Resilience is the ability to adapt to situations or recover quickly from a failure. The great value of resilience is that the faster you can recover, the faster you can give another attempt. The skill comes in learning how to think correctly so you maximize your recovery and ability to withstand discomfort.
It is also the ability to be flexible in the face of ever-changing circumstances. If you encounter difficulty on the job, you want to go see the person who is not fazed by this. You want to talk to the person who can laugh in the face of difficulty and begin to generate solutions faster than you can even tell him the problem. The goal we should have as men is to become that person. You must be the person who produces solutions. You are the one who is flexible in the face of chaos and disorder.
Let us look at a few of the key attributes of resilience.
I – Mental Recovery
The essence of resilience is the ability to recover quickly from any event. Whether minor setback, outright failure, or during mental training, the ability to recover fast is key. This is the mental equivalent of resting between sets of physical exercise you want your body to be able to recover in the time allotted to that your performance on the next set will not be reduced.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to simply subject yourself to more events that will tax you. This is a difficult path, but it is very beneficial as well. The more times you can fail, the faster you will be able to recover from failure. You will condition your mind to realize that no failure is permanent. There is no single mistake that can cripple you for life (outside of a felony or something like that).
In the modern world, the majority of our failures or setbacks do not really harm us at all. Our very survival is not at stake when we take an exam or go for a job interview. Nearly every society has some form of a social safety net that can catch us if we faceplant. Therefore, there is no excuse for us to avoid trying many new things. We should race towards failure, knowing that in it is the growth of character and resilience we are looking for.
Mental recovery is also the bottleneck for all other recoveries. We have to be able to recover in our minds before we can get our body to attempt something again. How fast the brain can recover is the rate-limiting step for our total recovery.
II – Physical Training
We can simulate adversity and failure with our physical training. Just like we can train to recover faster in the gym, we can use those principles and learn how to recover faster in our mental training.
If you want to recover faster in the gym, you have to look at the root of recovery and see where you need to improve. Do you need to work on your heart, lungs, nervous system, or muscular system? Which one of those is limiting your recovery? Once you figure that out, you can begin to train it. You can research new training ideas to isolate the system you want to train. You can track your results and see how well you improve over time. There are a number of ways you can train your body and recover faster.
You can do the same thing with your mind. Find the bottlenecks for your mental recovery. Is it the inability to get over failure? Perhaps a low tolerance for work volume. Maybe you are burnt out and need to figure out how to recover while still moving forwards. Whatever it is, you cannot fix it without first identifying it.
Once identified, you can start experimenting with different recovery tactics and see which one works for you. If you are burned out, research how people recover from burnout and what the causes of it are. Learn how to increase your work tolerance and complete more tasks with the same working hours and energy.
The key to rapid growth is to fix whatever problem is the main limiting factor. Once you fix that, you improve in every other facet of your performance. Learn from mentors and people who have been in your shoes before. There is no need to figure out everything through trial and error. Learn from the experiences of others, this will allow you to learn rapidly. If you learn rapidly, you recover rapidly. Pursue knowledge so you can first know yourself so that you can recover and build resilience.
III – Reframing Experiences
To mentally recover, we often have to reframe the experience. This also applies to the anticipation of events that may lead to recovery. Where we choose to focus our minds will be what determines our resilience. If we choose to focus on the negatives, the consequences, or the dangers, we will train our minds to fear and be anxious. But if we focus our minds on the positives, the benefits, and our capabilities, we train our minds to be resilient.
When facing a new event that is causing you fear, shift the focus in your mind. You change your focus by changing your questions. Instead of asking, “What am I going to do when I fail?”, ask, “How am I going to succeed?” Your brain will give you an answer for any question you ask. So, make sure your questions build you up instead of tearing your strength down.
Even if the event is frightening and you are afraid of negative results, write down all the positives that would result from a seemingly negative failure. Write down your problem on paper. Write down what would be the worst that could happen if you failed. Then write about how you would recover from the failure. What action would you take to immediately get back on your feet and start recovering and moving towards a new goal? If we choose to stay still and wallow in our failure, we will only become depressed. But if we begin moving towards a new goal, that movement will fill us with energy, and we will recover.
The worst thing you can do for an injury is to give it pure bedrest. The best thing you can do is get the joint moving as much as you can tolerate and begin to recover. You must do the same thing with your mind.
When it comes to previous failures, you must learn to look back on the lessons you learned while leaving behind the pain associated with the mistake. This can be very difficult, but it is very beneficial to us. No man wants to relive the pain of failure over and over again, yet we do this on a regular basis! Instead of leaving the mistake behind, we choose to play the event again and again in our minds. We reopen those old wounds, experience the worst parts of the failure, and restart the mourning process again. This is no way to succeed as a man.
When we look back on our mistakes, we need to be able to pull out everything we learned and turn a blind eye to everything that is painful. You can do this by learning to first laugh at the failure. If you can laugh at it, your brain will not take it as seriously as before. It must not have been a big deal if you can laugh about it.
Second, look at all the benefits of that mistake. Intentionally look for ways that the mistake led to future opportunities or successes. When you first try this exercise, do not be surprised if you cannot think of anything. Your brain is stilled scarred from the experience. It wants to say, “there is not one single good thing that resulted from that mistake! Don’t ask me that again!” But you must continue to ask it, eventually, it will find an answer just to get you to stop bothering it.
Third, be grateful for the successes and for the lessons. It is difficult to experience negative emotions while also experiencing gratitude. In fact, it is impossible. So, look for all the benefits that have come into your life since your failure and appreciate them. Be grateful for what you have earned or the opportunities you have.
Even if you fail, you likely still have all your basic needs met. You still have food, water, and a place to live in the majority of cases. What then do you have to worry about? Even if the worst should happen at any time and you “fail beyond repair”, you can still come back here. You can reach out to your friends, family, and church for help and they will lend you a hand. Our social structure is built so that we can support one another.