Resilience from the mat to the workplace

One of my favorite aspects of playing a sport is the chance to learn every single time you do it.

Something that I feel is extremely important to success is . . . failing.  You can learn so much when you fail, but that is hard to see when you are young or in the midst of your career.  The greatest athletes learn from every win and loss and build up their resilience.

I grew up playing a couple sports — but wrestling was king. I practiced four to five times a week starting when I was about 8 years old and competed at least once every weekend.  Wrestling was extremely important to me and my family.

Even though I wrestled so much and wanted to win so badly, I knew at a young age that wrestling wasn't everything in life. But that didn't mean losing didn't hurt and that I still didn't get in trouble when I did lose. I quickly started to learn from my losses and built up my resilience to “falling down”.

Most athletes equate losing in their respective sports the worst thing in the world.  Now we all know this isn't true, but what losing really does is prepare you for the real world.  You build up a resilience to failing and learn from it.

You often see great wrestlers/athletes doing well in the real world and when asked how they are doing so well, they contribute it to their sport and failing.  This is so important because if you don't learn how to pick yourself up after a hard loss in your sport, it will be hard to do it when you have to do it for your job; I am sure you enjoyed playing your sport more than your 9 to 5.

The most common time I see resilience is when tragedy strikes.

This is a phenomenon I see so much with the wrestling community. It will always be so horrible when something bad happens to someone, but it is inspiring when you see them get out of the pain or fight their sickness all the way through.

Obviously, losing a wrestling match doesn't compare to losing a loved one or battling cancer, but at the time, losing a wrestling match can hurt a lot. When you learn to cope from that and build on it, it can help tremendously in the future when something tragic inevitably occurs. This is a reason why I love wrestling so much: It teaches you about suffering, weight control, teamwork — and most importantly resilience.

Resilience to the pain in the world.

There is a famous wrestling quote by former wrestler and coach Dan Gable that says, “Once you have wrestled, everything else in life is easy.”  Now I don't think that is necessarily true, because the real world is hard.

Maybe though, wrestling can make your life easier by teaching you life lessons along the way and building up your resilience.

This article is supported by research concerning the impact of resilience and learning from failures in the workplace:

Coelho, P., & McClure, J. (2005). Learn from Failure. Mid-American Journal of Business, 20(1), 13–20.

Jackson, D., Firtko, A., & Edenborough, M. (2007). Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: a literature review. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 60(1), 1–9.