What is mental resillience and is it trainable?
Mental resilience is a psychological skill that enables people to perform consistently. It allows you to stay focused, determined, and confident under pressure, and to keep delivering what is required of you. It’s a concept widely used in sport psychology and is essential for elite athletes who need to persevere throughout their careers. In this blog, I’ll explain why.
3 tips to boost your mental resillience as a cyclist
In psychology, there’s always an ongoing debate about mental traits: to what extent are they innate, and to what extent are they learned? Mental resilience is no exception. It is partly something you’re born with and partly something you develop. What we do know is that it’s a trainable skill (if it weren’t, I wouldn’t have a job as a sport psychologist or mindset coach).
Training your mental resilience is absolutely possible when you invest time, attention, and energy into it. You can strengthen it in the same way you would strengthen a muscle — it becomes your mental muscle power. The real question then becomes: how do you actually train it? Here are three practical tips to help you do exactly that!
Tip 1: Fixed mindset versus growth mindset
The foundation of mental resilience is having the right mindset. That may sound like a vague, overused term, but you can think of it as the internal story you tell yourself when dealing with adversity. What do you say to yourself in the moments when things don’t go the way you want or expect?
The biggest difference becomes clear when you compare a fixed mindset with a growth mindset.
Fixed mindset
With a fixed mindset, you tell yourself that setbacks equal failure. You position yourself as a victim of the situation. This blocks your sense of responsibility and your ability to grow. As a result, you stay at the same level much longer and miss valuable opportunities to improve as an athlete. Instead of responding constructively, your emotions take over and you stop thinking rationally.
Growth mindset
A growth mindset is open to development and learning. Someone with a growth mindset is highly motivated to improve and wants to seize every opportunity to get better. They take full responsibility for their actions.
After failure, they look at their mistakes constructively: What exactly went wrong? Could I have done something better? What can I learn from this?
Within the growth mindset, there are four different dimensions that operate independently from one another. This means you can have a growth mindset in one area, while still having a fixed mindset in another. Here are some examples:
1. Malleability
Growth mindset
Qualities can be developed.
“I can become the best athlete in the world if I give everything I have.”
Fixed mindset
Qualities are fixed and cannot change.
“My abilities have limits.”
2. Perseverance
Growth mindset
Persistence is necessary to make progress. Extra effort is enjoyable.
“I actually enjoy analysing and improving my sport.”
Fixed mindset
Pushing through is pointless. The outcome is already predetermined.
“I’m not good enough to improve my abilities — I’ll never become a great athlete.”
3. Feedback
Growth mindset
Feedback is valuable, and I can learn from it.
“If I ask more experienced athletes for advice, I can improve faster.”
Fixed mindset
Feedback feels like a personal attack or criticism.
“They probably think I’m a bad athlete if I don’t even understand these basics.”
4. Sense of Success
Growth mindset
Focus on your own progress and performance.
“I’m already making far fewer mistakes than I did three months ago.”
Fixed mindset
Focus on the performance of others.
“Another rider who I should be able to beat that is performing well at an international race — I’ll never be able to do that.”
My tip: watch the video below from Carol Dweck, the founder of this theory.
Tip 2: Use Self-Reflection to Train Your Mental Resilience
The ability to evaluate yourself honestly is a skill that takes time, can be painful, and requires vulnerability. But once you develop this awareness and break through that initial barrier, it becomes a valuable gift you carry with you for the rest of your life — one you can keep strengthening over time.
Sport is a small version of the universe. High peaks and deep valleys can follow each other quickly, and it takes a lot of time and effort to give yourself the best chance of success. Accurately assessing your own role in that success requires you to set your ego aside and look in the mirror. When athletes achieve something big, I often hear them say, “Finally, I’ve grabbed that big result.”
It almost suggests they were more entitled to success than others. But what you don’t see is that everyone is fighting their own battles on the path to achievement. Every athlete faces their own struggles, and comparing your difficulties with someone else’s is pointless.
First, you need the ability — or the willingness to develop the ability — to filter out this bias. In the short term, sport can feel like an unfair game, but in the long term, you’ll be rewarded for consistent hard work.
What most people don’t realize is how long that “long term” really is.
So keep looking in the mirror and ask yourself: Am I truly doing everything I can to get the best out of myself, or am I fooling myself? Once you learn to cut through the excuses and the stories you tell yourself, you’ll know exactly what you need to unlock your full potential — both as an athlete and in your career.
Tip 3: Improving self confidence
Improving your self-confidence is an essential part of becoming mentally more resilient. Feeling capable increases your chances of success. Achieving goals is a key component in boosting — or maintaining — your confidence. Goal-setting itself is a mental skill.
When you reach your goals, you experience a sense of competence and feel capable of taking on the next, more ambitious challenge. In the short term, it’s crucial to focus on the task you want to perform. Especially in sport, outcome goals are useless in the short term and often work against you.
“I don’t want to lose this month” is a terrible goal, because so much of it is beyond your control. A much better short-term goal would be: “This month I want to improve my speed.”
You have direct influence over the effort you put in and the focus you bring to your training sessions.
These process goals and improvement goals form the foundation of training mental resilience. They shift your focus, change how you perceive setbacks, and challenge you in ways that allow you to measure your progress and continue to grow.
Conclusion: Improving mental resillience
Your mental resilience is partly innate and partly learned. Fortunately, you have a great deal of influence over it by actively working on it in different ways.
You can strengthen your growth mindset, improve your ability to reflect, and boost your self-confidence — for example, by setting short-term process goals or improvement goals. Start training your mental resilience, and you’ll soon notice that you become a stronger athlete who is fully prepared to handle whatever setbacks come your way.
Want to boost your mental resillience?
My name is Lex, and as a sports psychologist I specialize in the mental coaching of cyclists.
Do you want to become mentally stronger? Schedule a free Mindset Scan through this link and I’ll give you your first practical tool to help you handle setbacks more effectively!
