How To Get Faster At Bouncing Back From Setbacks
Mistakes, bad competitions, getting benched, illness, injury, selection cuts, coaching changes… none of that is unusual. It’s sport.
You can train as hard and as smart as you want and you will still get things wrong. You’ll still have days where you’re flat, scared, frustrated or embarrassed. That’s not a sign that you’re broken. It’s a sign that you’re human.
What matters is not whether you experience setbacks, but how quickly you can find your feet again and get back into a place where you can actually learn, adjust, and move forward. This is where self-regulation comes in.
Setbacks Are Inevitable
Knowing that mistakes and setbacks are absolutely going to happen – and that perfection is not possible – can feel uncomfortable. It can also be incredibly freeing.
No one is perfect. Learning always includes mistakes. And any serious goal will involve some chaos along the way.
When you accept that adversity is part of the process, you stop wasting energy on “Why is this happening to me?” and start investing it in “What can I do next?”
Because setbacks are inevitable, we need to train our resilience and well-being on purpose, not only when everything has already gone wrong. That means understanding ourselves, our patterns, and our tools before the pressure spikes.
Journal Prompt 1: What You Already Know
Take 10–15 minutes with a notebook (ideally by hand; digital if you need to). Be specific and honest.
What are some typical setbacks you experience in your sport or life? (Examples: injury, being left out of the line-up, poor session, criticism from coach, conflict on the team.)
What thoughts and emotions usually show up when those things happen? Be concrete: what do you say to yourself, and what do you feel in your body?
Think about a time when you recovered from adversity relatively quickly and kept going. What made that situation different from the times you spiral or stay stuck on mistakes?
Which things, beliefs, people, routines or coping skills helped you bounce back? What is already helpful that you could use more intentionally?
You’re not starting from zero. You likely already have useful strategies; this exercise just makes them visible.
Give Yourself the Safety to Learn
To bounce back faster, you need enough psychological “safety” to actually learn from what happened instead of simply surviving it. That’s where self-regulation comes in: your ability to manage your behaviour, emotions and thoughts so you can respond instead of react.
A simple way to think about this is the three-zone model:
1. Comfort Zone
This is where you rest, recharge and enjoy. You feel like an expert here: training feels easy and predictable. There’s only a small push.
You need this zone to recover and stabilise, but if you stay here forever, you don’t grow.
2. Learning Zone
This is where you stretch yourself. The load is higher; you’re gaining skill, strength, and confidence. It’s uncomfortable, but still manageable.
Most meaningful development happens here. It’s where you want to spend a lot of your training life.
3. Overwhelm Zone
Stress is very high; you might feel panicked, numb, or shut down. Mistakes increase. Injury risk can rise.
This feels more like over-exhaustion than a healthy challenge. When you’re in overwhelm, your system is basically saying “Too much.” Learning stops; survival takes over.
Resilience isn’t about forcing yourself to live in overwhelm. It’s about recognising where you are and being able to move between zones: up into learning when you’re too comfortable, and down from overwhelm when you’re overloaded.
Journal Prompt 2: What Does It Feel Like?
Use these prompts to map your own zones more clearly.
Moving from comfort → learning
What strategies could you use to move from the comfort zone into the learning zone? Think about routines, mindset shifts, accountability, or training structures that gently increase challenge.
Sliding into overwhelm
What situations tend to push you from the learning zone into overwhelm?
Are there specific triggers (people, environments, expectations, thoughts) that reliably tip you over the edge?
Coming back down
What skills and tools can you use to move from overwhelm back down to the learning or comfort zone? Consider breathing strategies, self-talk, grounding, taking a time-out, speaking to a trusted person, adjusting goals, or changing the task.
The goal is not to avoid pressure. The goal is to know yourself well enough that you can adjust the dial instead of having it ripped off the wall.
And Then… Practice
Here’s the blunt truth: Your mental skills are useless if you only think about them in theory.
Just like strength or technique, self-regulation needs reps – every day, not only on competition day or in crisis.
Use your warm-up to practise breathing and focus. Use “bad” sessions as training for bouncing back. Use regular life stress as low-stakes practice for pressure situations.
Want to achieve something big? Great. Then you don’t just need more talent or more training hours. You need to get comfortable with learning and regulating your discomfort when things get hard, unfair, or messy.
That’s how you get faster at bouncing back from setbacks – and stay in your learning zone long enough to actually become who you’re trying to be.