Today’s guest post is by Dr. Lisa Lewis (my wife). Earlier this year she launched Psych Skills for Fitness Professionals, a course designed to fill a gap many fitness pros feel: psychology, motivation, and the softer skills that help coaches guide clients to their goals.
I’ve often seen that what wears out coaches isn’t the workout plans or technique work, but the ongoing effort to navigate the deeper psychological needs of clients, especially around motivation. COVID-19 has reshaped life in 2020 and made motivation, healthy habits, and resilience through stress and uncertainty more important than ever.
Lisa recently opened enrollment for her course, adding a new module on how fitness pros can build resilience to stress and uncertainty for themselves and their clients or athletes. If you’re ready, you can dive in here.
Building and sustaining resilience
Worry. Fear. Crisis. Stress. Uncertainty. In 2020 these feelings are familiar to many of us. If your life has been stressed by the pandemic—through closings, stay-at-home orders, or social distancing—you’ve likely felt its impact.
When we have a stressful day, most of us cope with things like a good meal with friends, a hug from a loved one, a strong training session, or a relaxing bath. But when days stretch into weeks and months, we need more than temporary boosts. We need skills that help us endure, hold onto hope, and access our strengths in the face of long-term adversity.
Starting in April and May this year, I was asked to contribute to articles and podcasts on coping with the pandemic and stress. As a psychologist, these discussions led me to explore resilience and the field of positive psychology. Over the past 20 years, positive psychology has offered evidence-based ideas for living well, coping effectively, and thriving. The benefits of optimism, positive emotions, personal strengths, gratitude, meaning, and healthy relationships have been studied and shown to matter in real, measurable ways.
This research provides skills that are relevant and essential in today’s climate. For example, I learned about mental agility from Karen Reivich, who explains that we can learn flexible thinking, recognize when we’re stuck in rigid patterns, deliberately adjust our direction, and plan for negative outcomes to be more productive and resilient. Just as fitness enthusiasts practice drills for physical agility, we can train mental agility too. If your thinking gets stuck in negative patterns, building mental agility can help you think more clearly and act more effectively.
Beyond fixing weaknesses, tough life events require us to draw on our strengths. In my work with patients, clients, and fitness professionals, I’ve seen many focus on gaps, but using the best of who we are is a powerful source of resilience—especially now. Whether it’s optimism, diligence, spirituality, or a good sense of humor, your strengths can help you cope and even thrive in hard times.
Do you know how to practice flexible thinking? Are you aware of your character strengths and how to use them in adversity? This summer I designed a curriculum to develop and practice these skills and made it available for free in the Psych Skills for Fitness Pros course. The new material covers: An Introduction to Resilience; Optimism; Mental Agility; Character Strengths; Implementation and Practice. It also includes an interview with Dr. Mike T. Nelson about anti-fragility and how it relates to stress hardiness and resilience, and how to promote anti-fragility with clients. All of this is free content added to the existing Psych Skills for Fitness Pros, Volume 1: Motivate and Facilitate Change. If you’re not familiar with the course, you can learn more here.
Psych Skills for Fitness Pros offers not only theory but real-life applications for coaches in fitness, wellness, and nutrition. A graduate who spoke about her experience said the course was exactly what she needed: it went beyond theory and gave practical ways to use the ideas day to day. It helped her meet clients where they are with motivation and work through ambivalence using motivational interviewing, making her a better coach.
Key ideas include resilience, optimism, mental toughness, mental agility, and character strengths. For the rest of 2020 and beyond, these skills can help us cope with the pandemic and other challenges, and they can help us become stronger. Learn more about Psych Skills for Fitness Pros, Volume 1, here.
If you’d like more of my writing on blending strength training and physical activity with mental skills and positive psychology, you can follow me on Instagram. And if you want to learn more about positive psychology, mental agility, and character strengths, check out the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
References
Key sources include Peterson and Seligman on character strengths, Peterson on positive psychology, and Reivich and Shatte on resilience.
