Positive Discomfort and the U.S. Women’s Soccer Olympic Gold Medal in 2024

Alexandra Moe / The Washington Post:

When Emma Hayes, the U.S. women’s national soccer team coach, kept the starters in the lineup over a grueling stretch of successive 90-minute Olympic soccer games in France, murmurs rose that the team was on its way to an exit, ousted by exhaustion.

Yet the team won the gold medal, the latest recipients of Hayes’s successful coaching methodology — one embracing “positive discomfort,” as she put it in interviews. The idea is that full potential lies on the other side of being challenged, yet it’s different from “no pain, no gain.” The team also boasts epic fun, goofiness, humanity and cohesion. When asked what propelled their trophy, Hayes, who is considered one of the world’s best coaches, replied, “Love.”

Thirty years ago, Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck pioneered the concept of the growth mindset, the idea that intelligence — and ability — can be developed. Those with this mindset tend to welcome challenges rather than see them as threats, Dweck said.

Today, leadership models lean on the science of motivation. And a slew of research confirms the importance of discomfort in motivating growth; in developing psychological well-being; and among adolescents, reappraising stress responses to learn how to engage positively with stressors in their lives.

Our biological inclination is to avoid discomfort, yet improving at anything requires action, practice, feedback and mistakes.

What if we could reframe our attitude and see discomfort as a sign of progress? Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Chicago instructed 557 improv students to embrace discomfort as an indicator of learning and skill development.

Students who were told to seek discomfort took more risks, persisted longer in the exercises and reported a greater sense of achievement. Comfort might be fine for keeping warm, but when we feel comfortable, “we’re often not advancing,” says Kaitlin Woolley, a marketing professor at Cornell and one of the study’s researchers.

One dilemma facing managers, teachers, coaches and parents — anyone leading others, particularly younger people — is how to provide critical feedback without crushing their confidence, David Yeager, a developmental psychologist at University of Texas at Austin and one of the world’s leading researchers into mindsets, writes in his book “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.”

One effective method is the mentor-mindset, or high standards mixed with high support.

“A coach can’t tell a player, ‘You’re the worst and you have to change,’ and then say, ‘Go do it on your own,’” says Yeager, who writes in his book that young people crave authentic respect. “The player needs to first feel like the coach is on their side, before they’re going to put in the work to change all of their technique or performance,” he adds. When that happens, criticism becomes a compliment.

In an interview, when asked about Hayes’s influence over many years as her coach at Chelsea, star forward Lauren James described intense support. “She understands me as a person, on and off the pitch. She knows how to get the best out of me. She put time into me.”

Hayes could not be reached for an interview for this article. But in her book on leadership, Hayes describes leaders as more akin to social workers. Over 12 years coaching English soccer power Chelsea, she won 16 trophies, before departing to lead the U.S. women’s team.

Middle school students also respond positively to high support in classrooms. In an experiment published by Yeager and Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen, teachers covered students’ essays with critical comments.

Half the students received a note from the teacher: I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know that you can reach them. The other half received a different note: I’m giving you these comments so you’ll have feedback on your essay.

The first note contained “wise feedback,” a clear statement describing the reason for the critique: the belief that the student could meet the high standard with the right support. Those students were twice as likely to revise their essays, and they improved the quality of their final drafts. Black students benefited more than White students in the experiment, and nearly 90 percent of their scores improved from the first to the second draft, the researchers said.

How we perceive discomfort and negative emotions affects our experience of them. Emotions, whether pleasant or unpleasant, typically last seconds to minutes, says Emily Willroth, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. But when we judge uncomfortable emotions negatively, that leads to more negative emotions — shame, worry, rumination, she says, generating “a spiral of ‘meta emotions.’”

An emotion is a signal, like a horn. Sadness may indicate that more support is needed. Anger: an injustice. But negatively judging the emotion — essentially bemoaning the horn — extends it, according to Willroth.

In her research, Willroth has found that those who accept negative emotions like sadness and anger have better psychological health, less depression and greater life satisfaction. Accepting unpleasant emotions doesn’t mean inaction, she says. It means interpreting them as a normal response to what’s happening in your life, rather than prolonging them with negative judgment.

Intense stressors are a normal part of performing well, of learning, growing and developing new skills, Yeager says. Our stress response — what’s happening in our bodies and minds when we experience a stressful situation — prepares us to take action. Professional athletes tend to appraise stressful competitions as a challenge.

In mindset research, people respond to how their minds appraise a stressor, as either a challenge or a threat.

When the mind expects to meet the challenge, breathing increases to send more oxygen to the blood, the heart pumps faster and blood vasculature dilates to spread the blood to the muscles and brain. Motivation and performance go up, Yeager writes. The opposite happens when a threat is viewed as insurmountable and the body moves to protect itself. In such cases, the heart may pump fast, but blood vasculature constricts, keeping blood central in the chest cavity, essentially preparing for upcoming defeat and tissue damage.

A thousand factors must converge to create a championship team — years of preparation, skill development, mindset, support, nutrition, game analysis and micro programs that chisel away to gain every advantage.

On a practice field in France last summer, a final hurdle loomed between the team, its new coach and an Olympic gold medal: Brazil. From the sidelines, Hayes shouted her ethos to her players. “We bring the energy and the positivity and the joy! Boom!” She was euphoric, fully supportive.

Then she repeated her high standard: “We are not going home without gold tomorrow.”

For the first time in 12 years, the U.S. team came home with the gold.