Photo Credit: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

The Comeback Story of the Winter Olympics

The incredible comeback story of Alysa Liu at the 2026 Winter Olympic games in Milan Cortina has a lot to teach us all. Liu became the first US women’s figure skater to win singles gold since 2002. Multiple times throughout the Olympic event, television announcers and analysts commented on how relaxed, carefree, and playful she seemed in the lead up to the competition. It was as though Alysa Liu was completely detached from the weight of the outcome and genuinely thrilled to get to skate in the Winter Olympics again.

When asked about how she was able to maintain her sense of calm, Liu answered “Winning and losing don’t affect me anymore… Medalling doesn’t fulfill me. I skate because I like to skate.”

But this wasn’t always the case for Liu who retired from figure skating at the age 16 after competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Prior to retirement Liu described the intense pressure as “traumatizing” and talked about feeling like her life was on the line when she skated.

Stepping away from the sport for two years allowed her to gain a sense of control over her life and pursue other interests including fashion, travel, attending college at UCLA, and frequenting karaoke bars with her friends which ultimately made her a much more well rounded person. Pursuing a balanced life outside of the ice rink allowed her to rediscover her love of staking and return to her sport with a renewed sense of creativity and passion.

When she took the ice for her final skate in Milan, her mindset had completely changed. “I didn’t need a medal,’’ she said. “If I fell on every jump, I would still be out there wearing this dress, so no matter what, I was all good.’’

The Unexpected Key to Resilience

Liu’s journey to the Olympic podium reminds me of a talk I heard given to a room full of coaches at the American Volleyball Coaches Association Convention. Let me introduce you to Dr. Roberta Kraus, PhD., the President of the Center for Sports Psychology in Colorado Springs. Dr. Kraus’s presentation titled Resilience Tools and Techniques was focused the importance of giving yourself adequate recovery time and having a balanced athletic identity to avoid career burnout.

“We have to spend time getting them back to the love of their sport, the love of performing and the love of participating the sport,” said Dr. Kraus. “Versus worrying about a ranking, a world record or a podium. As soon as you start focusing on an outcome, you’re adding additional pressure that starts in the mind, and the mind and the heart always decides what your body does.”

Dr. Kraus is a sports psychologist renown for helping athletes and teams reach their peak performance through a holistic approach to mental wellness and mental toughness. The mental training programs that she’s designed and implemented have a proven track record of improving player performance, communication and team dynamics under pressure. She’s worked hand in hand with Olympians and Paralympian’s at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center to support athlete mental health and help athletes achieve their dreams. Given her extensive experience in working with world class athletes, she could have talked about any aspect of sport psychology but she chose to focus on recovery and resilience strategies because career burnout is the greatest threat to your athletic career.

How to Avoid Burnout

According to a poll from the National Alliance for Youth Sports, approximately 70 percent of kids in the United States drop out of sports by time they turn 13 because, “it’s just not fun anymore”.  Staleness syndrome starts at a young age and continues to plague players and coaches at every level. Athletes and coaches who overtrain, lack life balance and deny themselves critical space for rest and recovery experience burnout.

In other words, players and coaches lack resiliency. Dr. Kraus defines resiliency as, “the capacity of a department, team, coach or athlete to maintain their emotional balance, to empathize, to hope and to persist in the face of frustration”. So how we cultivate healthy patterns and habits within our team to support resilience training for elite performers?

The solution is a combination of rest and balance. Rest is critical because it helps prevent injuries, reduce fatigue, and enhance mental clarity, allowing you to bounce back from setbacks and perform your best when it matters most. However effective recovery strategies include more than just your physical needs like sleep, proper nutrition, hydration, rehab and active rest days. Incorporating practices of mindfulness, imagery and individual sports counseling can further support your healing process, reduce stress, strengthen your mental toughness and help you overcome burnout. By prioritizing your mental health and wellness, athletes and coaches not only recover faster but build a foundation for enduring resilience—both physically and mentally.

Let me put it simply, if you want to stay in the game long term, you’ve got to have balance. Allow yourself time to physically recover and explore other passions in life.  Having a balanced athletic identity and being intentional about your recovery time are a critical components to developing resiliency in players and teams. 

Get the Support You Need

Maybe as you read this, the story feels familiar —a spark of recognition that you know there is more to life than your sport, but you don’t know how to access it. The good news is that you don’t have to retire or step away complete, there are other ways to find balance, build mental resilience and extend your career by overcoming burnout. Choosing to invest in your mental health and wellness could be the most important investment you make in your career. You deserve to be in control of your own life and pursue your athletic career with joy and creativity.

At Headstrong Mindset, Dr. Brooke Rundle specializes in guiding elite athletes and coaches, through this very process. As an AASP Certified Mental Performance Consultant and licensed sports counselor in Colorado, Dr. Rundle is dually trained in both clinical mental health and sport psychology. This holistic approach to sport psychology can help you reconnect with your true self and rediscover your passion.

• Schedule your complimentary 15-minute consultation with Dr. Brooke Rundle today.
• Learn more about how mental coaching and sports counseling can help you build resilience and overcome burnout.
• Embrace the next chapter in your athletic career: one rooted in joy, resilience, and a deep love for your sport.

Other Services and Resources

In case you missed it, you can watch Alyssa Liu’s gold medal performance and learn more about her career as a member of the US National Figure Skating Team here.

For more tips on how to avoid burnout during your season, check out this interview with Utah University’s Head Volleyball Coach Beth Launiere on how to avoid burnout during your college season.

If you don’t already have it, make sure to download the free workbook that provides mental training worksheets to help you improve focus, increase confidence and balance your athletic identity.

Post originally written in 2020 and updated in 2026 in response to Alysa Liu’s Olympic Gold medal performance. Dr. Brooke Rundle is a former collegiate and professional athlete, an AASP Certified Mental Performance Consultant and Licensed Counselor in the state of Colorado. Dr. Rundle provides sports counseling and mental performance consulting to coaches and athletes to optimize mental performance and improve mental health.

admin

The post What can we learn from Alysa Liu about resilience? appeared first on Headstrong Mindset LLC.

Performance errors and setbacks are a part of a every sport, for every athlete, at every level. We all understand this concept and yet oftentimes have a difficult time recovering from the previous play and shifting the focus to the next one. If you find yourself worrying about the future, or dwelling on past mistakes during games, try this.

After making a performance error, it is common to re-play the event in your mind. The mental re-replay will either reinforce the impact of the error by dwelling on it, or help you recover and prepare for the next play by visualizing the correction and engaging in positive self-talk. Mentally fixing the error will prepare you for the next play and help you return to focusing on the present moment.

This “fix-it” and “play forward” mentality encourages athletes to control their reaction to error by re-directing attention towards the next play. Rather than responding to a mistake with a barrage of negative self-talk, try correcting the error in your mind and returning to the present moment in preparation for the next play.

Errors do not have to be catastrophic. The goal is not to never make mistakes in games or tournaments. The goal is to mentally recover from mistakes faster and move on to the next play. The question athletes need to answer is: how quickly do you move from an emotion focus to a task, problem-solving focus in competition? (Lodato, 2022).  By creating intentional, consistent, and repeatable routines for handling errors in competition, you will learn to let go of the past and mentally prepare for the next play.

Practical Strategies

Here’s a few examples of practical and tangible strategies to embody the “fix-it” mentality and mentally move on to the next play. 

• Step away from the baseline in tennis or service line in volleyball
•  Redirect attention to a focus point or cue to clear the mind.
• Take a big inhale and mentally release the error on the exhale.
• Make a physical movement to symbolically “wipe it away”. Some volleyball players will wipe the sweat off their forehead or beach volleyball players may pick up sand and throw it to get rid of the error.
•  Imagine flushing the away and going down a drain (Ravizza).

References

Lodato, V.A. (2022). Imagery and Visualization Week 7 [PowerPoint slides]. Sport Performance & Psychology, University of Western States. 

Lodato, V.A. (2022). Handling Competitive Stress [Handout]. Sport Performance & Psychology, University of Western States. 

The post Fix-It Mentality: Recover from Performance Errors Faster appeared first on Headstrong Mindset LLC.

What does it mean to have an athletic identity?

Your athletic identity is the degree to which you identify with your role as an athlete competing in your sport ¹ It’s basically a framework for an athlete’s self-concept. Sometimes, being an athlete can become such a big part of who you are that it overshadows other aspects of yourself and life can feel unbalanced.

Evaluating your athletic identity.

To assess athletic identity you can use the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale, also known as (AIMS) ².  AIMS is a 10 item self-reporting assessment based on a 1 to 7 Likert-scale that athletes can do to determine their level of athletic identity. The assessment includes statements such as “I consider myself an athlete”, “most of my friends are athletes”, & “I spend more time thinking about sport than anything else”. However the simplest way to check if your athletic identity is out of balance is to describe who you are without mentioning your sport.

Can you do it?

If you struggle to describe yourself without reference to your sport, that might be a sign that you have an unhealthy or imbalanced athletic identity and it’s time to balance the scale.

Warning signs to watch out for.

There are several risks and costs associated with having an imbalanced or unhealthy athletic identity. Athletes with an imbalanced athletic identity are more susceptible to depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and early burnout from sport. Signs to watch out for include reduced self-esteem or low confidence, irrational fear of failure, feelings of guilt, increased aggression, and difficulty in decision-making.

Finding a healthy balance.

One of the most of effective ways you can balance your athletic identity is to make and maintain friendships outside of your sport that don’t care about your performance or the amount of playing time you get. ³

Another way to maintain a healthy athletic identity is to find hobbies to do outside of your sport like cooking, gardening or making art and music. Having a healthy balance will not only improve your overall mental health, but it will also strengthen your mental toughness and resilience in sport during transitions in playing time, during periods of injury and retirement from sport. ⁴

Your sport should not define you. As an athlete, or a coach, your athletic identity is just one of part of you are. ⁵ A healthy athletic identity maintains a balance between your sport and life outside of sport. This includes prioritizing family, maintaining friendships outside of your sport, hobbies that have nothing to do with your sport. ⁶ It is critical to have a social support network that extends beyond on your sport or professional career. It is also important to have some ideas about what you might want to do after your athletic career is over. That’s what a healthy balance looks like. You are more than just your sport.

Are you ready to the take the next step?

Maybe you read this and resonated with the difficulty of balancing elite sports with your personal life. Conscious awareness is the first step to achieving personal growth and professional balance. Choosing to invest in your mental health and well-being can be life-changing and life-giving as an athlete and a person.

At Headstrong Mindset, Dr. Brooke Rundle specializes in supporting athletes, performers, and coaches with sports counseling Denver. Ask any sports expert who has been in the game a long time and they will tell you that balancing your athletic identity is the secret to enjoying a long career in sports and avoiding burnout . You deserve to walk away from your sport on your own terms. As a mental coach for athletes and sport psychology provider in Denver, Dr. Rundle can help you balance your career demands and learn to thrive. You don’t have to search any farther for sport psychology services in Denver.

• Schedule a complimentary 15-minute consultation with Dr. Rundle.
• Learn more about how a mental coach for athletes can support you on your journey.
• Learn more about the importance of having a balanced athletic identity to avoid experiencing the yips.
• Start a new chapter in your athletic career by finding balance in your professional career and personal life.

References

The post Balancing Your Athletic Identity appeared first on Headstrong Mindset LLC.

History is full of stories about athletes that have been cut from teams, experienced heartbreaking losses, and devastating injuries. However because the focus is usually on the career highlights of the winners, the heroic stories of their persevering journeys are often missed.

Michael Jordan was famously cut in high school from his varsity basketball team in the 10th grade. Later in his career, Jordan reflected back on the experience, “It was embarrassing not making that team. They posted the roster and it was there for a long, long time without my name on it. I remember being really mad, too.” The experienced seeded his famously resilient work ethic. “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it and that usually got me going again.” Jordan finished his career as a global icon named MVP of the NBA Finals 6x with 6 NBA championship rings, 2 Olympic Gold Medals, and widely acclaimed as the NBA’s the greatest basketball player of all time.

The experience of getting cut from a team or sidelined, and bouncing back stronger is not a unique narrative for elite athletes. The list goes on and on.

Bill Russell was cut from his junior varsity basketball team in high school and mostly ignored from college recruiters prior to winning 11 NBA Championships.

Abby Wambach suffered devastating World Cup losses in 2003, 2007, and 2011 before eventually accomplishing her dream of winning the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup at the end of her soccer career.

Crystal Dunn was the very last player cut from the US Women’s 2015 World Cup roster. She described the experience, “getting that phone call and being told you’re not going to the World Cup was soul crushing. I really doubted myself in that moment…I had to make the decision to pick myself up, dust myself off, just get back to work and enjoy the game again.” Four years later, in 2019, Dunn became a FIFA World Cup Champion. In 2021 she was the only American World Cup player to start in every match at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Tom Brady was looked over in the first 5 rounds of the 2000 NFL draft. Eventually selected as pick number 199, Brady was the 7th quarterback selected in the NFL draft that year. Two years later Brady led the New England Patriots to a Super Bowl in 2002. He would go on to win 7 Super Bowls in throughout career.

If you were recently cut or sidelined, you are in good company. It hurts now but might just be the extra fuel you need to sustain in the future. All of these athletes maintained a growth mindset to work harder and come back stronger. Take a tip from MJ, Wamback, Dunn and Brady. All of these athletes are examples of overcoming adversity in sports before rising to the top. It is the history of failures that pave the way to future success.

Do you know of other comeback stories about great athletes? I want to hear them! Drop me a line and share stories about famous athletes coming back from being cut.

The post How to Bounce Back from Adversity in Sports appeared first on Headstrong Mindset LLC.