How to cope with team members leaving the team

Life in the pandemic

was like a marathon in which neither the route, nor the length, nor the destination was known. Professionally and privately spoken, I notice that more and more people are thin-skinned, their nerves lie blank and people started thinking about their life from a new perspective. For a long time no training schedule could be planned, championships were postponed for the second year in a row now and nothing that could bring some joy was in sight.

If you are an athlete, striving to get better every day and competing on a high level – nothing is worse than being repeatedly banned from doing what you find fulfillment in. I mean we spend a lot of time and money in our sport and need to coordinate team members, coaches and dropzone slots. The constant news about new virus variants and increasing numbers of infections cause frustration and resentment.

In our case these longterm set backs have caused two of our team members to withdraw their commitment. In April 2021 we stood there with a ticket to the Mondial in Tanay (Russia) but no training and no lineup. It is not hard to guess that this feels awful and disappointing.

But nature has endowed

many of us with a quality that helps us through such times. This quality is there so that we can make it through hard times. Giving up is not an option in nature. Because if you give up in nature, you will probably not survive. So in these times it important to activate this wonderful power that Mother Nature has given. The term resilience comes from Latin and originally means something like a rebounding. Today we use this word to express resistance to psychological stress. Some even speak of the mental immune system. In other words, it is a protective shield of which stress and fear will bounce off.

Psychologists describe a person as resilient

if they do not allow themselves to be discouraged by failure and defeat, but instead overcome these failures and repeatedly get involved with new topics (or life itself). What qualities do you have to have in order to continue after the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th attempt and to understand setbacks as a learning process? Resilience is one of THE top qualities of successful athletes and entrepreneurs! So if you need a slice of resilience in your life – here are our personal tips for resilience training:

• Tip 1: Stop feeling as a victim! We have to stop maneuvering ourselves into victimhood and feeling sorry for ourselves. Start acting instead of reacting! You need to believe that you are the person to change the situation you are in.
• Tip 2: Get a bird’s eye view! (We should know how to do that!) Resilient people are able to leave old patterns and emotional entanglements. You should rather enter a kind of meta-level and take a virtual drone flight over the situation. Because with a little distance and a different perspective, the situation often doesn’t look as dramatic as when you “bathe in it, emotionally”. By changing the perspective ideas, workarounds, ways out and new options will arise.
• Tip 3: There is a life afterwards! Resilient people can accept the situation as is, let go of losses and continue to look to their future with confidence. A crisis does not drag them down, but remains a time-limited event from which you can lead yourself out.

Resilience is pretty cool – that’s for sure. If you are resilient, you get through life better and can cope with almost anything. So in our case we set a new goal, started the recruitment process and keep on training with player coach. – to be continued –

Team Skynamite