Forbes: What Bode Miller Taught Me About Mental Resilience via Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC)

I'm not sure what I expected Bode Miller to tell me about the key to his resilience and success, but I sure didn't think it would be "coherence" — a holistic and consistent approach to finding balance and improving performance. This, after all, is simultaneously one of America's all-time greatest skiers and one of our most maligned fallen angels. I didn't expect him to talk to me about skiing drunk, but I also wasn't expecting the most succinct and insightful perspective on mental resilience I have encountered in years of research.

Bode is one of the most interesting case studies in resilience, not only because of his successes but rather because of his very highly publicized failures and tragedies. The setbacks came early for him, when, at a young age, he realized he had bad technique, wasn't the fastest skier, wasn't the strongest and didn't have a ton of endurance. He couldn't simply work within the coaching system as it existed and achieve his goals. Instead, he had to get creative, work harder, be more flexible and adaptable, and be willing to do things differently rather than simply accepting conventional wisdom.

Those early lessons would be key to his later success, recovering from his failure to medal in Turin or finding ways to work through the tragic death of his 19-month old daughter and using the lessons to save lives through drowning prevention activities.

Find Your Center

One of the world's great overachievers then gave me his keys for making it through the hard times. In a world of craziness and chaos that surrounds us, you must constantly find your center. Be dialed in and ready to go. How else could he achieve such greatness during the Olympics when that event offers very little time for meditation and focus? The same goes for all our overscheduled lives. Just like mountaineers find a moment to rest amid every stride, Bode works to find his moments of meditation in everything he does.

Although he's no longer on the cover of Sports Illustrated, his drive is very much still intact. He's currently working with different companies to develop and market a wide variety of products, including new goggles designed to improve skier visibility and safety and a personalized digital skier coaching platform.

While most of us can't comprehend hurling ourselves down a mountain at record-breaking speeds, we can use coherence to manage our daily overload with these three suggestions that are fit for nearly anyone's resolutions for 2021.

Enforce Efficiency

Make sure to prioritize what's important and ignore the rest. Easy to say but hard to do in a world optimized to divert our attention and distract us.

Maintain Integrity

Be honest with everyone around you. Maintaining a facade is too exhausting. Saying what you feel and being true to yourself becomes a way to conserve energy rather than wasting it on pointless posturing.

Seek Synchronicity

Find ways to use your personal passions to accelerate your professional interests and vice versa. Building overlapping personal and professional networks helps make you more robust to setbacks and makes the work more fun.

The three pillars of efficiency, integrity and synchronicity form the foundation of internal coherence. They remove energy-draining distractions and allow you to reap economies of scale from the time you invest in each of these different areas. That coherence, in turn, allows you to perform at a higher level with less exertion. Living harmoniously with your values makes it easier to overcome life's inevitable setbacks.

These principles have helped drive a coherence to Bode's existence that he credits with being the key to overcoming adversity and succeeding at the highest level. I'll be thinking about how to add more coherence to my life in 2021, and I suggest you consider that as well.

This article was originally published as a Council Post through the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) on Forbes.com.