The Resilience Challenge

I was reading a bedtime story to my daughter from a book entitled Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100+ Tales of Extraordinary Women. One of the stories was about Wilma Rudolph, who overcame polio to compete in the Olympics as a sprinter, broke a world record, and was declared “the fastest woman in the world.”

Rudolph’s is a story of resilience, and the quote I lingered on with my daughter was this:

“…if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.”

– Wilma Rudolph

It’s simultaneously inspiring and sobering. Losing, it turns out, might be one of the most important keys to success.

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We’re going to lose…a lot

Pick up a newspaper, scroll through your feeds, or look outside your window, and you’re bound to see how bad things can be.

Teams at work are doing more with less.
All of us know someone who has been looking for work for too long.
We’ve all seen the violence escalating around the country and abroad.

The wins often don’t feel like enough and we wonder: “how much longer we can keep this going?”

For many, it feels we’re living through a never-ending losing streak.

Down or Forward?

“But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”

– Rocky Balboa

When people hear the quote by Rudolph, or the potentially more well-known version above from Rocky, it’s easy to misinterpret the advice.

It can sound a little like advice to keep moving forward while taking a beating. It can sound like relentlessly pushing yourself despite the wear and tear. It can sound like never quitting for even a second.

But that’s not learning how to lose, that’s chasing the win at the risk of losing permanently.

If you want to keep moving forward, or get back up, or improve your chances of winning, you need to know when to stay down and catch your breath. You need to know when to pause and reflect on your strategy so that you don’t keep walking straight into the same punches with your face.

Maybe it’s time we pause to catch our breath.

The 3-Step Resilience Process

No matter what has you knocked down at the moment, right now is a good opportunity to practice resilience. Here’s your challenge:

The first part of the process is to experience the loss:

Feel the ache in your heart, the burn in your legs, and swirling frustration in your mind.

Be sad. Be angry. Be tired.

Let it wash over you instead of running from it or working through it.

The second part of the process is to recover:

Find those things that recharge you.

Go to bed a little earlier, get a little more fresh air, or spend some time connecting with those you love.

When you take the time to experience the loss and give yourself a chance to recover a bit, you have a much better chance of success when you get back in the game.

Here’s the final part of the process: get back up:

You will know when it is time to get back up.

In some cases, it will be a feeling you get when you’ve allowed yourself to feel the loss and recover a bit. In most cases, external circumstances will force you to get up, and it might be before you are truly ready.

In either case, this is where resilience lives. It exists as the answer to the question of “will I give up for good?”

Which leads me to the key element of resilience…and today’s challenge.

Finding The Point.

While experience and recovery are key elements in the process of resilience, both are insufficient to fuel resilience. In fact, the only thing that can push people to keep getting up even while ignoring their own pain and need for rest, is their commitment to something bigger than themselves.

We push past our limitations to protect our loved ones.
We stand in the face of danger, despite our fear, on principle.
We try, try, and try again when our belief in something important outweighs our own needs.

This is where so many “leaders” and organizations fail. They demand that people keep pushing forward, past the point of exhaustion and burnout, for what?

For some vague sense of team unity?
So that someone else might materially benefit?
So they might get to keep the job pushing them to exhaustion?

The challenge I issue to each of you today, is to figure out what you will keep getting back up for. What is bigger than you? What will you keep your sights set on, so that the question of whether or not to get up, is really not a question at all?

Find that and you will have found the fuel of resilience, and you are going to be a champion someday.

I hope you enjoyed this post!

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