ThePADDLER 112
BUILDING resilience
Words and photos : Chris Evans , Lead Paddlesport instructor at Plas y Brenin
The last two articles looked at how to build your confidence and belief in your ability . In this article , I ’ m going to give a few suggestions on how to build resilience . Firstly , what ’ s the difference between confidence and resilience ?
Confidence 1 The feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something . 2 A feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one ’ s abilities or qualities .
Resilience 1 The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or toughness . 2 The process of adapting well in the face of adversity , trauma , tragedy , threats or significant sources of stress .
So confidence is all about a positive mindset based around the ability of self and the people around you ; resilience is about how we recover from the bumps in the journey to achieving goals . At this point , you might be asking what you need resilience for within the context of getting better in a boat . The answer is several things , and again , all personal . These things could include peer pressures ( tales of either chaos on rivers or the pressure to step things up constantly ), training and assessment pressures ( various awards or white water course sign-offs , for example ), change in the situation ( changes in social groups for example ) or the classic , resilient to sometimes getting it wrong ( nasty swim , injury or not developing at the rate that you want to ). Although there ’ s an argument that confidence and resilience are different , some of the methods used could have some overlap .
Once again , these are all suggestions and work well for some but might not for others . If resilience is something , you feel you need to build or just interested in the practical applications of building resilience , pick the ‘ golden threads ’ from this article that work for you and disregard the ones that don ’ t .