Being resilient means looking through a different lens. We take a different point of view when life throws us a curve ball. Instead of reacting in the same old I-guess-I'm-a-failure way again, we stop making failure personal and instead look for an opportunity in this difficult situation, to be our best.
NHL coach Pat Quinn had a sign in his coach`s dressing room when I played for him with the Vancouver Canucks, that read: A failed project is not a failed person! Sometimes difficulty forces us to think that we are the problem, when what we need to know is that people throughout history have faced many of the same issues that we are facing now.
Choosing not to see it as a personal issue is critical. We must choose to stop the pity party flow and decide to use the situation to energize us and make us Hungry!. Being resilient shows up in the way we choose to act and in the way we focus on finding a solution instead of finding fault.
Difficult times invoke two types of responses from us;
1- We can have the classic pity party: How can this be happening to me? How could God allow this to happen in my life?
2- We can allow difficult times to fuel our HUNGRY spirit, develop our character and challenge us to grow and be better.
Successful, resilient people stop themselves when their minds begin to rehearse failure. They reprogram their minds to rehearse the actions or attitudes that will bring success. Rehearse successful outcomes, and then step up to the line.
Dictionary.com defines RESILIENCE as:
1- springing back; rebounding.
2- returning to the original form or position after being bent, compressed, or stretched.
3- recovering readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyant.
Business coach Mark Thompson tells of the fair-haired Stanford University freshman who was struggling miserably to keep up with his studies. Hampered by dyslexia, he had flunked English twice, not to mention French, and was on the verge of being forced to leave the school. Math and science came easily, but any course that demanded critical reading and writing completely overwhelmed him. It was a daily battle just to move his eyes across a page and absorb what he read.
Did this fair-haired fellow stay stuck with a lifetime of failure? Hardly! Today, that once-floundering college freshman, Charles Schwab, is internationally known for reinventing financial services. The San Francisco-based firm that he founded in 1971 has accumulated 1.1 trillion in assets under his management.
Virgin Enterprises entrepreneur Richard Branson has an obsession for simple and often outrageous ideas that have given his marketing the power to cut through the clutter of competition. "The good thing about being dyslexic is I need everything simplified for me," he says. "By simplifying everything and making things clear to me, I can then make it clear to other people."
For Branson, however, the biggest challenge has always been math. "If I were good at it," he laughs, "I probably never would have started an airline." He's used that line for years, but he's only half-joking. "We run the biggest group of private companies in the UK and up until last year, I couldn't work out the difference between net and gross," Branson claims. His board knew it, so instead of saying, 'That's our gross,' they would say, ‘That's good news, Richard,' or 'That's bad news, Richard.' "Bizarre things like that."
A board member finally gave him a simple image that is now a rather famous lesson in finance that Branson has been sharing in his speeches for years. The board member said, 'Look, think of a big ocean and you are catching fish ... what's left inside the net is 'net' and what you are left with at the end of the year, and everything else, is gross, Branson says. "Wonderful. Now (even) I know that a net has holes in it."
Mark Thompson makes an interesting point about resilience: Your greatest weakness may be your strength. The challenges these leaders faced made them better CEOs. They were forced to recruit talented teams to subsidize blind spots and delegate authority to achieve their goals long before most other entrepreneurs come to that necessary realization during their careers.
We don't just choose resilience to weather storms and stay the same. We view and do life through the resilience-lens so that we can grow, learn and be our best!
Have a resilient, HUNGRY, week!
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