useful. But also reflecting with a partner or a family member who was sometimes kind of independent or away from that situation, away from that pressurized situation to get an independent third party perspective. That was also quite useful. So I think when it comes to reflection is using a technique that works for you, but also thinking about do you want to reflect or do you want to reflect on your own or do you want someone to help you with that reflection? I think that's really kind of quite key as a

kind of take home or practical message. So the reflection can be on your own or with someone else. And I like what you're saying in terms of experiential and how the high achievers saw adversity as helpful. You know, so many times we get in situations where we don't appreciate the adversity or, you know, or maybe we don't act resiliently. And I think I think that's the key. I think we also did some kind of this idea that adversity is really quite important. There's also been backed up with some of the research that we've done with Olympic champions. And we actually found that adversity wasn't only beneficial, but it was actually essential for their Olympic success. And I think the key message there is that adversity is not a nice thing. And particularly those who are high achieversvers both in sport and also in other professions

they recognize that going through adversity particularly the initial stage was not a nice feeling and so it's kind of I'm not saying that adversity is something that's going to be a pleasant experience but what we have identified is the lessons that can be learned through adversity, but also kind of quite interestingly, the confidence that can be gained by going through adverse situations, particularly when facing adversity throughout a career. The confidence that you can gain from early adversity and the lessons you can take onto future adversity uh we found that to be kind of really really important um but as a take-home to that i think um kind of we're not saying that i guess coaches or managers who are listening in kind of might be thinking well okay what does this mean for my teams and it means okay does okay, does that mean I need to put my employees or my athletes under adversity all the time?

I think there's a real balance there because I think, yes, a certain amount of pressure and a certain amount of adversity is good, but at the same time, you need to provide that support. And how I look at that from a practical perspective is, from an environment perspective is to really get the balance between challenge and support and that's really really key when it comes to what I would call for something like pressure training or adversity training is in some situations putting people under a bit of challenge and putting people under a bit of pressure really

really good thing but at the same, you might need to put you might need to have some support mechanisms in place as well. It's not just it's not just about the pressure and adversity, the support, the balance with support is also really important. Absolutely. Can you give us some examples of the types of adversity that these Olympic champions said that were essential for the success? You know, I'm thinking, you know, was it a poor performance? You know, maybe getting to the Games four years earlier and not performing at their best? You know, can you just give us some examples of that? Yeah, sure. So the kind of examples from the Olympic champions were kind of divided into

what we could have termed sporting adversities, but also non-sporting adversities. Some of the sporting adversities were, as you kind of mentioned, significant sporting failure. So in a lot of the cases, the Olympic champions had actually failed at a previous Olympic Games before actually going on to win their gold medal at subsequent games. Many of the champions talked about how they failed at really quite high-level competitions, so things like the European Championships or the World Championships, and again, the lessons that they learned from that.

So that was this idea of a really kind of significant sporting failure. Other kind of adversities that they had faced, sporting adversities, was repeated non-selection in particular I can kind of think about one athlete who was not selected for a team four years in a row before actually getting onto the team and the experiences and of actually being part of that team throughout that process he found to be particularly valuable um another part of kind of a sporting adversity was um a serious injury a lot of these athletes and particularly elite athletes go through injury all the time and injuries are often looked at as a negative kind of event or situation

but in these in these in these cases the injury really provided it kind of gave these athletes the mindset that to see how much they could push themselves to actually get to where they wanted to get to in that case kind of in our case looking at how they wanted to achieve and perform and secure Olympic gold so actually that adversity was a stimulus of them wanting to achieve and then some of the the non-sporting adversities um a lot of the champions that we talked about they were they were performing in countries there was there where there was political unrest and that gave the motivation to perform for their country to perform for the people that they were the country that they were um representing and interestingly another sport a non-sporting adversity that a lot

of the champions talked about was it was a death of a of a family member um and from a motivational perspective it was just fascinating because they talked about how the death of a family member really ignited their motivation to perform at the highest level. It gave them a kind of a sense of identity that they wanted to win for their mum or they wanted to win for their dad. And I think when it comes to motivation, we think that kind of doing something for the fun and enjoyment is really important. But what we identified with these Olympic champions was sometimes having this deeper or darker motivation

where you're wanting to do things to prove yourself to others or to do something for your mum and your dad. We found that to be really, really kind of interesting and something that was really identified in the research that we did. So, yeah, some kind of sporting adversities, but also some non-sporting adversities as well. Okay. You know, one thing that I think is really important that I'm hearing is number one, adversity is beneficial. And then number two, you know, it's essential to success and it can come in various ways like, you know, sport adversity, like you said, that's a significant failure.

But adversity can also come from adversity that is not in sport. I think that's a very powerful message. You know, at least for me, you know, when I'm going through it, it really helps me just gain the perspective that, you know, this adversity is something that I'm going to learn from, that I'm going to grow from from and that it's essential for my success and i think i think when it comes to adversity i think it very much um it very much depends on how you view pressure and adversity we identified this with some of the research we did we did with the olympic champions is what is the thought processes that go through these athletes when they've encountered these setbacks and generally speaking you can either look at pressure and adversity something that's going to be threatening

to your performance or threatening to your well-being something that's going to harm you or you can look at pressure and adversity as an opportunity to develop to grow to get better um and we identified with the research that we did with the olympic champions is they looked at pressure and adversity as this opportunity to develop and to grow the technical term being challenge appraisal um so that's something i said I agree with you I think that certainly in the short term having that challenge appraisal having that view that pressure and adversity is a good thing is is probably easier said than done but certainly kind of medium to long term if it's a if it's a mind mindset or thinking pattern that athletes or managers and leaders can get into,

that pressure can provide that stimulus for change. It can provide that stimulus for better performance. That thinking pattern, that constructive thinking pattern, we found to be very, very useful. And did you see, in terms of your research with Olympic champions and high achievers, was this a perspective that they had during the adversity or was it after the adversity? You know, how quickly were they able to see the adversity as an opportunity to grow and learn from and get better? I think that very much depended on the nature of the pressure and the nature of the adversity. I think in cases of the non-sporting adversity uh particularly the death

of a family member uh that that certainly took a little bit of time for the olympic champions to recognize that this could actually be um provide a sense of focus on on something else um and i think as part of that i think that's something that's really really important to recognize is that particularly when adversity or when when individuals encounter adversity for the for the first time and some really really kind of non-sport adversities like the death of a family member they will encounter some quite intense negative emotions but that's actually really really important um going through negative emotions things like anger disappointment hurt frustration the the olympic champions actually

recognized that those were in those were emotions that they'd encountered but they were able to once they recognized why they were why they were experiencing those emotions they were then able to kind of channel and accept and manage those emotions a little bit better. So certainly with the non-sporting adversities, that took a little bit more time, particularly kind of the death of a family member. The non, kind of the day-to-day pressures, things like team conflicts, things like performance slumps, they were then, I guess, evaluated a little bit quicker as an opportunity to develop and to grow um and as part of that um um the reflection piece was really really important

being able to to take that time and actually look at okay what are some of the benefits that are coming from that i think that's something that practically athletes, managers, coaches can actually do is when you've gone through an adversity or a setback, list down three or four things. What are some of the benefits? What were some of the advantages of actually going through that? And I think you'll probably individuals will surprise themselves slightly that actually there are things that they can pick out benefits and advantages of going through that they can pick out quite quickly. Yeah, you know, I think that's a really good tool. It's a really good tool just to write down three or four things you can learn from it, you know, just specifically how you can learn and how this experience can later be an advantage.

And as part of that reflection, I think what's also really important is to recognize and appreciate how are you feeling right now? Because you might not feel particularly great, and particularly with some quite challenging adversities, it's probably going to be a very, very natural process to feel low, to feel some kind of quite negative but what we've identified with high achievers is the self-awareness is really really quite key they recognize when they feel quite good in terms of energy levels

their thinking patterns but they also recognize when things are not so good and they've got kind of any negative energy levels. So as part of that reflection, if you're reflecting and you realize and you have that awareness that you're not feeling so good, that's actually equally important. So that reflection is not just about the benefits of adversity and the benefits of going through it, but also how are you feeling right now? And if you're not feeling so good, what are some of the things that you can put in place so that you can feel better over a period of time? You know, tell us why it's really important to feel those negative emotions while we're going through the adversity. And I'm kind of thinking about my work and even myself. And sometimes I want to avoid feeling those negative emotions.

But tell us why it's important to feel those while we're going through the adversity. Yeah. And for me, that's actually a really one of the big myths. Going back to resilience is one of the big myths around resilience that people who are resilient either don't have any emotions or they suppress their emotions. They kind of pretend as if they're not there and they kind of hide them away. that's really really far from the truth um emotions whether they're positive or negative and we're talking here about negative emotions they're really important because they give us an indication in terms of how we're feeling um and without without those negative emotions particularly if those negative emotions are suppressed, at some stage during your journey as an athlete, as a manager,

those negative emotions will come to the fore if they are not accepted and they are not managed. So I think the danger of actually suppressing those emotions or the danger of pretending they're not there is that they will come to the fore at some stage when you think everything is OK. But actually, because you've not been able to process those negative emotions, it's kind of come about in potentially some quite drastic behaviors um so um from a from a from a behavior perspective it's really really important to process those because it it gives you an indication of how you're feeling it also kind of gives you a chance to reflect on why you're feeling those emotions and i think that's really the key but it's's not to focus on the emotions itself. It's not to focus on the anger, the hurt, the disappointment, to focus on the reasons behind those emotions. Why do you think you're feeling those negative emotions? And it can give a real good indication as to what you can do to actually process them better. Excellent, Mustafa. You know, at the beginning

of the interview, you gave us six personal qualities of resilient high achievers, one being positive and proactive personality, and then the other experience and learning. Are there others of those lists that you think would be beneficial to kind of dive into a little bit in more detail yeah so um i think the the other kind of um few of the other ones are flexibility and adaptability um i kind of talk about resilience as being an elastic band where you can be stretched about in so many different places whether that's time commitments or family commitments, and you've got all of these things going on. But being able to always kind of have that stretchability really as a person, being able to adapt to changes, being able to be flexible to the different requirements of job roles or the requirements of different kind of sports.

So we found that to be really important with our work with high achievers, is having that flexibility and adaptability um to change in particular um the other kind of personal quality um probably worth discussing is also this idea of of us having a sense of control um kind of um and potentially people who would have heard the phrase of being able to control the controllables these high achievers in particular when it came to resilience recognized the the need to realize when things were in their control and things that they could do but also recognize when things weren't in their control and to to an extent let go of those things um and

as part of that process of sense of control one of the one of the things that the high achievers mentioned and realized was they actively they had that recognition that they actively had they actively sought out challenging situations they by their own choice they put themselves in some quite challenging situations and i think that's that's really important when it comes to sense of control because whether you're whether you're an elite athlete whether you're a manager in a kind of a high performing business um you are in to invert commas, you're not forced to be in that situation. You actually have an active choice to put yourself in that situation. And recognising that the decisions we make are choices rather than sacrifices, I think that's really,

really important when it comes to having a sense of control and when it comes to developing resilience. Because I think the more we have really important when it comes to having a sense of control and when it comes to developing resilience. Because I think that the more we have this idea that we're in control of our of our choices, we're in control of our decisions, we're in control of the way we think that that seems to be really important when it came to resilience. But the last the last kind of quality I'll mention is this idea of perceived social support. And the reason I think that this is really important, it kind of goes back to one of the things I said to start off with, is it's a myth to think that you can develop resilience purely by yourself. Having the social support around you is really, really important.

But one thing we identified, both with our work with high achievers, but also our work with Olympic champions is it's the perception of social support that's important, not the actual social support itself. So if I kind of give an example, you might be, let's say, as an athlete, you might not necessarily need lots of social support all the time. But if, for example, you know that your coach, your teammates are going to be there for you when things go wrong or they're going to be there for you in times of need. It's that perception that someone is going to be there for you rather than actually getting the support itself, that's important. So I guess for managers or for coaches, is making sure that employees and athletes know that they've got the support available. That's really the key bit. It's not actually providing the social support itself, but making sure that athletes and employees know that support is

available to them if needed. But yeah, sorry, I've gone on, talked about quite a lot about some of those qualities, but hopefully that's kind of been useful in terms of some kind of some take-home messages and some practical tips. You know, you've already described several practical tips that I really, really appreciate. You know, I'm thinking about how research should inform practice. And that's what we're talking about here today. How can this research on resilience inform our practice? What other ways can you tell us that we can actually use to enhance our resilience? Yeah, so we're actually in the process of developing, in the process, it should be actually kind of coming out by the end of this hour or so um we've kind of categorized um developing resilience into three kind of categories or

three kind of blocks um the first bit is around these personal qualities so if you want to develop resilience we we recognize that um developing these personal qualities are really important, whether that's a positive proactive personality, whether that's experience and learning, whether that's a sense of control. Those personal qualities are really, really important. We've also identified as part of that that from a coach's or a manager's point of view, developing or having a what we've termed a facilitative environment. So we've obviously recognized that resilience is the interaction between the person, so the personal qualities, but also the environment that an individual is placed in. And how we've conceptualized an environment is having a facilitative environment where there's a

appropriate balance between challenge and support uh because i think if you're in a if you're in a performance environment whether that's sport or business if you've got if you're in an environment where there's lots of challenge but there's no support i think then you're in you're at a risk of being burnt out and your risk of actually dropping out or in the case of sport actually quitting your sport um if you're in an environment where there's lots of support but there's not actually in much challenge you're probably in an environment where it's probably too comfort you know you're in your comfort zone and you've not really got that opportunity to develop and to grow um so actually getting that appropriate balance between high levels of challenge and high

levels of support is is really really important when it comes to resilience and this is particularly the case for for coaches and managers um providing that challenge and providing that support is is really important so personal qualities facilitative environment as two kind support is really important. So personal qualities, facilitative environment, that's two kind of really, really important categories. And then the last category in terms of developing resilience is this idea of a challenge mindset. Having a thinking pattern where you're looking at pressure and adversity as an opportunity to develop and to grow.

And I guess one practical strategy that I recommend in terms of the challenge mindset, and I can't say this is my own, this is something that the US Army have done a lot of work on around developing challenge mindsets in soldiers and their families is something called learning your ABCs. So the the the the army, the foundation of their challenge mindset is around their ABCs. Not unfortunately, not the alphabet. But but ABC is basically A stands for adversity, B stands for beliefs and C stands for consequences. And recognizing that it's not the adversity itself that is causing sadness or disappointment, whatever these consequences might be um but um it's the beliefs about the adversity that's important so it's teaching athletes it's teaching employees um to go through abcs in turn rather than going rather than thinking that adversity leads to

consequences it's thinking that adversity leads to consequences it's thinking that adversity leads to beliefs and beliefs leads to consequences um and i'm making it sound a lot easier than it is you know the the u.s army do lots and lots of work with soldiers um and families around this kind of perspective um so it's a it's a it's not it's a it's a lot easier said than done but that's really the foundation and i guess as a as a recommended resource um karen rivich and martin seligman have got a book called the resilience factor um it's a very very good book because it provides some really practical strategies around what the u.S. Army do. And they talk about ABCs. They talk about things like thinking traps, minimizing catastrophic thinking. And that's very much

built around this idea of a challenge mindset, getting people to think more constructively about stress and pressure. I like it. You know, I appreciate that you brought up the ABCs. I think that's Marty Seligman's work, right? And I like that because I use the ABCs quite often in my practice where I have an athlete or leader or entrepreneur actually write out the ABCs. And I think when you do that, you recognize the limiting beliefs that you're holding and how that's holding you back. It helps you increase your self-awareness. How would you describe the benefit of doing that? Yeah, I agree. I think actually getting people to write down the ABCs and it kind of leads to the point of reflection. It could be

another, as well as looking at the benefits of adversity and looking at the benefits and the advantages of going through setbacks, a kind of a higher level of reflection could actually be doing by doing the abc's getting getting athletes and and and um and people could have within business to actually think about what's the event itself and distinct i think the real key bit is to distinguish between the event and the thoughts and the associated consequences um so it might be if we use a concrete example um it could be the case that an athlete um well let's say a team sport such as uh football um you might know before the game that you've got a particular referee or official who is officiating that game and you automatically think because we've got this official or referee we're going to lose the game and actually kind of distinguishing the actual

event itself the belief your beliefs behind that event and and the consequences off that um i think as part of a reflection exercise it takes time i think that's really really important to recognize it's not not something that's going to happen overnight um just as you would do you know uh physical training psychological training is going to take time and it's going to require a lot of lot of effort um but certainly abs can be incorporated into reflection exercises really well, I think. Okay, so I have a few questions about you. You know, you've done such a great job of developing this research line and conducting this quality research. But let's talk about you for a few minutes. So tell us your why. Why do you study yeah i guess i i guess why why i got into it probably

it's probably actually the the most powerful motivator to start off with um i actually was an elite um or was a aspiring elite athlete myself when i was the age of about 15 16 years old um and i i recognized um i i wasn't actually able to to make it as an elite athlete and i think the reason behind that was from a psychological perspective tactically and technically i had all the skills and in fact i probably had better skills than than everyone else but from a psychological perspective i just found it very difficult to take on board feedback. And it made me think on a personal level, why was it that some athletes were able to actually withstand that pressure, take on constructive feedback and actually perform and go on to perform at the highest level? whereas others who had probably similar talent similar kind of physical and technical ability you know actually succumb to that pressure and i i would i would argue that i probably as a as a as a athlete an aspiring elite athlete succumb to that pressure so i guess i got it my

my motivator was from a personal perspective i i wasn't able to make it as an elite athlete and from a psychological perspective i was really kind of interested as to so why was it that some athletes can make it to the highest level um and and others can't and and I recognize that that probably the main reason behind that was the psychology behind that um I guess from a from a from a um personal another personal perspective i'm very much interested in the psychology of excellence um there's a kind of quote uh from warren benet who's kind of a um kind of a um a leader um kind of a very a scholar in in scholar in leadership thinking and he talks about the excellence um what we can learn from high achievers is much more than we can learn from i guess you know mediocrity i think

that that's one of his take-home messages um and for me that really kind of strong accord because i've always been interested in those who achieve at the highest level and kind of learning a little bit more about their journey. So, yeah, I guess from a personal perspective, that's why I kind of got interested in the study of resilience. From a research perspective, what's really interesting from a research perspective is that until kind of 2008, there hadn't actually been a lot of research on resilience in sport. That was just quite an interesting observation that I as i was reading around the area um it's kind of a hot topic in the press is a hot topic in the media but from a research perspective certainly from sport

since 2008 there hadn't been a huge amount of research that kind of got me going from a from a i guess a research perspective was to really start to address some of these gaps yeah you know I think you and I have a lot of similarities and um you know what what still motivates me today is my own experience and I wasn't able to achieve what I think that I could have um athletically based on my mind. You know, Mustafa, we've been talking about how adversity can be helpful. And one question I have is about you and your resilience. Can you tell us about a time that you experienced adversity and a time that you stayed resilient? Yeah, so I can think about a non-sporting

example um i mentioned at the start in terms of my background i my kind of first um my first point of education was to do sport and exercise science at loughborough university um but it would have been a very very completely it would have been a very different story unless unless this one event happened. So basically, when I was at school coming towards towards the end of school of my close classmates were doing um kind of what you would call in inverted commas traditional subjects um law economics medicine um so i you know wrongly felt that i needed to be doing something like that so i applied to law school um but i could have six seven months into my application I found I applied to I think six or seven different law schools and I didn't get into any of

them so I had a very hard decision to make at the end of my time at kind of high school where I wasn't going to university because I actually hadn't got into any any kind of law schools and at that point it was kind of goes back to one of your other points in juror at that time adversity felt horrible um you know it just it was I thought that was it I wasn't going to university and I I you know I it was rock bottom if I'm being honest it was rock bottom at that time. But inadvertently, and I know with retrospect and with hindsight, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it was so much a blessing in disguise. Law was not something I wanted to do. going to university i worked at price waterhouse coopers i was there for six months as a consultant i also traveled uh traveled south america for three months uh so kind of worked and traveled and during that year out i read about sports science in the magazine i read about the i read

about kind of um a tennis player who used sports psychology and And I thought, well, I love science, I love psychology, and I love sport. I should really be doing sports science at university. And strangely enough, if I hadn't gone, if I hadn't got into law school, I probably now would have been end up doing law, a profession that I didn't really want to get into. If I hadn't got into law school, I wouldn't have gone on to do sports science, do sports psychology in an area that I'm very, very passionate about now. So yeah, at the time, certainly an adversity,

which was, you know, I couldn't really see further beyond that, but kind of 10, 15 years down the line really was a blessing in disguise. I like your perspective a lot, you know, that it's a blessing and you wouldn't be doing the great work you're doing right now if it wasn't because of that experience. Okay, let's final question for you. Can you tell us what your final advice would be for those high performers who are listening? So those people who are really working to reach their greater potential. I think kind of, yeah, I think the real key, the first key kind of take-home message is resilience can be developed um i think sometimes when it's portrayed in the media it's sometimes considered to be this

extraordinary quality or special quality that some people have and other people don't have and i've talked today a lot about high achievers and olympic champions and viewers might be thinking well is it only these high achievers and Olympic champions who can demonstrate resilience? And I think that's, again, not true. We've done the research on these people because we know that they've achieved at the highest level. But resilience is a capacity that can be developed by anyone. And it kind of goes back to this idea of kind of fixed and growth mindset um resilience is a capacity that you can increase you can enhance um don't don't think it's something that you've either got or not you don't have the other the other key to take home about resilience

is that it is it is context specific um you might not be resilient in one context um but you might be resilient in a very other context if i use an example from me i would consider myself to be quite resilient in a work context but when i do diy work i'm far from resilient i'll give up at the first instance i will you know won't try new things whereas in a work environment i would consider myself to be very resilient so i think um don't don't see resilience as you're either resilient or you're not i think resilience is a capacity that you can develop and you are gonna be you're gonna develop that resilience with experience with learning and you're going to be more or less resilient in different types of situations and i guess i guess the last take-home message something that we've discussed

is um the benefits of adversity um adversity at the time can be can be difficult and it can be challenging and it is very natural to to feel quite negative negative and to have some quite destructive emotions. But what we've identified with our research is that adversity is not only beneficial, but certainly in the medium to long term, adversity is really essential for sustained success, whether that's in sport, business or any other profession. So view adversity as an opportunity to develop and to grow rather than a threat to performance or to well-being. I want to thank you so much for your time and your energy. You know, Mustafa, you're doing such good quality work in the field. And I just want to give you

some praise and accolades for that. Just, you know, keep up the incredible work. It's really helping us learn a lot about resilience and applying it to practice. I learned so much from you in the last hour and I know everyone else who's listening did as well. There's a few things that I wanted to point out just that were important to me within our discussion. And your definition of resilience

is personal qualities to withstand pressure. And I like what you said about providing us the six personal qualities that we all can develop. I'm going to make a list of those on my show notes page. So you can head over to Dr. Sindhra, C-I-N-D-R-A. And you can find that list of six over there on the show notes page. I also liked what you said about how resilient people change before change is necessary. And that's an important quality. And that resilient people also see adversity as beneficial. You provided us lots of practical tips like the ABCs and just the importance of developing a mindset and thinking patterns so we can

see the adversity as something that is necessary for us to grow and learn. So I just want to thank you so much for joining us today, so much for spending an hour of your quality time helping us learn more about your research. And I know people are going to be interested in connecting with you. And so just tell us a little bit about how we should connect with you maybe on social media or you know if we have questions how might we do that sure so I've got kind of various kind of different ways uh people can reach out and please do reach out I'd love to hear from you and your thoughts about this uh about this uh podcast um I can be reached on Twitter. The name is at Mus Sarkar.

So Mus is M-U-S and then Sarkar is S-A-R-K-A-R. So Mus Sarkar as my Twitter feed. I tweet a lot of things around psychology, sports psychology, business psychology. I also have a LinkedIn profile. So please do reach out to me that way as well. In terms of finding out a little bit more about my research, I have a profile on ResearchGate where all my research is available on my ResearchGate profile and as well on my staff profile. So'm based at nottingham trent university and if you were to

type in mustafa sarkar at nottingham trent university my staff profile also has some kind of more details about my my research interest my research kind of expertise and copies of my my research and also my kind of staff email address as well. So Twitter, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, please do get in touch. I'd love to hear from you. Again, we'd encourage you to head over to Twitter and tell us what stood out to you about this interview, how you might use this interview to be more resilient in sport, business, and in life. You can tag Mustafisa.

Again, this is his Twitter handle. It's at M-U-S for his first name and Sarkar for his last name, S-A-R-K-A-R. So at M-U-S-S-A-R-K-A-R. And mine is at Mentally Underscore Strong. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear what stood out to you about this interview. And cheers to a 2017 that is full of resilience and appreciating the adversity in your life. Thank you so much for joining us here today.

Look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Sindra's free weekly videos, check out DrSindra.com.