Sport Ethics: Resilience

Athletic competition grinds down everyone. Athletes lose and fail constantly. In baseball the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time, in basketball fine shooters miss half the time. Developing and elite athletes make mistakes, lose and fail often. The consistency of failure discourages and weeds out many would be athletes, but the ones that stick it out learn from their errors.  I believe that successful athletes and teams master a fundamental virtue of professional success—resilience.

Resilience is a foundation of successful individuals and organizations. It presents itself in two related ways. 

The first begins with a baseline of performance. A person or organization performs at a particular level, hopefully high. This performance grows from the unfolding of the commitment, skills, coordination, knowledge and practice in a competitive environment. This level of performance is earned and critical to the individual or group's success. The baseline of achievement represents one way to measure resilience.

Resilience emerges and is tested in a particular environment with a particular group of people. A group or person can be performing at this baseline and then confront  misfortune or  shocks. These impacts hit the person or team and throw them off. The impacts can be internal, injuries, or external, new challenges, and threaten the integrity of the performance. A person or team can fall apart quickly when facing these hazards. Resiliency helps the person or team return to its baseline level after staggering from a difficulty. They "bounce back." This form of resilience depends upon keeping intact the integrity of purpose and performance under new and challenging tests.

The second aspect of resilience involves adapting and changing while keeping integrity of purpose intact. This response transcends just recovering from a blow to return to the baseline. Here the person or team  don't just bounce back; they change and thrive through the challenges. These adaptations empower the person or team to increase their performance and get better in response to distress or turmoil. This suggests that integrity of purpose itself can grow in light of new knowledge and challenges so that direction and performance adapt but remain intact to purpose.

Resilience is critical to success because all individuals and teams fail, make mistakes or face traumas that can undermine their confidence and performance. Everyone faces surprises and resilience undergirds response to surprise. If not handled, the trauma of misfortune or surprise can undermine their emotional, cognitive and relational performance.

During a competition or season of competing, shocks and surprises will occur. External shocks involve changing the environment of competition. New owners, new coaches, new talent can reenergize competitors who suddenly start to win. New tactics, techniques or strategies can throw off individuals and teams stymieing their ability to succeed. This changed environment challenges the competitive equilibrium of the person or team. These changes can induce shock, surprise or paralysis. 

The shocks need not just be external. Internal trauma requires just as much resilience. An athlete may fail or not perform up to expectations. Personal misfortune can undermine confidence or slowing physical skills can lead to sudden and unexpected declines in performance. Players might fail, be traded, or benched which erodes well choreographed relations. Injuries take away critical actors and skills, and new persons  suddenly appear and have to be integrated into a cohesive pattern of emotional and cognitive responses. All these throw off the internal equilibrium or coordination that enabled the team to perform at a high level. 

Whatever the cause, the performing baseline can no longer be achieved and is often no longer sufficient. To find success requires that individuals on the teams create a new balance among relations and skills and achieve new coordination and commitment. They need to reassemble resources to restore integrity of purpose and performance. 

This demand to restore integrity of purpose and performance under stress suggests critical dimensions of resilience lie in imagination and learning. Resilient individuals and organizations can see new possibilities and adapt beyond simply replicating what no longer works. 

Resilient individuals and teams have to be able to absorb the consequences of the changes, the losses or defeats, without falling apart emotionally, cognitively or relationally. Failure, trauma, assault generate chaos and confusion out of which the individual and team generate resources to restore relations and performance. 

The counterpoint of resilience lies in brittle or fragile individuals or groups. The person or group may feel robust and successful. These persons or teams may be brilliant performers when things are going well. They succeed within a definite scope and set environment, but when faced with sudden changes that upset established patterns, they struggle. The point of being fragile or brittle is that stress breaks them. Individuals or organizations do not recover when misfortune hits them. 

Brittle or fragile individuals or teams collapse. Facing sudden changes or new challenges the emotional, cognitive and relational balance of individuals gets skewed; they cannot bring the focused attention and relational coherence to bear under the stress of competition and the new experiences.

Under stress relations  can explode with recrimination and anger when members turn on each other. Individuals turn on themselves and cannot grapple out of their slumps. They might also implode into a silent spiral of panic and despair where players and coaches keep trying harder and harder patterns that replicate and reinforce the failed approaches and do not adapt to the new internal or external circumstance. Sometimes, the resilient action may involve simply dismantling a team that has fallen apart, and beginning the process of rebuilding.  

More than a few superb athletes or professionals remain startlingly brittle when they begin to struggle. They have been so successful so long and are so used to success, that they have not developed the emotional or cognitive capacity to accept the breakdown, adapt and work through it in ways that permit them to succeed again. The key here for individuals and teams lies in not seeing integrity as a hard and unchanging core, but understanding that integrity builds outward from purpose and outward manifestations of performance can change but be consistent with inner purpose and integrity. This often means individuals must change  aspects of their style or approach. Often trades of individuals who thrived in one ecosystem of support or competition will result in degraded performance because the athlete no longer possesses the support system that sustained them. What looked like individual accomplishment had been sustained by team and culture.

The first aspect of resilience involves the ability to absorb without disintegration. The second requires the team or individual to adapt and grow from changes. This adaptation under press of competition really defines true competitive  resilience. Simply not disintegrating does not suffice. If an individual just continues to absorb punches and continues to fail; they might be resilient, but only in a limited way. At the core this requires individuals keep their attention and focus under control even when things go badly. This permits people to improvise, test and adapt under pressure.

Real resilience means individuals and teams learn from their failures and mistakes. This requires emotional and cognitive suppleness and abiding confidence. Resilient individuals or teams do not cannibalize their emotions with self-doubt or recrimination, but get down to business of analyzing what is not working, how it can be fixed. Such an approach depends upon both self-mastery and forms of team and self-leadership.

Resilient individuals and organizations keep their attention and  ask critical questions facing these challenges:

1. What has changed? 
2. How can I identify how those changes have impacted my style and performance? 
3. How can I change my approach, training, tactics or strategy to respond to the new challenges of the environment? 
4. How can I adapt my internal game and skills to adapt to new teammates? 
5. What does the team need to do in terms of its commitment, training and roles to achieve the level of performance we lost and need to regain?

These questions grow from attention to common efforts as well as individual efforts. They shape reflection and improvisation and testing to find what works under the new conditions.

Modern professional and college sports entail incessant and often chaotic environmental changes. Free agency, trades and high injury rates lead to endless in season and game adaptations for teams. Individuals and teams have to reinvent themselves each year and sometimes several times during a season. Each year new classes arrive on college campus, old ones graduate and players now leave early. At the same time transfers and injuries make rosters much less stable. Successful teams and individuals must develop resilience.

In his book Eleven Rings Phil Jackson illustrates how teams can develop resilience and success in different ways. His early Chicago Bull teams won on the basis of a strong core of six or seven players who played together and grew into a remarkable “tribe” that played with trust, joy and skill. His later Los Angeles Laker teams built far more heavily around two players and a rotating caste of role players who came through the team. Both approaches worked but both required constant adaptation by the coach and the team as they had to work through the ups and downs and shocks of games and seasons. Jackson explains how the more resilient teams built upon a deeper set of relations and purpose that bonded the team members together. He also emphasized that resilient teams possessed  a wide range of experience and possessed several focal points of leadership who can step up and help teams reorganize and regain coherence. 

Organizations dependent upon just one star or leader are far more vulnerable to shocks, just like companies. 

This resilience grows into a cornerstone of successful professional and institutional careers in a chaotic world. Any learning process should build the capacity for resilience because growing and learning depends upon making errors, understanding why the mistake and then correcting the error, achieving success and moving forward. Ideally persons who learn in this process should develop an emotional and cognitive capacity to deal with failure and mistakes they make. Well played athletics  achieves this in a very powerful and sustainable way.

Sport Ethics: Let the Game Come to You

How many coaches have counseled anxious and pressing players, “let the game come to you.” It’s hard advice, even odd advice in a world of sports and professions where aggression and taking control are the preferred strategies. "Getting there first" or "controlling the tempo fly" in the face of this disciplined approach. Yet this sage advice matters profoundly for successful athletic and professional endeavor. Let the game come to you, however, takes strong virtue and character to learn the skills and insight needed to achieve it.

Notice the advice begins with the notion of a “game.” A game presumes a goal; participants know what they want to achieve and do so in a competitive environment. Usually the athletes and professionals work with a team to achieve the end result. An athlete plays imbedded in a game with goals and competition.

That competition means opponents are working to get to the goal first and win. It means that opponents will defend against the team or player. Opponents seek to impose their will or throw the team and players “off their game.” The game unfolds as a competition with plans and plays and counter plays as well as adaptations on the fly.

In competition ebb and flows occur as teams get the upper hand or open a lead. Momentum can switch. Teams can get behind or get ahead; either momentum can pose a danger or opportunity. But imbedded in the flow and texture of the game, each player has a role and has to perform. Individual competitors have strengths and limitations, and he or she will try to maximize the strength and hide or minimize the cost of limitations. Good opponents will go after their limitations and try to nullify their strengths.

This competitive dynamic sets the stage for “let the game come to you.” Inside each game opponents are seeking mismatches where their strength comes up against another's weakness. Opponents may do this by schemes or designs to get a player to commit prematurely or play a known weakness. It may be trying to get into a player’s head and get the athlete to panic or force issues exposing a weakness, an action without full focus or actions that leave holes in the team's scheme.

Good opponents are always seeking to push athletes or professionals to force actions—to take actions that have lower probability of success or play out of a player's or teams’ strength. 

When players force actions, the opponents succeed in undermining a player and team’s performance. They have maneuvered an individual into taking a lower probability high risk action.

Here is where letting the game come to you matters. It unfolds as a form of mindful patience. 

Inside the game athletes compete but also watch and scan the game to see patterns unfold. They scan for openings or possible mismatches. Successful professionals look and anticipate possibilities. They are looking to set up actions down the road, not immediately before them. The example would be a pass that leads to a pass that leads to an assist. Good players and teams wait and display patience as well as commitment. They look for timing or openings and then explode into the opening provided by the flow or rhythm of the competition or game. They seek an emerging pattern that permits their strength to explode against an exposed vulnerability.

Often a team not only runs a play, but must pick the right play that fits the moment or responds to an offense or defense or tendency of the opponents. All this depends upon situational awareness and pattern recognition over the course of a game.

At the elite level teams have scouted each other. They know each other and every player’s tendencies and probabilities and areas of weakness and strength. They know players who tend to overcommit and who react too slowly.They know who shades off on defense or loses attention over time. Often players will disguise their true intent to get teams or players to commit too early. That premature commitment, then opens up a mismatch or window of opportunity to move aggressively and erupt into the actions.

We can see this dynamic any day by watching a pitcher and batter. The batter has to wait upon the right pitch and then pounce on it. Sometimes they have to foul off balls. The pitcher plays the same game seeking to entice the batter to swing at a pitch out of their zone or commit to a disguised pitch. In football quarterbacks need to let the play unfold and count on the system to throw to the space rather than the player. In tennis or volleyball a long volley plays out until someone sees one misstep and can hit the ball right beyond the reach or to the player that forces a bad shot that can then be put away. Every interaction creates this dynamic. If players try to hard, they press and fail in execution.

Good athletes need to be patient, but not passive. Athletes need to be alert but resolute. 

When a play opens up, they strike; this can happen at any moment. This approach encourages players to both keep their emotional tenacity but also be energy efficient so they are not wasting physical or emotional energy they need to husband over the course of a game and season.

The opposite of letting the game come to you is to force it. This happens with batters swing at bad pitches. It happens when frustrated pitchers throw a pitch into a batter's zone. People get anxious and worked up. Especially when behind or when things feel static, they might “press” and push beyond their skill zones. This means they take actions where they have lower probabilities of success. Watching quarterbacks try to force passes into coverage that get intercepted demonstrates this as well as an over swing hitter or a basketball player who keeps driving to the basket when the shots or seams are not there.

Forcing it means an athlete takes an action that given their skill and the opponent, the action has a much higher probability of failure given their skill set and conditions of the competition. Every good opponent wants to incite players to force it.

Forcing actions not only lower probability of success for the player, but it can dissolve the intricate structure of team defense or offense. If one member on defense breaks coverage to shade and help another, it leaves open layers that others can exploit.

Forcing leads teammates to compensate and move from their domain and assigned roles. This offset cascades into breakdowns and openings for the opponents. In a different vein, when players free lance and force it such as forcing passes in football, soccer or basketball or breaking to score when no reasonable probability exists, these actions undermine everyone’s trust in everyone else. 

These free lancing actions subvert the system and confidence in the plays people have practiced and committed to. This lack of trust leads to overcompensation. People end up out of place and don't trust the coverage or system. They may give up in anger on the one forcing it. Teams hesitate or get angry at each other. The entire rhythm of the team can break down by a player forcing the game. It can also break the player’s skill when they over throw or over swing, or over kick. This upsets the accuracy and consistency of their execution.

Elite professionals including athletes develop the capacity to be calm and see and recognize patterns in unfolding play even when it looks chaotic.

They understand how the plan works and execute it; they invite and elicit trust from teammates who can rely upon them. They also understand that mistakes or slumps occur and that they and everyone can get anxious and overcommit and over anticipate and literally try to hard in a way. This trying too hard  destroys the rhythm and prepared consciousness they bring to expert judgment under conditions of stress and uncertainty.

Preparation—patience—perception reinforce each other in letting the game come to you Notice this is not about “waiting” for the game which is passive.

Let is a subjunctive verb with an active scanning component to it. But it becomes one of the dangers of such as approach that the "let" can sink into wait and take the edge off an aggressive player.

As is often the case, the success of this approach requires character and self-discipline. Athletes like any good professional acquires trained integrated perception and skill that can be unleashed at the proper moment. Letting the game come to you means an athlete or professional plays smart and maximizes their skill and energy to act when the options of success are highest.

In his book Eleven Rings  Phil Jackson describes one of the differences between coaching basketball superstars Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan as centering upon how Jordan would let the game come to him. Bryant would shoot and shoot and push, even when he was not on or the defense had him. This could lead  to losses as well as wins. Jordan possessed a deeper confidence in himself but in the flow of the game knowing that chances would open up for higher probability actions. Both are superb players, maybe the finest of their generation, but one never lead to collapsed teams, the other did.

Letting the game come to you, like the capacity to let go, and carry on, depend upon a refined and trained virtue and skill that good athletes and good professionals live by.

Phil Jackson and Why Athletes Stay Past Their Prime

Phil Jackson announced his intention to return as the Coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. Each year he retreats to the desert to reflect upon whether he possesses the energy, health and reason to return to coaching. Already acknowledged as one of the greatest NBA coaches with 11 championships built on Michael Jordan in Chicago and Shaquille O’Neil and Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, Jackson’s process each year stands out because it is not the norm.

Jackson is the greatest NBA coach in history and his approach bears emulation. He asks a critical set of questions of himself: Do I have the health to sustain the rigors of the season? Do I have the love of the game and passion to sustain the demands of coaching and riding the emotional roller coaster and turmoil of player’s lives? Do I have the talent and willingness to learn on the team and in my mind to achieve the goals I set for them and myself? The questions align the intellectual, physical, emotional dimensions that any athlete needs to stay and achieve. He is returning, really, for glory, as he put for one “last stand”  and a “grand one.”

Jackson got it right and did so by thinking through the right range of issues. Most players and coaches linger on beyond their expiration date. I’ve discussed the rhythm of athletes entering and leaving. But most athletes stay on beyond their peak ability to play. They are not all that different from most of us who fear leaving our jobs, but tend to stay out for a number of reasons.

Athletes have very limited time windows because of their utter dependence upon the health and skill of their bodies. They can train, hone and refine their skills. The greatest and most durable athletes have incredible work ethics. Athletes can compensate for some decline of skills over time, but in the end they simply do not possess the same level of quickness, speed, strength, endurance needed to flourish at the elite levels of competition.

Elite athletes in elite leagues have excruciatingly small margins margin for error. They are constantly challenged for roster spots by an endless array of talented, trained and ambitious younger athletes. The younger athletes seek to displace them on team slots or beat them in head to head. This means players must constantly keep in top condition and hone their skills; if they do not, someone else will.  The best elite athletes learn early that their talent only carries them so far against similarly talented but harder working or better-coached competitors.

A natural progression in many sports occurs from sensation, to rookie, to pro, to top-level game to veteran to grizzled veteran. The veteran designation is the kiss of death because it means a player has reached a stage where their experience and team compatibility now matter as much as their skill. The term suggests they are replaceable statistically by a wide array of comparable veterans or younger players with high upsides that surpass the veteran’s performance level. If you read too much sabermetrics, you begin to think that all but very few players are fungible, just like in corporate life.

The limited window and constant competition coupled with threat creates a very limited economic window for athletes. Most elite athletes are over the hill by the time many doctors are just getting their degrees or lawyers and accountants getting partnerships or military officers getting their first major commands. The world of an elite athletes ends just as most professional trajectories are moving into highest orbits.

For pure economic reasons more than a few athletes hang on past their prime or peak performance simply because they must maximize their earnings while they can. Athletes will endure steady diminishment of playing time, stature and often end as backups or team guys to bring a level of experienced toughness to a clubhouse. They suffer reduced lowered skills and performance to maintain a flow of money that they need to cache for a future.

If you talk to athletes about leaving, an overwhelming sense of missing or loss hits you. The loss fills everything they say. Even when they have moved on into successful lives with family and position, for many of them, the loss endures.

What do they lose? Elite athletes start very young. They have identified as and been identified as athletes since their early teens. Parents, friends, family, schools all relate to them as athletes. They internalized their sense of worth tied to their academic prowess. Internal and external signals anchor their sense of self in being an athlete and succeeding as athletes.

Most elite athletes garner joy and satisfaction from the sheer execution of their athletic proficiency. The movement, the skill, the winning and even losing cumulatively fulfill them. Ex-players reminisce on this and emphasize how they miss the camaraderie, the joshing, joking, hanging, practicing, focusing with each other. Their memories recall people, smells, places, relations as well as moments, not always of victory, but of accomplishment including coming back from failure.

These losses are profound. Leaving sport abandons an identity that defines them and most of their relations. It means leaving behind the accomplishments that are valued and they are masters of for a different world that admires but does not really need what they are trained to do.

 Most of that world will view and admire them for the player they were, not for the person they are. Imagine living in a time warp where your identity and worth are frozen by whom you were at the age of 17, 24, and 31? I can never forget memories of seeing old players signing cards at conventions or being official “greeters” at casinos.

I admire sports like soccer that have a wide range of leagues across a huge spectrum of talent and age levels that permit wider array of players to play for much longer periods by slotting their talent levels of the way up and on the way down to and leagues that fit them. American sports really does not possess such graded variations in the high visible sports where you play in NBA or have no options or you play in NFL or nowhere. Baseball has strong minor leagues and sports like tennis or golf have the equivalent of tournament that encourages and permits players to grow or settle into a mid range of elite play for long periods of time.

Phil Jackson got it right. He can stay on with a balanced decision to pursue glory one last grand time. Most athletes do not go out on their own terms and linger until nothing is left.