The Resilience Factor
By Cary Mullen

Picture yourself in the start gate of the XXIV Olympic games in Lillehammer Norway. You step into the gate and hear the crowd cheer. This is the Olympic Downhill Event. This is your event – it is your chance to win an Olympic medal. You have been training almost 20 years for this day. It is your opportunity to shine in front of the world. There are 50,000 fans on site, and another 50 million fans watching worldwide, all ready to celebrate the greatest day of your life with you. You know that you can win a medal today. You just came off of a podium finish in the World Cup Downhill in Saalbach Austria 3 weeks earlier. You have beat these same skiers just weeks before, and today you are a gold medal favorite in this event because you have proven your prowess. You breathe deep to oxygenate your body and to relax. Yes, this is it. "10 seconds" announces the starter. You take your position in the gate. The starter shouts, "Racer ready, Go!" You thrust out of the gate and push and skate to create as much momentum as possible. Then it is a quick turn to the right and then to the left. As you now cut in on the big right hand turn, the tails of your skis slide a bit unexpectedly, but you recover and are back in line. Another turn to the left and then off the second flight, you sail 35 yards. As you land, you cut in tight just as you had planned, tighter than any of your competitors, and you make the best turn of your life. You can feel the acceleration and speed carry from the turn as you come onto the flatter terrain. In your tuck, you flatten your skis for optimal speed and reduced friction and then off the big jump you sail 75 yards. As you start the critical left hand turn, you lose your focus for a split second and in that instant, you find yourself suddenly heading 85 mph backwards. You careen into the safety net. Your mind is screaming, "Nooooooo! No! No. This is not the way it ends. I am supposed to be at the finish getting the gold medal. This is not the ending. No. All of the training, all of the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices cannot be for this." You see your coach running down the hill towards you with his ski boots on. He is frantic and wondering if you are okay. It is all that you can do to lift your arm and wave that you are okay - physically. But emotionally you are deeply wounded, feeling as if a truck has just run over you. Twice.

Two volunteers show up to help you as you realize that you must get out of the way because the race must go on. You get up out of the net and you dust yourself off. One of the volunteers hands you your ski that had been forced off in the crash. You put your ski on and cross the course to a safe place to stand so that the race can resume. You stand there, leaning on your poles, as Kjetl Andre Aamodt from Norway races past you on his way to a silver medal. You hear the crowd cheer with excitement, cheering for him. You side slip down the bottom of the course and find yourself in the finish. The crowd gives you a cheer. A cheer that you are healthy after the crash, a sympathy cheer, but not the cheer that you have strived for. In a mental fog of dismay and disbelief, you watch as Tommy Moe from the US wins the Gold Medal and Edi Podivinsky from Canada wins the bronze. You are excited for your friends and teammate, to see them have their dreams come true. You smile for them, as you cry for yourself inside.

As a show of respect for the other athletes, you attend to the medal awards ceremony that evening. You watch the winners step on to the podium in front of the world and receive their Olympic medals. "Why not me?" you ask yourself. You keep thinking "I worked my ass off for this and yet they get to win?!? I work way harder than any of them in training. This isn't fair." You force yourself to watch anyway. You tell yourself, "Feel the pain. Remember this pain. You don't want to feel this pain again." While you feel entirely deflated, there is still a small voice within you that says, very quietly, "Not today, not here, but someday, someday it'll be my turn." You are not ready to hear that still small voice inside of you though.

That evening you wake up to go for a 3 am bio relief. It suddenly hits you that it wasn't a bad dream, that it actually happened. You just lost your chance to win an Olympic gold medal. You blew it. You crashed and finished the race in the net. Tears well up and burst through as you sit sobbing on a cold toilette in the dark, deep within the athletes village of the Olympics. How could you give it everything and come up short? You let the tears flow for a few more minutes and you climb back into bed and collapse back asleep.

Your Olympic Downhill run and your chance at the gold was nearly a week ago. Even though you have long since hoisted your body up from your crash and made your way to the bottom of the mountain, a part of you is still caught in the very net you landed in on the day of the race. You keep replaying the race over and over again in your mind, ripping yourself apart again and again. As you think about how you have missed your one chance at victory, you are absolutely devastated. Nothing you have done before this race matters. You feel like you have missed your one shot and it is over. Your spirit and your mind are still trapped within the hard, orange plastic netting. A part of you wonders "maybe it is just easier to stay in the net". You find yourself now holding yourself back in your training, not skiing to your full potential. You have a horrible realization: you have become "the skier who crashed in the Olympic downhill - the one who blew it". Is that how you will be now defined?

Suddenly, that small voice inside you is growing stronger and says, "Okay that's long enough. You've cried, you've moped and you've wallowed in your sorrow and disappointment. If you stay in that net, you will never win. You can choose to continue to mope or you can choose to leave that crash behind you." You realize that you can be defined by this event or you can be developed by it. This energizing voice inside you gets louder, saying "You can learn the lessons from this crash, and get back into a winning mindset where you are able to excel. What did you learn? You just need to keep your focus on the task at hand and on your techniques on the way down the mountain. You can do it!" You remember that you are on the top of your game. You start to put things into a winning perspective, realizing that this was only one race and you have trained your entire life to be the champion that you are now. This isn't the first race you have lost. You have been conditioned to get back up again, no matter how big the setback. You are surprised by feelings of excitement for the next race. You decide to get back out there and go for the win.

One week later, you step into the start gate at Aspen Colorado for the World Cup Downhill competition. Your concentration is on one race and one race only: right here right now. You have used what happened at the Olympics two weeks ago to be even more focused this time around. You blast out of the start gate giving it 100%: you are holding nothing back. You cross the finish line knowing that you gave it all you had and that you completed a fantastic race. After all of the competitors have finished, you are crowned "World Cup Champion". You are the best in the world: this is what you have been striving for your entire life.

When I won the World Cup Championship, it was a phenomenal victory. As I now look back at this period in my athletic career, I realize that if I had mentally and emotionally stayed stuck in that net at the Olympics any longer, then I likely never would have won a World Cup. I was in peak condition at that point. As much as what happened at the Olympics was disheartening, I knew that I could not afford to take time away from training or competing. If I was going to be a world champion, this was my time to do so. I had to first give myself permission to mourn for the loss I experienced at the Olympics. I had to forgive myself for what had happened. Finally, I had to decide that I would not be defined by that race.

We all get stuck in nets from time to time. The longer and harder we have worked towards a goal that we fail to reach, the bigger the potential net we can be stuck in. And, the harder it is to get out of the net. As devastated as we are, we need to pick ourselves out of the net and go for our goals again fully. When we are caught in a net, it seems so far from our next victory. But our biggest victory can be the very next race. It can be our very next phone call, our very next meeting, our very next date. We must find ways to get ourselves out of the nets of defeat and learn from them rather than letting the defeats deflate us. It is possible for to use the pain of disappointment to fuel your passion to reach your goals.

In the book 'The Resilience Factor" by doctors Reivich and Shatte they found that the key defining characteristic of top producers was not that they got knocked down less than others, but that they got back up quicker. They had the "Resilience Factor". As a professional athlete, the reality is that you lose a lot more races than you win. You learn to keep getting up again. Learning to be resilient is one of the advantages professional athletes have. Resilience is something that has served me well in so many other areas of my life.

As I think about the nets I have escaped in my life, I wonder what some of the nets you may have been caught in. Maybe one of your nets was a promotion at work that you were passed over for. You may have felt like you had lost out on your one and only shot to move through the ranks of the company. Missing this opportunity, you believe that you will never be successful in your career. Worse, you begin to act like you are unsuccessful in your career and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps the net was ending a serious relationship, maybe even a marriage, and starting to define yourself as someone who "fails at relationships". At the time, it may have seemed impossible that you would ever be in a happy, healthy relationship. Heck, you may even be caught in a net today.
It is powerful for each of us to know when we are stuck in the net. It is equally powerful to connect with what has helped us get out of nets in the past. When we can get in touch with the core drivers that keep us striving towards our goals, we are able to get up quicker and to get out of the nets that we might be stuck in. To connect with your own resilience factor, I ask you to think about two questions: "In the past, what one net have you been caught in that was significant?" And then "What core drivers helped you get out of that net?"

If you are able to identify what has helped you be resilient in the past, this knowledge can become a resource that you can tap into time and again to get through the challenges you face in your life today. Connect with your inner resilience to uncover the champion within you!