When was the last time everything went to plan? Adversity is a significant feature of life, so it’s time to learn how to overcome it. As usual, these principles will be viewed through an athlete’s lens but can be applied to any aspect of life.

Accept your feelings

When faced with adversity, it is normal to feel frustrated, sad, angry, or any number of other emotions. This is normal. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Emotions are part of what makes us human. It’s what we do from this point forward that matters.

Put an expiration date on your emotions

Feeling any number of emotions about a difficulty that has presented itself is natural, however, that doesn’t mean that these feelings aren’t capable of completely ruining our ability to move toward our goals. That’s why it is important to prescribe a period of time to wallow in your emotions that is dependent on both the seriousness of the adversity you face and how immediate the need to bounce back is. For example, after a poor performance in an early-season meet, you are struggling with feelings of embarrassment and frustration. Your family was in attendance and you have another meet coming up next week. This is fairly low-level athletic adversity and your timeline for recovery is not extremely limited, but you need to support your team and be a reasonable human being to your family. Give yourself 5-10 minutes to be angry AF. Then go spend time with your family and cheer on your teammates. Let’s try another one. It’s the conference championship and you fouled your first two throws. Feelings of terror and embarrassment are welling up inside you at the thought of fouling out and letting your team down. This is fairly significant athletic adversity and there is very little time to dwell on your emotions. Recognize the feelings that you have and count to 10 in your head knowing that when you get to 10 you will take a deep breath and move on. Another classic athletic adversity is an injury. Mild pain that disrupts training even for a day can be very frustrating to a focused athlete. Give yourself 5 minutes and head to the training room. If you just blew out your ACL and will be out for the next 6 months, it’s safe to say that a few days of self-pity is warranted. Remember, you are not likely to be able to put your emotions completely aside after your self-pity time is over. They will still be with you- your job is to make them take a back seat to the actions that you are going to learn about below.

Learn from your mistakes

When your scheduled self-pity time runs out and you have a moment, take some time to reflect on your recent adversity. Talk to your coach, mentor, training partner, or someone you trust about what you could have done differently to give you perspective on how to avoid similar adversity in the future or to minimize its impact on your performance. After that poor early-season meet, it’s time to chat with your coach about what went wrong. Lack of preparation, loss of focus, trying too hard, getting nervous or scared? After fouling your first two throws at the conference championship, consult your coach briefly. Hopefully, they tell you that the two throws before have no bearing on what your third throw will be like. If they are a real baller, they will tell you a very brief story about Adam Nelson’s 2004 Olympic Gold Medal series in the shot: Foul, Foul, Gold Medal! You likely need to relax and focus on doing what you’ve done all season to get you here. (INSERT LINK TO BLOG ABOUT PERFORMING UNDER PRESSURE) But you may need to slow down technically and get in a “safety” throw. In this scenario, learning from your mistakes and making a plan happen almost immediately because of the time crunch. Regardless of the outcome of your third throw, it will be important to talk to your coach after the meet as well. This reflection will hopefully help you learn what went wrong and set the stage for the next step.

Make a plan/revise your plan

Now that you’ve moved past your self-pity and learned from your mistakes, it is time to look forward. We can’t change the past, but we can use our newfound experience to guide us to greater success in the future. That’s right, whatever adversity you faced likely knocked you down a few levels, but if you take the time to learn from your mistakes and incorporate your new experience into your plan, you have the potential to be better than ever. You now have the knowledge to design a plan that will make up for lost time and handle similar future adversity with greater ease. Mild pain that causes you to lose a day of training? Consult your trainer and work with them to both understand what led to that pain and make a plan to bomb-proof that part of your body so it doesn’t happen again. Torn ACL? There is already a tried and true plan to get you back into action in 6 months or so. Focus on seeing the trainers, scheduling doctor’s appointments, and physical therapy. Your plan will provide you with the needed steps to get back on the improvement train, which is a great place to be.