Resilience! The practical aspects behind the word everyone uses but few understand

Dr. Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching podcast. My name is Bradford Cooper, and I’ll be your host. Today’s focus is on the word resilience. Now, if you’re thinking, ah, yeah, I’ve heard all about that. I get it. It’s a concept that’s impossible to avoid, you, you hear it at conferences, you read it in articles, the headline news, the sports talk shows everybody’s using it, but I’m not sure many people know what it really means. Now today’s guest definitely knows everything there is to know about what resilience really is. Dr. Chris Bryan does his PhD research on psychological resilience across both work and sports psychology areas. Now in terms of background, this is pretty interesting. He was a top international swimmer for Ireland for more than a decade narrowly missing, missing out on the 2012 Olympics in a photo finish after fighting through contracting shingles in the time that led up to that competition, can you even imagine? He is currently living in Dubai and managing a sports coaching business and his research examines, how individuals can learn to persist, bounce back and develop from a variety of adversities. Dr. Bryan and I met when we were both speaking at a conference in Germany, back in July, his topic of resilience overlaps my own PhD research on functional mental toughness. So I was very intrigued by what he had to share. And after recording the interview, I know you will be too. If you’re considering pursuing your certification as a health and wellness coach through an accredited program, our next fast track is coming up November 9th and 10th in Colorado. You can do everything else from back home, but those are the two core days. And if you’re looking to pursue the national board certification 2020, this schedule definitely sets up your timeline nicely for that. And of course, we also have the distance learning option available that you can do at anytime. All the details at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com, or reach out to us anytime with questions about anything related to coaching Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. Now on with the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching podcast.

Dr. Cooper

Dr. Bryan, It is a pleasure. We first met at a conference when you and I were both speaking and your, your research on resilience performance, it’s really fascinating. Can you share how you landed on this topic as the focus of your research and give us a, I guess a 10,000 foot view of the topic?

Dr. Bryan

Yeah. Hey Brad. Um, yeah, it, it is a rabbit hole, we’re going down to how we turned up on our research topic and, and something that I realized as I’m getting older each year and I’m embracing that I’m an absolute nerd. I love that I love learning and how I really got into it, my background in elite sports and, uh, and elite swimmer, um, but also have done quite a lot, uh, a lot even in the workplace talks and come very much from a performance mindset stuff, even from a younger age. I always had quite a lot of confidence. And, but even from the point that I knew that I was never the most talented athlete, but I was always one who worked harder than everybody else, basically because I wasn’t the tallest guy. I wasn’t the strongest guy, but I would always be the guy who would find a way to get there. So for me, I felt no matter what I did after sport, I felt that I would be quite successful. And for me, I want to kind of figure out what, what, what are these, these attributes that would make me successful, not only in sport, but in the workplace. And I began my PhD focusing on these overlaps of high achiever is not just in sport, but also in the workplace. And as I started diving further and further down into that, I started looking at this idea of consistency and this consistent success that all of these top out you’ve had these failures top entrepreneurs that were a series of failures, where they managed to learn and to grow. And can come back a little bit stronger and not a quick process, but over a long, long periods of time. And, and through the rabbit hole of academic papers and reading more and more into it is what brought me to psychological resilience.

Dr. Bryan

And, and it was, and it’s a very, very topical thing even now. And I would even more so I would say five, six years ago and not just in sport and every week in the papers you just see resilience thrown in here, there. Or in any, uh, organizational, uh, organization magazine article online, LinkedIn resilience is just that buzzword, but no one really knows what that, what it means. It’s just interchanged with mental toughness that I know you’re studying grit and hardiness, and it was this real confusion over what this super important resilience was. And everyone was talking about building and needing resilience and then being in sport day-to-day and even looking at field sports that I used to do a lot of strength and conditioning for rugby teams and also GAA, and which is the Gaelic sport in Ireland. And you just hear these colloquialisms all the time, and you can also almost see a bit of a danger of, and of how resilience is used as a day to day, and almost lack of understanding from academia to practice, but also then within the practice. And, and then I said, okay, this, this is the area I want to focus on that I thought this is what needs, uh, every high achiever and not even high achievers, but anyone to progress and learn and grow needs to be able to have a certain amount of resilience, but also develop resilience. And, and I really wanted to dive into the literature and try to look at these achievers in contexts where I was looking at sport and work primarily, and is resilience even relevant in this. And because resilience came from this positive psychology, boom, with Martin Seligman. And, um, they wanted to move psychology away from this. What is wrong with people and trying to fix what’s wrong rather than rather trying to go to the positive psychology and trying to figure out, well, what, what are people doing, right. And how can we repeat that again? And again, and that’s where you, you see a lot of the, a lot of this positive psychology and coming in, and that’s what Martin Seligman in the, in the nineties. And for me, that’s where I wanted to kind of focus on. I want to focus on well, and even through this inevitable stress, what are people doing right to be able to navigate through it that others might struggle. And, and that’s, that’s really where my research really started to get, get exciting.

Dr. Cooper

Very interesting. Very good. We’re gonna have fun with this today. So resilience, more of a trait or a state?

Dr. Bryan

Again, being an academic man, and I’d love to give opinions, but I’ll go straight into the research and what the research tells us is we’re very confused. And, but what I will say from, from my side of it, I have a public, uh, publication, uh, back in 2017, which is relevant to resilience and it’s stressing the relevance of resilience across work and sport. And what I basically did is looked across the 52 articles across work and sport to see, well, how do we categorize resilience? And about 15% of these articles and studies focus on resilience as a trait where the rest of them then focused on, on this more state-like developable asset that can grow over time. And so when we’re looking at resilience, we sometimes look at it as an outcome because you’re looking at a past event, something happened, right? What was the outcome was that resilience, and then straight away, we start labeling these resilient people. A lot of my research then looked in, okay, let’s not just take a certain snapshot and assume, okay, this person, then what happens to them in 12 years time. And a lot of the research did that. It took a measurement of resilience and two years later, they assume they stayed the same and look at who was successful. I looked over a period of eight weeks monitor resilience over every two weeks. And we found significant changes of how everything has changed. It’s just over time, just in relation to time without including anything else. So I’d say from my research point of view, we followed a, IT workers, more office workers across the 11 different Irish companies and, and decided very, very simple. Those are the, those were the change over time. And, and that’s really the first port of call because if it didn’t, it was a trait then maybe our organization’s core team need to just find out who is resilient and they put their, their bets on them. But we’re not seeing that we’re seeing that actually, it’s quite a, quite a dynamic process that there are a lot of different resources that that affected, interchanged. And from the positive side, then by understanding what affects resilience, then we can actually learn how to develop it. And when, in which situation, in which context.

Dr. Cooper

Interesting. So we’ve got quite a few endurance athletes that listen in on this, as well as wellness coaches and folks just interested in wellness as a whole. So let’s, let’s hit both those groups, let’s start with the sport and then we’ll broaden out to more health and wellness here in a minute. What’s the role of resilience in sport. And, and in that context, how dynamic can it be? Have you seen it be, et cetera?

Dr. Bryan

In, in sport it’s fascinating. And a lot of time, again, me trying to compare a sport and work with sport, you are, you’re often dealing with, with a younger sample of people. You get younger athletes. And from that point of view, you, especially in youth sport, you see a lot of change and development, and almost like looking at sports as this great vehicle and for development and resilience development. Because what we have in sport is we have these very specific times that we can all prepare that we know are going to be stressful. If you’re running a marathon, no matter how fit you are, it’s going to hurt. That’s probably the first part of acceptance, right. And, and as much as I’m a, my, my first degree is sports science and I’m an analytical kind of guy and sport is not black and white. You could have had the best run or the best training, everything going perfect. And the performance just doesn’t add up, or on the positive side, on the other side, I found it myself, you learn that you don’t need to have the perfect buildup. You don’t need to have the, everything doesn’t need to be perfectly right. You can still manage to pull out a great performance on the day. So you’re getting these unexpected expected, but unexpected adversity from the outcome that you can monitor individuals. Well, you see, you see it quite often, you see someone coming in and, um, you know, you need to be confident. You know, you want to go in, you can’t help, but have these goals of, okay, I want us to run under a three hour marathon and then whatever happens, maybe you go and you run, uh, it’s you bunk at the end, you run a four hours. It’s amazing in that 24 hours, the, the level you would put yourself on your own esteem of how, how good you thought you were coming out four hours previous. Following 24 hours, and all of a sudden your confidence is gone. You’re pushing people away. You’re, you know, you’re not very optimistic your self talk has changed. And it’s very, very interesting, but it’s very, very normal, but it’s those situations. And then following it again, maybe two months later, you do another 10 K and you realize, okay, two months, you know, two months ago that performance really wasn’t reflective for one way or another. Okay. It just hurts. I’ve learned that things don’t go well, but these few months were really difficult, but I managed to pull myself out of this hole and it helped me because, you know, my, my, uh, my girlfriend, really the support of my partner was supportive. Great training, training group really helped me. Actually it helped me realize not to focus and obsess over all these small and paces in every session. I just started running because I couldn’t bear looking at the watch anymore.

Dr. Bryan

And you start getting a bit of an appreciation of the process over the end outcome. And I think this is where resilience is really important because you can capture these buildups in sport. In a match sometimes, you know, primary league teams are playing matches every single week. And, and it’s very, very interesting on not only how they deal with an inevitable failure or loss. You’re not going to, there’s always going to be one losing team, but how did they respond to the next match? So when you look at psychological resilience and where the confusion is as well, when do you need to be resilient? And what we see is across the, the research of both sport and work, we look at these three different periods for resilience. You talk about the ability to maintain under pressure. This is the game scenario. This is in the middle of the marathon. This is you’re, you’re running a marathon. And one week in the following week, you’re going to do another 10 K it’s how can you manage to sustain through that stress that you can maintain functioning that okay, things haven’t gone great, but you don’t just collapse in the middle of a major, a major game or a major competition. So that’s this ability to buffer in the face face of adversity and stress, but then you have this, okay, this is an outcome, and it could have been a loss. And that you’re going to have some kind of a, some kind of disruption. If you’re, you’re gonna, you’re gonna feel a bit of a loss. Your, your confidence is going to take a bit of an impact. And how quick can you rebound this rebound ability, going back to previous levels of resilience and resources. So they’re the two it’s being able to sustain, being able to rebound. And then your third point is how can you learn from that experience? How can you reintegrate with new learning processes, this ability to reflect on a very negative experience where a lot of the time, you just want to sweep it under the carpet, say, look, wasn’t great. I’m not going to learn anything because it was a, it was a terrible performance, but it takes, it takes a lot of resources and take a lot of confidence to be able to judge in quite a bit of detail or seek this critical feedback on where it’s this capacity over the ends allows you to buffer stress, bounce back quicker, and being able to learn from it. And that’s really the three points where resilience differs from just recovery, differs from just hardiness to persist, or just being able to this growth that actually you see the same associated resources and processes of resilience across this whole process, because it is a continuous process. It’s not very as fine tuned, as I’m almost saying it at the very specific, just buffering, very specific bounce back, very specific learning because they, today there’s so much going on any athlete, isn’t just dealing with that at a career. Any entrepreneur isn’t just dealing with his business and whether it’s going, whether or not you’re managing people, day-to-day, you’re dealing with competitors, you have a family and probably kids at home, you know, it’s, there’s so many things that are that interplay. And that’s why then it’s so complex.

Dr. Cooper

So you’ve given us a few tips in there about how to develop it, spliced into what you were talking about. If you were given a two minute talk to some running coaches, triathlon coaches, uh, swimming, coaches, et cetera, what would you focus on to help them or help the athletes develop more resilience?

Dr. Bryan

I look at resilience again, as, uh, an ability to really develop through a variety of different stresses, often coaches, and because they have their own skin in the game, want, want to control the results, want to control a process when they’re out there in the field and they’re out there on the track. It’s up to the athlete. So I would say, even go down to the coaching styles and management styles that you want to create these robust, resilient, resilient athletes and employees that are able to think on their feet, that something goes wrong and they can react where it’s almost our natural habit as managers and coaches to quickly step in and say, what went wrong and how to fix it. Won’t do that again. It’s almost having the confidence to step back and know they’re going to do something wrong, let them go through it. And then it’s almost giving you these little keywords and pointers to help back on that journey because it’s that process of learning and development is so important. And you just, every single day, there’s so many opportunities to build resilience and small little skills and small little scenarios. And a lot of research. I know a Yolande Cleaver is doing on trying to look at a developing resilience through a controlled adversities, especially in teen sport and basketball and the heart. And people say, you know, what, how can you, how can you create a game scenario? It’s never going to be the same as the real thing, but it’s even this idea that you’re trying to reenact. The things might go wrong. So again, I’ll go back to maybe my, my own, um, arena, which is swimming, and maybe you’re preparing for a major championship and you see it, maybe a lot of British sports, but it’s amazing facilities in the UK. But when you go and compete, the, the food, isn’t the same. Maybe even the venue you’re competing at the swim down facilities to recover between isn’t the same. And it’s getting very accustomed to this really great training facility, which of course is it’s great to have that say, you know what? We’re going to go down the road to this amazing hundred-year-old pool. And we’re going to swim here every Tuesday and they’re going, Hey, well, the showers are cold and it’s not nice. And the pool is a little bit dirty. And the, when the water is on the ground, it creates a lot of waves in the pool. So you just, you know, you just give them little scenarios to make them a little bit uncomfortable, but realize actually you just try to perform on the day and it just takes it. It allows you to say, okay, control the controllables. But the majority of things are uncontrollable. And I think we talking about developing resilience, we can do it, to answer your question. I don’t know how to in just two minutes, but you can do it in a very structured way that you can create and create scenarios that you know, are going to be predictable and such, even losing a match. What way do we, what are our team values, losing a sale or a major contract? What are our values around things don’t go well with it all time for nothing, or is that just a pretty good routine for the next big thing that comes up? It’s almost having the talk of we, you know, about putting the value on the process and or then it’s actually you notice so that there’s that controllable scenario that then there’s the, day-to-day control of scenario that’s going on all the time. You need to be very, very aware and see what’s happening, where maybe if someone comes in and they, you can see their issues and you as a coach or as a mentor needs to know how much do I push and how much do I not push. And that’s where it becomes quite individual then as well.

Dr. Cooper

So a lot of that would apply to broader life, but let’s, let’s put the sport over to our side here, out in the peripheral vision and, and let’s talk more health and wellness aspects. What is the role of resilience in those areas and where do you see application outside of sport in areas like sleep, life balance, stress management, eating better exercise, you know, just the broader aspects of life?

Dr. Bryan

So if we, if we go down and again on my paper, which I mentioned in, in 2017, um, as well as looking through where is resilience on a trait or state, it’s also goes down to what is associated with resilience. And we found these a whole load of, uh, psychological resources associated with resilience, you know, motivation, coping skills. And, but the number one resource across both work and sport was social support, it was that ability be able to have that, that, that, that support, which might be a coach, might be a founding member, might be a mentor that this social support was the number one greatest resource for resilience, not just in, in being able to stay in under pressure, not just being able to rebound, not just being able to learn, learn all across everything. It’s being able to ask for, ask for help. And I’m sure this self-advocacy comes into this, into that as well. And because it’s difficult to ask for help. And even a lot of people might in the workplace have this imposter syndrome where, you know, we’re, we’re all new jobs and you don’t want to say, you don’t know, you don’t know something because you’re getting paid for this. And, and it’s even down to well in a workplace or in a group, how can you create this psychological safety that people that aren’t afraid to be vulnerable? And I think with the resilience, it’s also in a day to day, wellness is trying to show, show these and show the research and the stories that resilience is not this dirty word of you either were resilient, or you weren’t. And let’s say, if you went a lot of stress and pressure and you just couldn’t handle it, and you just gave up and you’re saying, well, you know what? You just weren’t resilient enough. And I think we mentioned it. We mentioned it before, with a small conversation before we started this podcast. And I mentioned just the issues they’re having in the health and in hospitals and with doctors and surgeons who are under a lot of pressure long, long hours. And they’re saying, well, doctors and surgeons just aren’t resilient enough. And I think that’s very, very dangerous. And we judge ourselves as well. And that’s where I assume again, you can see what mental toughness is, the research as well. Is, is that danger to say, well, you’re not mentally tough enough. And, and what we’re, what we’re seeing from, from again, those resources, it’s social support. It’s not just down to the individual. Yes, we all have different capacities. And we might have resources that predisposes to be a little bit more resilient in certain situations.

Dr. Bryan

But the importance of the environment is really what’s coming out of the research. And, uh, I published a paper in 2015 about mental fortitude training, and they have a lovely graph where they have, um, uh, challenges on one side and you say, okay, to build resilience, you need a certain amount of challenges. On the other side, they have some have a, the environment. And you’re looking for these supportive environments where high challenge and low support is going to give this unrelenting environment. That’s never going to build resilience. It’s this high resilient, they’re high, high challenge, but high support really cultivate resilience. And it’s taking the pressure off the individual and, and back to the environment. And then if you want to say to each individual, that’s the environment we find ourselves in and trying to be aware on that, or what’s happening around us and not being afraid to just put it on those that we’ve got to be able to bear all this on our shoulders, actually see those people who are more resilient are able to ask for help. We’re able to acknowledge the different types of support around them and are able to proactively seek that support more often. And it’s interesting to say that someone who is rooted in is in a better situation to proactively seek more support. And I know, and it’s really by having experience in doing that where, and it could have taken a long time, right? You could, you could be really struggling for a long period of time, and it might finally end with you breaking down and opening up to someone close to you. And if something happens here, happens again, you’re probably going to be a lot more likely to search out that person again. And I think that simple as that is where we talk about learning from past experience and that it’s almost necessary. And we talk about sport and it almost teaches you, especially as kids and children, to be able to rely on other team members that if that, okay, if we fail, we’re almost, you know, you see in kids sport and it’s, it’s very, uh, my nephew is a keen rugby player, but he’s only about 11 years old and, uh, going through a rugby tournament and they lose in the last match. And they’re all bawling crying, but they’re bawling, crying together in a huddle talking about us saying, you know what, we’ve got it next season. It’s, it’s just fascinating. And, but as we get older, we feel that, well, we’re not kids anymore. And, but in sport you just learn this kind of, um, this pure, this pure, you know, hearts on the line, not afraid to put in a lot of effort, but also you have this kind of control support as well, I guess, by great coaches, parents. But when, when go into the, the adult world, we’re expected to not need that. But it’s, it’s ridiculous. It’s just human nature, right.

Dr. Cooper

Well and it’s interesting because what I hear, in my filter is that’s oftentimes the role of the wellness coach that the person is going through a struggle there they’re trying to eat better. They’re trying to exercise more. They’re, they’re trying to do better with their sleep or life balance or relationships or whatever. And they bring that to the coach who helps them kind of filter through what went well, what didn’t go well, and I may be hearing you wrong, but are you saying that processing piece helps to build resilience going forward? Because you’re not just going in, you fail or you succeed and you move on you’re, you’re going through it. You hit the bumps, you struggle with those bumps and then not the, not the answer, but one of the answers is then talk that through with someone and process that, am I hearing that right?

Dr. Bryan

Yeah. A hundred percent. It’s a, it’s a key aspect of resilience, right? It’s that pathway and it, and, and the negative experience, stress and failure. I hate the word failure. I’m sure everyone, they always say it, but it is an emotionally painful experience. Anyone who’s who’s really suffered that poor and that, that sense of loss, it’s a painful experience. And it’s even on a, on a, on a very basic on a brain level. It’s the, the pathways to being able to overcome that, to be able to explore that. And that is, again, it’s like that multiple perspective that the more often you’re able to do it. And the more secure you are, it’s that rebound stability and rebound ability isn’t, isn’t just about getting there. It’s about, well, in the day-to-day world, how quickly do you get there? And if you can knock out this emotional roller coaster and what you see about those people who, who happen to happened to be higher in resilience over time is exactly that a lot of my research as well, it looks at the daily hassles and major life events. And how does our resilience change in relation to the daily hassles and major life events? And what are those? The people higher in resilience resources, they fluctuate a lot less. Do, do they feel failure? Do they feel the highs? Yes, they do. But not to the same, same aspects. They don’t hit the lows as low, but they don’t have the highs as high. And you can talk about this emotional control that they’ve developed. And again, what major life events, but you see when this major life adversity reaches a certain, certain aspect, almost doesn’t matter how well you, you can be able to manage yourself and control emotion. People who have high amount of resilience at certain periods of time. I’m trying to say not resilient people here, but they still feel this. They still suffer it. They still go through this disruption, but then they bounce back a little bit quicker. And even if they don’t, they’ll probably learn more than other people do because it’s very, very dependent on the specific adversity. So it’s not a, it’s not about not going through this curve of disruption and rebounding. This disruption rebounding is a very important piece of what resilience is. Everyone goes through this loss and that, that’s why it’s so important. And I think that’s, uh, it’s, it’s something really, really key to understand from a wellness point of view. That it’s okay not to be okay.

Dr. Cooper

Right, right. And then what you do with that. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. Okay. So again, your, your research and some of the things I’m doing in my PhD, have some fun overlap. One of the things that my focus is on is the within person mental toughness. So I loved what you said about people being told you’re not mentally tough enough, or you’re not as mentally tough as she is or whatever. And, and what, what I’ve tried to focus on is I don’t even care if yours is better than mine, maybe, maybe not, but can mine get better? Can yours get better? And it sounds like you’re seeing some ways to do the same. So not comparing this amount of resilience in me to the amount that you see, but how have you found, and again, you talked about this with the athletes. We talked about this with the role of the coaching and social support environmental aspects, but any other just, just kind of hit and run tips on how somebody can develop their own resilience, not in comparison to somebody else, but just how can I develop my own resilience in, in some other aspects?

Dr. Bryan

Some very, very basic ways is really just trying to look at these self-reflective processes and this awareness. So something I think is quite good is it’s kind of diaries. You know, if we’re talking about, in the sports sense, it’s trying to capture this initial raw feeling. We used to have a rule that we never, we do a short debrief, and we take some notes, but we don’t break it down. We do the breakdown about a week afterwards. So we do write out ideas and it’s almost like a teenage diary of beating yourself up frustration. It’s very, very interesting, but there’s no point in really diving into what went wrong, just there and then you’re really in, in this emotional situation, but then you go back without even looking at those notes and the week data you debrief it, what was good, what was bad while you could have improved what you couldn’t improve. And then it’s very interesting having that one piece of experience where then you look at what you thought initially, and you look at your week, your post week reflection, and then you start realizing that it’s okay to feel like that immediately after maybe that’s just the kind of personality I am sure that I do throw all the toys out of the box. And it’s really, really good to keep, keep a diary of these experiences and, and that’s in sport, but that’s also then going to be just day to day. Maybe you have a horrible fight, you know, with, uh, with your wife with a loved one with a brother, with a sister. And sometimes it’s, it’s hard to be able to process what’s going on in your mind. If you don’t have someone to talk to the first thing to do is almost just put down how you’re feeling, probably keep it away from that loved one. And then following up a week, a week later, and you’re probably made up and you just start looking at your own trends of how you react, and then you start to, you start learning to be able to manage those emotions. And a lot of this kind of emotional control is quite high with the resilience as well as then our own stress appraisals.

Dr. Bryan

So stress appraisals then, well, how do we appraise that stress? That’s it’s, it’s trying to be able to take a step back and say, okay, I didn’t perform well, but how much did that threat threaten my ability to do well in the future? Or is that a challenge to be able to grow into the future? Those people who, a lot of my research focuses on the development developmental aspect of sport into later life workplace. And what we looked at with just that was, uh, your resilience levels over time, but also how they were able to appraise, uh, that work stress. And what we found is that it wasn’t just those, uh, those employees who had a past history of competing at a high level of sport. It wasn’t just about competing in sport with those people who persisted through their, their high schools, through their secondary school exams in sport. So a much, much longer time of probably there was quite stressful, final exam. They still persisted in sport through that seemed to be able to manage stress a lot, lot more where you will, you see a lot of individuals drop out from sport because okay, as you get busier as priorities take charge with exams, you probably aren’t going to compete at a higher level if you’re not in a position to be able to appraise that, okay, at this point in time, I’m not going to compete as high as I need to, but I have other priorities and be able to persist through that. It’s interesting that in later life workplace, they’re also able to go ahead and say, look, I’m stressed at the time. This is work. I’m going to go home in the evening. I’ll figure it out tomorrow. It’s, it’s interesting that it’s, uh, uh, longevity in sport seems to allow people to almost create a perspective on stress on stressful outcomes, more so than just those people who had developed emotional control and does that at a high level of sport. And, and I think what I put the priority on in day to day and for ourselves is that ability to be able to work through things that even though things are very, very difficult, the ability to try to navigate through a good batter or different without judgment is very important. You, you realize that you go on, you have more and more conversations, especially as a wellness coaches, you, you see similar stories crop up again and again, and again, from the seat you’re sitting in, you see how normal it is, but the seat there and they, all, everybody thinks that they’re on their own journey by themselves, right? And so it’s almost coming to that, that realization, but also then trying to be a little less judgmental. And I think those diaries is a very nice way to be able to start looking in trends, at how you react, be able to build and scenarios to help you deal with it. But also that allows you to learn from, okay, this is what I’m thinking straight away, but that’s just because this is the way I am. That’s just take a moment and not react on the immediate thoughts and feelings.

Dr. Cooper

That is so interesting. So just contextualizing this for, especially for our runners out there, folks that may have done it in the past, I’ve got it sitting just to my left here, my little running journal. I had a horrible track session this morning. I was doing 12 by 200, 12 by four hundreds. Didn’t hit the times that I was wanting to. And it was all those emotions that you talked about coming out of that like, Oh man, what’s wrong with me? Body’s not responding, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what you’re saying is, yes, I write that down here. I, I say, you know, bad workout. And then I can look back and see, Oh, you didn’t sleep as well. You, this, you had this hard workout three days ago, whatever. And you’re saying in real life doing a similar thing. So not just for running, but when I have a, a meeting that goes poorly or, uh, my wife and I, you know, butting heads against each other with something or, or w whatever it is, we’re struggling. I’m not, I’m not eating like I’d like to et cetera, you jot that down in a journal. And then instead of seeing patterns like I’d seen running about the sleep pattern, or, you know, this workout session I don’t do as well. And I don’t take as much recovery, whatever the specifics are that starts to show itself in your personal life. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Dr. Bryan

Yeah. You always see trends. And I think you’ve really got to realize that we’re, we’re human beings and as human beings in the moment, we’re, we’re very lazy and self-critical beings, you know, and I always, I always look at it almost as, as exercise, you know, and you and everybody knows that exercise is good for them, but nobody, not everybody does it. And you might get up, you know, you say, okay, tomorrow morning, I’m going to get up and I’m gonna go for a run because I need to do more exercise. But on the moment when the alarm goes off, you know, so if you say, look a bit tired, but I’ll see what I’m like in the morning. You, you have already, you, you know, it’s over, but then what you realize is, okay, the only time I have to do it in the morning before work, and it’s going to be bloody early, my body is going to be screaming no, but I don’t live in the body. The body doesn’t know best. So I know by the end of that run, I won’t regret it. Even if the lashing rain is horrible, I’m running crap. I never regret that. I still got up and went for a run. And it’s almost acknowledging that past experience. So then preparing that, you know, you’re going to fail. So you set three alarms, you have your runners ready. You have, and maybe a shake. The quick or you know your coffee. You’re telling you already know you’re going to have a coffee in the morning. So you’re already preempting, small, little positive to just get you out of bed. You don’t think about it. I’m just getting up. And it’s, it’s creating little a routine around these things because we’re in any given moment when, when we’re tired, when we have a big fight, high emotion, you’re always going to do the wrong thing. You’re always going to do the wrong thing without acknowledging that and realizing how quick you get to that point of emotion. And so you can quickly remove yourself from the scenario or remove any emotional decisions and same in the same in running. Right? And we talk a very basic psychology and talking about concentration. A lot of decisions are done almost quite reactive. They’re, they’re free thought out decisions if you’re running a marathon and you’re trying to think, Oh, will I start running? You know, will I start running any faster, will I stop will I walk. These are the killing thoughts that you know were going to come. So you have to prepare yourself, you’ve got new songs on your iPod to prepare you for those sessions. Because you know, you’re going to start thinking like that. These are very, very basic. And it sounds funny, but this is resilience. It’s learning from previous experience of when things are getting hairy, when you’re experiencing stress and you’re already suffering, but how do you rebound a little bit, a little bit quicker. Okay, in a marathon you never wanted to walk. You’re starting to walk. How quick before you get yourself running again? And it’s almost important that those training runs to learn, how to navigate yourself back from walking to running. And it’s not easy when your body is screaming, No. So, you know, we have so many examples to, to monitor ourselves and then just try to build routines around us.

Dr. Cooper

Excellent. Uh, great stuff, great stuff. Okay. Personal level. We’re going to turn the mirror around here. How has your research influenced your life? What changes have you made on a personal level as a result of your academic findings?

Dr. Bryan

Yeah, that’s always a funny one, you know, and sometimes we wear many hats. So when we talked to Chris, the academic, I’ll say all the right things. And then if I’m, we’re talking to Chris on a Chris on a Saturday morning, relaxing, he might have different opinions. And I think where something I used to always say before is knowledge is power. But I’m trying to realize that actually it’s not, it’s the application of knowledge is power. Everyone knows they need to have a right diet. Everyone knows that they need to need exercise, but it’s trying to have to apply that knowledge for me from, from academia. I suppose, again, it’s allowed me to be a little less self-critical and it’s allowed me to look at maybe my, my career in sports. And even though maybe I might never achieve things that I wanted to do, I’m still able to realize that that journey helped me develop and lots of aspects of my resilience that helps me cope with a lot of things later in life. And that actually, it’s not just about being an elite athlete. You are actually creating, you know, almost elite individuals, these high-performing strategies and these assets, and, you know, these mental processes that allow you to deal with an array of things in life and work, and that really allow you to succeed. But sometimes it’s not until you see, you’re aware of the value of those things, that actually you can put it into practice and you see a lot of high level athletes dealing with this, this career transition and really struggling to see their value outside of being Chris the swimmer. And it’s very, very normal to think that this thing where all I know is high-performance sport, they have no idea how applicable is the ability to be driven and discipline because when we get to the workplace, no matter what degree you have, you’re kind of figuring it out on the spot and you’re trying to fit. You’re trying to adapt to the, any organization you’re in. And, but actually it’s not on athletes don’t just, individuals don’t realize that that needs to be educated. And I think maybe it’s almost being inadvertently self-educated to myself, even though maybe I had this confidence, but I almost needed to explore this rabbit hole.

Dr. Cooper

Interesting. All right. So now you get to create a brief message. It magically appears on everybody’s phone. What is that phrase or word or message sentence that you’d like to communicate to the world? What is the Dr. Bryan message you’d like to get out there in an, in a nutshell, not a paragraph, not a book, but boom. What, what is that thing?

Dr. Bryan

So there was one thing I’ve been saying, and I, I don’t, I hate to put it specifically on sport, but I’ll say it first elite sports is so much more than creating elite athletes. And again, I don’t want to just categorize that to sports. Well, I think, again, this, this is the ability to be able to apply yourself at a high level that something may, maybe it’s dance, maybe it’s music, and, you know, maybe these days maybe it’s gaming computer games, but to be the ability to be able to try to achieve something in a high level, sport creates a lot, lot more than being elite in that sport. So I’ll say it again. And elite sport is so much more than creating elite athletes. And I think that’s really, really important because again, you’re trying to put an appreciation on the process and the journey over the, just the outcomes. And that’s what we found in the research, looking at resilience that it’s about being able to persist over long periods, time, not just competing at a high level. And that’s what we’re thinking more and more. And again, I think that takes a lot of pressure as well off a lot of athletes. And a lot of maybe parents who are saying, well, you’re not going to qualify for the Olympics. You’re not going to play in the NFL. So what’s the point? Well, actually there’s a huge point. And that’s actually where a lot of people who were just amazing out of college at taking tests and they can take some amazing tests, but what, what real world experience do they have? And I think, uh, being able to, to really put your yourself on the line, to invest a lot of time and effort into a passion, and then you’d be able to get up and perform that in front of people. I think it’s something that really developed something that we, we relish later in life and we can really thrive from.

Dr. Cooper

Excellent. One more question, Dr. Bryan, and this is so timely, like you said, resilience is the word right now. And so I appreciate you taking the time to jump on. Any final tips, suggestions for either individuals who are listening, who are trying to improve their own lives, or again are coaches or future coaches who want to help the people around them. Any, anything that I haven’t teed up with the right question that you’d like to get out there to everybody?

Dr. Bryan

We develop resilience through threats, but I would almost say we develop it through challenges and it’s a high amount of challenges. So I say, we want to be challenged. We want to challenge ourselves, but what we’re learning, it also takes a lot of support. So for coaches, we need to try to challenge our athletes, but also we need to couple it with the right support for ourselves. I think we need to be brave to challenge ourselves, before we challenge ourselves, we got to realize that we need to know that we have some support there because we’re always going to be afraid that we might fail, but that’s okay. But as long as you have support there, you’ll be able to deal with the high amount of challenge. So we’re looking at high challenge, high support to develop your resilience.

Dr. Cooper

So good. Wow. What a closer, wow you crushed that one.

Dr. Bryan

I don’t know. There you go. Under pressure, right?

Dr. Cooper

Exactly. You’re ready for that challenge, but Dr. Bryan, thanks for joining us. How can people find you? Do you have a Twitter handle? Do you have an email you prefer? What if people have follow up questions? How do they keep track of your research and some of the things that you’re doing over time?

Dr. Bryan

Yeah. You can contact me, no problem on a personal email at the moment, which is Chris.Bryan@hotmail.com and also you can always catch me on Twitter and which I use, uh, from an academic point of view, especially which is a ChrisAgsnamh, which translates to Chris, Chris swimming in Irish.

Dr. Cooper

Perfect. Perfect. Well, sir, thank you very much. And keep up the good work. We’ll stay in contact on this stuff.

Dr. Bryan

Sounds good. Thanks very much, Brad, and all the best.

Dr. Cooper

Absolutely. So interesting isn’t it? Resilience. We’re hearing it all the time. It’s utilized all over the place, but unfortunately, typically it’s utilized incorrectly. Now you can avoid doing that, you know what it’s about. A big thank you to Dr. Chris Bryan for sharing both his time and his expertise with us. Big time shout out to those of you who attended the first ever Rocky mountain coaching retreat and symposium up in Estes park three weeks ago, such a fantastic group of coaches. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for making it such a special event. If you missed this year’s event, we have posted the dates for next year, next September, along with what we’re calling a super early registration discount at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com, just click the, the retreat tab. And we’re always happy to answer questions about anything coaching related. Doesn’t have to be the retreat. Doesn’t even have to be certification. Anything you’re thinking about in terms of your career. Anything else you’d like to talk through Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for spreading the word about the podcast. And remember it’s not about perfection. It’s about better than yesterday. Taking positive steps, often very small, positive steps to move toward better, both in our own lives and helping those around us do the same. Make it a great rest of your day and I’ll speak with you soon on the next episode of the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching Podcast.