How Mental Readiness and Psychological Resilience Optimize Performance

Brian Bishop — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 01:38:46 +0000

Targeting individual and organizational readiness and resilience is adopted from my time as a Soldier in the US Army and their focus on the same two concepts for the Soldier population and their families. However, in this blog, we will discuss how we have modified the concept and have created a model that fits our perspective on how we see readiness is achieved within the populations that we engage; athletes, business professionals, and most importantly first responders.

why is mental readiness important?

Imagine being in a high stress situation (intense call for service, high stakes championship game, or needing to produce quality results on a project for your boss or investors) and your mind is ruminating on past performances/future failures/situations at home, you are low on energy, or your arousal is through the roof. In other words, you were not ready. In scenarios such as these, the end result is often performance breakdowns that look like, increased errors, poor decision making, physical injury, poor recovery, etc. Achieving and maintaining an appropriate ready state sets the stage for how resilient individuals and organizations are or can be in the face of crisis and adversity. Mental readiness is the cornerstone of performance flexibility. How prepared are you to handle the worst possible or even best possible situations? Our performance can be significantly positively or negatively impacted by our state of readiness.

what does a ready individual look like?

We see a ready individual as someone who is optimally motivated (the individual has an understanding of the proper balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and how to increase self determination to achieve that optimal state of motivation), someone with a proactive attitude, composed, focused, confident, recovered, collectively competent, and, lastly, appropriately mentally and physically trained (the individual knows when, why, and how to use the skills that optimize performance).

Let's look at how we approach readiness & resilience

Let’s explain what each layer of this concept means and why it has an impact on effectively achieving a ready and resilient state. The innermost ring is what we call the core of development. From the individual perspective, deliberate purpose is the individual’s “why” to what it is that they choose to do. It is the identified values that guide the individual daily – more on this in our previous post. From the organizational perspective, a sense of belonging is the foundation upon which organizations create a work culture that promotes solidarity, social support, autonomy, leadership development, and competence all geared towards constantly effective performance. These two overarching elements towards readiness from both the individual and organizational perspectives are important to providing a base from which both the individual and organization improve readiness and maintain resilience.

Moving outward, the second ring is what we call the elements that promote self-regulation. These are the elements both individually and collectively that help create and maintain a ready and resilient state for optimal functioning when it matters. From the individual perspective, developing a sense of awareness of current productive or unproductive behaviors as well as awareness of effective tools/concepts is one of the first steps to truly making changes that allow for remaining ready and resilient. This awareness allows for better self-control within highly stressful situations, which look differently for everyone, and ultimately promotes performance flexibility allowing the performer to flow within the highs and lows that naturally occur during performance in any domain. One of the most common areas where we implement self-control is stress-management. For specific tips on how to apply stress-management tools, visit our Stress-management for Increasing Resilience Resource Room. From the organizational perspective, reflectiveness allows the organization to objectively evaluate areas of improvement or success from past performances and then intentionally implement concepts that help to either improve or maintain those areas. With that, the organization becomes flexible.

The outermost ring is what we call the individual and organizational state of readiness. This is the achieved state of readiness at the individual and organization levels. This state of readiness is what allows for the individual and the organization to perform in their Optimal Zone of Natural Excellence (OZONE) more consistently and increase resilience. When we think about burnout and other significant mental injuries that take performers away from what they enjoy or leave organizations and teams with holes to fill, making mistakes and not being able to shake the impact of those as well as not being able to bounce back from the stress related to traumatic experiences is at the root. This measurable ready state provides something tangible to strive for and allows individuals and organizations to perform at their best when it matters most.

how this impacts and improves performance?

In today’s world, the ability to achieve a performance enhancing mental ready state couldn’t be more important. In the present environment where performing at your best when it matters most, especially as a first responder, is critical to the life, safety, and security of those around you and the public you engage with, your mental state of readiness helps to determine the outcome in those high stress situations. High stress and high-risk performance are rife with task relevant and task irrelevant stimuli. The key is to respond effectively and appropriately to the relevant stimuli that help to control the chances of the best possible outcome. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In the same way, information processing theory scientifically walks us through the path from stimulus to response as well. We want the individual to be empowered through the knowledge and implementation of performance enhancing mental tools to develop that ability to choose a suitable response. Our mental readiness state affords us the space to evaluate when, where, and how to utilize those tools to optimize our performance.

For more information on how to create the space between the stimulus and response, visit Mindfulness Practice for Self-regulation & Resilience.

Moreover, as the cornerstone of performance flexibility, readiness allows the individual and organization to respond appropriately rather than react. Reacting is less deliberate and can have significant uncontrollable impacts due to engaging in impulsive reactions to experiences. Readiness doesn’t mean we are stress free, it means we are where we need to be to effectively manage the impacts of the stress we have and will encounter throughout performance. The idea here is to increase resilience to better promote nonreactivity. One study that looked at the role of resilience in mindfulness training for first responders reported on the conclusions from evaluations of mindfulness-based interventions which found that improvements in nonreactivity predicted reductions in depression symptoms in veterans (Colgan et al. 2016) and increases in predicted stress and anger outcomes in LEOs (Bergman et al. 2016). This is important because it speaks to the emotional demands, linked to high rates of job dissatisfaction and burnout, that come with being in high risk occupations, especially in law enforcement work. The effects of improving nonreactivity hold true whether you are an athlete, business professional, or first responder. In any of these high demand performance domains, readiness is critical to performing in your OZONE when the stress is high and you have to make the right decisions. In later blogs, we will discuss tips to achieve an optimal mental readiness state and improve psychological resilience.

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Does Burnout Exist?

Brian Bishop — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 22:12:01 +0000

There is some debate on this. Some will say that it does not exist due to the fact that there is no clinical or biological substantiality to human beings burning out. But is that actually true? Well, the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon within the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the handbook that guides medical providers in diagnosing diseases.

what is burnout?

Mechanically speaking, “burnout” exists as a physical result of entropy. Entropy is the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. Clinically and biologically speaking, “burnout” in regards to human beings, is more of a description to explain the manifestation of various symptoms we see in others or ourselves when stressors have compiled over time and have gone unaddressed.

why do we use burnout?

Typically, we will describe someone who is highly productive, energetic, and connected to what they do as having some fire inside that drives them to perform in this manner. Well, as we know, due to entropy, fires can burnout. So, as we see or feel the fire extinguished, what comes to mind is the idea that it has burned out due to the compilation of stress suffocating and extinguishing the flame that exists within.

is burnout the big green monster that exists around every corner we should run from?

Burnout is something that exists around us. Given the advances in technology that keep us more connected to executing and less connected to what matters, we are always on the gas pedal without taking time to connect and engage appropriately. This ultimately leads to exhaustion, disengagement, poor mental and physical health, etc. which is essentially burnout.

so what?

Given what was described above, burnout is a real thing and frequently happens amongst those working on challenging issues, in difficult contexts, and in high stress environments. It is not something that only affects the person who suffers it, but also the organization or the collective as a whole. As mentioned earlier, burnout is the manifestation of symptoms such as exhaustion, cynicism, inability to sleep, disengagement, hopelessness/helplessness, inability to manage stress, etc. These are signs we may see in others and also experience ourselves that tell us that our stress response to the job or in our lives is spilling over into an unmanageable area. Oftentimes, we will deny and ignore the signs and symptoms thinking we are not susceptible, typically known as hero culture. However, left unaddressed, this burnout can lead to more significant mental and physical health issues.

The resilience tools we provide as well as the concepts we cover during mental training modules, individual sessions, workshops as well as other preventive performance enhancing services are the “armor” against burnout. For more information about how to manage stress effectively, visit our Stress-management for Increasing Resilience Resource Room. Think about it this way . . . burnout is not something you are trying to run away from daily, but more so, effective concepts and tools allow you to co-exist and operate more freely in a line of work or life where burnout CAN run rampant. So, what do you think, does burnout exist?

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