Resilience: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change
In this week’s newsletter, Rick discusses the importance of resilience as the fourth Leadership Essential, which was ironically very relevant for what I have been experiencing in my life, although I’m not a leader in the business sense of the term. As many of our clients and followers know, when I’m not working for Behavioral Essentials I’m pursing a career as a professional classical singer, which can be a nightmare of an emotional roller coaster at times. I applied to different graduate programs 3 years in a row, getting rejected 2 of those years in a row which was pretty painful. However, I wasn’t going to give up and was determined to pursue music in a challenging academic setting so I kept practicing and the third year I applied I got into 3 programs with scholarship offers. For me, this was exciting evidence that resilience really did pay off, and that growth takes time and patience; and if you go with the ebbs and flows of that process you’ll often end up right where you’re supposed to be. To make it in the professional music world, you have to have a rock hard shell and be able to bounce off rejections all the time, and, like any career, the more you progress, the bigger the rejections get and the more you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. Some days I’m hit with discouraging, confidence killing news and somedays I give a good performance that I’m proud of, and sometimes these days can happen one after the other. However, like my dad and our CEO says,
“Each time we fall down, we gain new information, new learnings. Remember, pain and experience are the great teachers. When we fall down, we have just received a new lesson from our teacher. That’s it. But so often, we beat ourselves up, and punish ourselves with internal verbal abuse. Not helpful. I suggest you remind yourself to cultivate the four Essential attitudes: Gentleness, patience, a sense of humor and curiosity. These are super powers by the way. “
Through these super powers, I have been able to build my resilience, one small step at a time. It’s a hard process, but I have seen it pay off, and I have to believe that it will continue to the further down the path I get.
In dealing with some of the adversity and change I’ve recently experienced, I found comfort and inspiration in some of these quotes, and I hope you do too:
“It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop.”
-Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”
-Ambrose Redmoon
“Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”
– Osho
“Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.”
-Robert F. Kennedy
“On the other side of a storm is the strength that comes from having navigated through it. Raise your sail and begin.”
-Gregory S. Williams
“Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you are going to do right now, and do it. Today is your lucky day.”
-Will Durant
“Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others.”
-Sharon Salzberg
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
-Thomas Edison
-Confucius
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
-Japanese Proverb
“No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength – if we have the virtue of resilience.”
– Eric Greitens, Resilience
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
-Albert Camus
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
-Maya Angelou
“Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”
-Buddha
