Resilience can help you Succeed – Just like Andy Murray

Why is it that some of us bounce back even stronger after a crisis or misfortune, while others fall apart and give up? How you deal with the setbacks in life speaks volumes about your character and whether or not you’re resilient – which basically means how you’re able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.

Game

Take Andy Murray as an example. He didn’t give up after last year’s Wimbledon final, in fact he had only actually won two of the 10 Grand Slam finals he’d appeared in beforehand. If you’re not a fan of tennis or random stats, there are plenty of other inspirational career comeback stories that prove the resilience theory.

So the first trick of resilience is staying positive, and doing your best not to let past disappointments or bumps in the road affect you. Just because something didn’t go well, that doesn’t mean the same thing will happen next time. It’s also useful to note any mistakes you feel you may have made to help identify areas that you can build on in the future. Keep going, you’ve got to be in it to win it.

Set

Objectivity is another trait of resilient people. In Andy Murray’s case, after ending his relationship with his coach Amélie Mauresmo earlier in 2016, and losing in the final of the Australian Open, he reached out to former coach Ivan Lendl to help him address the weaknesses in his game and reach the top at Wimbledon. ‘He says exactly what he thinks. I don’t always like hearing it, but I have to hear it’, he said after his victory.

How you respond to feedback can have a big impact on your success, just as it has Andy’s. Research shows people who cope better with handling negative feedback tend to be more successful and resilient than those who aren’t. A study conducted by US leadership training firm, Leadership IQ, found that 46% of newly hired employees will fail within 18 months. Of those that fail, 26% do so because they can’t accept feedback.

And Match

If you put your past failures behind you – and Andy Murray has had his fair share – then learn from them, adapting the way you approach situations. Then combine that with lots of objectivity, a good amount of preparation and a great game plan, you may find that success is closer than you think. Failures actually breed success and shouldn’t be something we hide from. Andy Murray hasn’t, he’s looked at learnings from every failure and carried on. During a match he’s not thinking about what’s gone wrong in the past but what he wants to happen in the future.

Andy’s resilience has paid off. He’s taken Olympic gold, claimed his second Wimbledon title and became tennis' world number one, as well as winning the BBC Sports Personality of the Year for the third time, in a remarkable 2016.

Some Tips to Help Build Your Resilience

The American Psychological Association (APA) made some interesting findings when they asked a group of top psychologists to take a look at the evidence of the features associated with people who have, or show, great resilience.

Using the results, they have created a list of the top ten things you can do to build your resilience – the ability to deal with the peaks and troughs of life. These are the things that resilient people do and that you can try to adopt in order to help you boost your own resilience. Find them listed here in our blogs 5 Tips for Building Resilience and 5 More Tips for Building Resilience. You can, of course, personalise these suggestions so that they work for you.

Building resilience