The Resilience Lamp

How did I build resilience?

I think my resilience comes from sports.
Especially from ages 9 to 18, when I played sports.
But it wasn’t just the sport itself.
It was how I approached the post-race moments.
Let me tell you a story.
And share the 6 questions I asked myself after a bad race
I’ll break it down into 3 steps.

1.    So, from 9 to 18, I did sports
At a pretty high level.
And of course, you have good races and bad ones.
At first, after a bad race, I used to feel bad — really bad.

You know, in sports, you need two main ingredients:
→    Talent
→    Discipline

I’ve never been extremely talented — probably an 8 out of 10.
But I’ve always had a strong 9.5 in terms of discipline.
So, when you sacrifice everything and have bad races, you feel bad.
Of course.
But in the last 3 years, from 15 to 18, something changed.
After each race, I started to ask myself six questions.
What questions?

2.    Here are the 6 questions (3+3):
1.   What went wrong?
2.   What can I learn from that?
3.   Based on what I’ve learned, what simple action can I take to improve?
4.   What went well?
5.   What can I learn from that?
6.   Based on what I’ve learned, what simple action can I take to improve even more?
Let’s see a basic example.

3.    Imagine it’s a couple of hours after a race.

Here are six potential answers:
1.   I forgot to drink enough and eat healthily in the past few days
2.   Lesson: Drinking plenty of fluids and eating healthy really matters
3.   I wanna create a list of what I need to drink and eat in the 3 days before the race
4.   I prepared very well mentally for the race
5.   Lesson: Visualization really helps to face the race with more confidence
6.   I wanna start visualizing the race 3-4 days before the event, not just the day before

I think those post-races, especially from ages 15 to 18, helped me:
→    Build resilience
→    Learn how to deal with ups and downs
→    Create a framework to face tough situations