The Magical Benefits of Resilience

by Sherrie Campbell from entrepreneur.com

The single most important trait for achieving big goals is the capacity to return, again and again, to the task.

Life and business are full of unexpected challenges and hardships. To succeed we must embrace our inner warrior. We must find our resilience. Resilience is our ability to pull something from deep within to continue moving forward. That thing within us, is hope. Hope is the magical emotion which reminds of our dream, of why we are doing what we are doing, and the reasons we started. Hope funds resilience. It is that elusive pot of gold at the end of our story that makes the suffering we experience to get there, worth it.

1. Sense of community.

Being resilient doesn’t only come from suffering alone and without support. That is one way to be resilient, and we all experience this individual passage in life, but we are more resilient when we have supportive relationships to fall back on. Resilience requires community, even if it’s a community of two. Best case scenario is to have a community that is diverse in experience, age, outlook, talents, skills and viewpoints. These differences help us to be more resilient. Having a sense of community teaches us to look outward and to see a greatness that exists beyond our own individual desires. We are able to see that we can produce a change that is so significant for the whole that it makes the individual adversity at hand worth working through.

2. Nothing is insurmountable.

We cannot allow others to say ‘No’ to us. We must hold the deep belief that nothing is insurmountable. There is always more than one way up the same mountain. Resilience is not just about struggling and surviving, as much as it is about being resourceful enough to thrive. We must be leaders in our own right, and turn each “No” into a “Next.” Make the choice to dig deep and do the insurmountable. Once we see that we can do what we thought we couldn’t, we are more prepared for the new challenges we are sure to face. Resilience requires a certain stubbornness to do what we set out to do, regardless of adversity.

3. Change is a constant.

Change and challenge are fundamental to the development of who we are. How we handle change is the marker of our ability to adapt. To be resilient we must flex in response to the changes which come our way and re-set our sails. As we face challenge, we each have the right and responsibility to examine the roads ahead of us, and those we’ve already traveled. As we take inventory of where we are now, we also have the right to step off any and all negative roads, without feeling any shame or embarrassment to take another direction. To be resilient, we must be wise to understand that when we cannot change our circumstances, we must change ourselves.