Pick Yourself Up

When you face a setback in life or at work, the challenge is not to cave in

RESILIENCE means knowing how to cope in spite of setbacks, barriers or limited resources.

Resilience is a measure of how much you want something and how much you are willing, and able, to overcome obstacles to get it.

It has to do with your emotional strength. For instance, how many cold calls can you make in a row that all turn out to be, “No, thank you”?

Look to Lincoln

Remember Abraham Lincoln? You wouldn’t, if he had given up.

In 1832, he was defeated for the state legislature. Then he was elected to it in 1834.

In 1838, he was defeated for speaker of the state house.

In 1840, he was defeated for elector. He ran for Congress in 1843 and, guess what, he was defeated.

He was elected to Congress in 1846 and then lost for re-election in 1849.

He ran for the United States Senate in 1855 and was defeated.

In 1856, he was defeated for vice-president. He ran again for the US Senate in 1858 and lost.

And in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the US — but only after eight major setbacks. That is resilience!

Your challenge to stay resilient may not be quite the same as Abe Lincoln’s.

You might be working on making a sales quota when 90 per cent of your prospects say “no”.

You might be pushing for a change in your department and you have to fight with the management.

You might be trying to get your co-workers to recycle paper to save money and trees.

When you are up against obstacles, you can either maintain your resilience — or cave in to defeat.

Kids know better

People are all pretty resilient when they are kids. When they fall down, they pick themselves up again.

When the tent they make with sheets and cardboard gets blown apart by the wind, they put it back together again.

When someone says they cannot go to the park because it is raining, they find something else to do.

However, somewhere along the way, they start to develop a rigidity towards the unexpected, and then towards change in general.

They lose their ability to shift course or to try something else. They lose their resilience.

Bounce back

Let me give you a couple of tips on improving your resilience.

Here is an exercise that is fun and can tell you something about yourself.

Finish this sentence with five different endings: “When I’m faced with a problem, I ...”

Give yourself 30 seconds to come up with any five answers. Be creative.

Is there a pattern to your answers?

Here are some answers I came up with for myself:

When I’m faced with a problem, I...

• generate several different options to deal with it.
• ask my wife, Sue, what she thinks.
• listen to music in the dark.
• say to myself: ‘OK, this too shall pass.’
• call one of my friends to get his input.
• decide it is time to read the sports page.

Now, some of those answers are useful and some are silly. However, the exercise revealed to me that my attitude is basically one of engaging the problem rather than running away from it.

I hope you have some silly answers among the serious ones. But I hope that your answers indicate that your basic approach to problems is a hands-on, can-do attitude. That is the stuff resilience is made of. — Source: ST/ANN

Article by Dr Tony Alessandra, president of Online Assessments and co-founder of MentorU.com. He is also the author of 14 books including Charisma and The Platinum Rule.