Effective Techniques for Building Mental Resilience

by Dr. Blakely Low-Sampson

Updated September 2026

You just missed the shot you practiced a thousand times. You said the wrong thing in the meeting that mattered most. For a second, everything in you wants to either shut down or force a smile and pretend it didn't happen. Neither one gets you back in the game.

That gap, the moment right after something goes wrong, is where mental resilience actually lives. Not in a mantra. Not in "toughing it out." In what you do in the next ten seconds.

Mental Resilience vs. Mental Toughness: What's the Real Difference?

People often use "mental resilience" and "mental toughness" interchangeably, and in casual conversation that's fine. But in my work with athletes and high performers, I draw a sharper line: resilience means actively engaging with adversity, working with it, learning from it, adjusting because of it. Toughing it out means trying to ignore it and white-knuckle through.

One of these is genuinely research-supported. The other one just looks like strength from the outside, right up until it doesn't.

Why Positive Self-Talk Falls Flat (And What to Do Instead)

If you've worked with a coach, a teammate, or even well-meaning friends and family, you've probably heard some version of: "Just think positive." "You've got this." "Shake it off."

Here's the problem: most athletes already know they're supposed to feel more positive after a setback. Knowing that doesn't help when a phrase like "I've got this" feels too abstract to actually believe in the moment you're struggling.

So instead of positive self-talk, I teach clients productive self-talk. This draws directly from the sport psychology literature on self-talk, which breaks it into two broad types: motivational and instructional. Productive self-talk is instructional. It's neutral, objective, and focused on exactly one thing: the next right step.

Here's what that actually sounds like for a golfer working through a bad tee shot:

• Routine-focused: "Slow down and execute the routine. Swing freely."

• Tactical: "I need to take more time to calculate the yardage so I make the right club selection."

• Physiological: "My heart was pounding and I was holding my breath walking up to that shot. I'm going to take a few slow, deliberate breaths before the next one."

  
  

Notice none of these are reassurance. They're instructions. That's the shift: coaching yourself through the moment instead of trying to talk yourself out of how you feel.

Dr. Blakely teaches how to use emotions as data to support mental resilience.

Mental Resilience Techniques for Setbacks: Acknowledge and Adjust

When something goes wrong mid-competition or mid-project, I teach a two-part response I call Acknowledge and Adjust.

Acknowledge means naming what happened, out loud or internally, without skipping past it. For an athlete: "That's not what I meant to do with that pass." When I ask college student-athletes about their first thought, many laugh and reply that it's usually an expletive first, and that's fine. But I encourage clients to go one step further and actually identify the emotion or thought underneath the reaction.

This matters because emotions are data. Thoughts are data. Neither one is a fact. Before you can move to a solution, you often need to cope directly with whatever thought or feeling isn't serving you in that moment, rather than trying to bypass it entirely. That's a specific, deliberate use of mindfulness: observing your inner experience clearly enough that you actually get to choose what happens next, instead of reacting on autopilot.

Adjust is the solution-focused half. In sport psychology, you'll sometimes hear this called attentional allocation, refocusing, or more casually, "next play speed." At its core, it's about returning your attention to the present moment and the next concrete step in front of you, so you're not stuck replaying the last one.

How to Build Mental Resilience: An Exercise You Can Try

One question I regularly ask clients when we're assessing resilience together: "If I could listen in on what your mind says to you after this specific thing happens, what would I hear it say?"

Most people don't have full awareness of how they talk to themselves in difficult moments until they're asked this directly. That awareness is the starting point. It's also why generic resilience advice tends to fall short: it skips the step of understanding your actual inner process before suggesting what might help.

Try it yourself this week. Pick one recurring setback, a missed shot, a hard conversation, a mistake at work, and ask yourself that same question. What does your mind actually say? Write it down if you can. That's the raw material we'd start with in a session together.

What Progress Actually Looks Like

I know resilience work is landing with a client when they say something like, "That's why I've never liked positive self-talk," or "This actually feels like something I could do." That shift, from abstract advice to a concrete, personal tool, usually comes with a real increase in confidence: a sense that change is not just possible in general, but possible for them, specifically.

That's the whole goal. Not to eliminate setbacks. To change what happens in the ten seconds after one.

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