Raise Your Resilience

An Old-Fashioned Notion

Resiliency. Perseverance. Grit.

In a constantly evolving economy that increasingly favors those with knowledge and access to the latest and greatest technologies, whether that be designing NFTs, trading or mining cryptocurrency, or other endeavors that can generate significant amounts of income more quickly than ever, the concept of becoming more resilient can seem downright quaint.

For too long resilience seems to have been defined fairly narrowly as the ability to bounce back after adversity or disappointment; being able to manage and adapt to sources of stress or adversity.

Perseverance tends to be associated with a steadfastness in mastering skills or completing a task; having a commitment to learning.

Grit is a more recently publicized attribute, highly researched and promoted by Angela Duckworth, and is defined as the tendency to sustain interest and effort towards long-term goals. It is associated with self-control and deferring short-term gratification.

But the truth of the matter is, here we are in a new year with a new COVID variant, tensions rising in the country and throughout the entire world, and uncertainty remains as rampant as ever.

If you are a service-industry worker, I need not tell you that. The restaurant, hotel, or airline that you work for may still have a job for you today, but not tomorrow. It may be there next week, but what about next month or next year? If it is, can you earn more by working there than by doing any number of things including not working at all?

This month, employees may be enjoying the upper hand when it comes to finding a job, but what about next month? Or next year?

One of the benefits of being a bit older and, thus, theoretically wiser than those of you in your twenties or thirties (I grant that some in their forties are likely wiser than I am) is that I have seen numerous trends come and go. Multiple economic cycles of real estate booms and busts. The dot-com bubble of 2001 and 2002, the Great Recession from December 2007 through June 2009, the pandemic years of 2020 through the present, and I remain a breadwinning husband and father to this very day.

By no means am I claiming success, although by some estimates I would be.

Rather, I am sharing some thoughts and strategies about how you can give yourself the advantage of becoming more resilient — not only flourishing through the boom times but having the right mindset and skillset to continue flourishing through bad times, whether personal or on a wider scale.

I am on this journey with you, as well, so do not take this as preaching from high above or the pinnacle of success. It is my personal goal to continue not only becoming but remaining, stronger and more resilient through the difficult times that will undoubtedly come.

Thus, this is not one of the typical “how-to” or “how I made big money” articles or videos that populate my own endless feed, whether it be Medium, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Twitter, or whatever.

While I, too, want to gain the ability to earn six figures every month by reposting videos, it is more likely that I must continue gaining resiliency. I would bet that is true for you, as well.

So even though improving one’s resiliency may seem like an old-fashioned notion, I believe that it will remain just as important in the Twenties, Thirties, and decades to come as it was hundreds of years ago.

Perhaps more so than ever.

What Is Resilience?

In its essence, resilience is the process of being able to adapt well and bounce back quickly in times of stress. This stress may manifest as family or relationship problems, serious health problems, problems in the workplace or even financial problems to name a few.

Developing resilience can help you cope adaptively and bounce back after changes, challenges, setbacks, disappointments, and failures.

Research has shown that resiliency is pretty common and people tend to demonstrate resilience more frequently than you think. One example of resilience is the response of many Americans after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and individuals’ efforts to rebuild their lives.

Demonstrating resiliency doesn’t necessarily mean that you have not suffered difficulty or distress. It also does not mean you have not experienced emotional pain or sadness. The road to resilience is often paved with emotional stress and strain.

The good news is resilience can be learned. It involves developing thoughts, behaviors, and actions that allow you to recover from traumatic or stressful events in life.

No Easy Thing

Becoming more resilient is by no means an easy thing. You cannot achieve it by downloading an app, reading about it, or watching dozens of videos. You may learn more about it by reading things like this, but becoming more resilient takes time and effort.

When resilient people suffer setbacks or encounter things that seem completely overwhelming, they allow themselves to feel anger, grief, loss, distress, and confusion. However, they do not allow these feelings to become a permanent state. Not only can they heal from these setbacks, but they often bounce back stronger than ever.

The volatile and chaotic period, whether we mean politically, economically, or climate-wise, or some personal setback that you are suffering through, may not end soon. To build a better life for yourself, or for those who are dependent upon you, you must strive to become more resilient than those who came before you.

In this world of life-disrupting, non-stop change, those of us with resiliency skills will have a significant advantage over those who do not.

When those hard times come, like one with a very close family member that my own family is dealing with right now, we can either cope or crumble, become stronger or weaker, give up or persevere.

I prefer to persevere, but it is by no means an easy thing to do.

Can You Count on Yourself?

I suppose a better question would be, “If you can’t count on yourself, then who can you count on?”

Highly resilient people know that they can count on themselves during difficult times. They have a reservoir of inner strength that they can tap into during the most stressful times.

Again, because I am a bit older and wiser than most readers, I have the benefit of life experiences to draw upon when reflecting on how hard it was for me to persevere, remain gainfully employed, and financially support my family during many difficult years when my wife was a stay-at-home mom and our children were fully immersed suburban kids. I faced job losses multiple times and suffered through some terrible bosses, long commutes, and ten- to twelve-hour workdays on a regular basis. And me, a government worker to boot!

Having the inner strength to count on yourself is one of those things that is easier said than done. You may never have had to go to this well deep within yourself ever before, or you may have had to do it many times to make it to the point where you are at today.

Whatever the case may be, there are three core inner strengths that you can draw upon to count on yourself, and they begin to develop early in your life. Although these are things that begin to form who you are and how you view yourself and the world around you, the good news is that they are also things that you can learn and improve upon when you are older — for instance right now!

Those three things help define yourself. Yourself as in self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-concept.

Self-confidence

Developing self-confidence — establishing a good sense of self-concept, an understanding of our values and what is important to us, and believing in ourselves — is what manifests as resilience. This is what makes us hardy.

Hardiness does not mean emotional coldness or hardness. We don’t want kids to “toughen up” so much that they grow into unemotional, untouchable adults! Even the most resilient among us are still breakable, emotional human beings. We can feel the emotions of hardship while knowing that we will survive the difficult feelings

There is no magic switch that you can flip that will help you gain self-confidence. But if you can increase your mental toughness and “stick-to-it-iveness,” over time you will allow yourself to act on your inborn motivation to become skillful and more effective at what you do.

Even after more than twenty-one long, tough years in the field of economic development, I still find myself lacking self-confidence in some situations. The same goes for non-work matters.

In a world where we are constantly required to do things that we have never done before and leave our comfort zones, what choice do we have besides doing our best and gaining some more self-confidence along the way?

Do not think to yourself that you cannot do something. Become more self-reliant, adaptable to change, self-motivated to learn new skills, and willing to take risks. Think to yourself, “I have not done this thing yet, but I am going to now.”

When you succeed in reaching that goal, whether it is as small as conversing confidently with someone new or as big as leaving an abusive relationship, your self-confidence will grow by a bit.

Self-esteem

Do you know anybody who you know is mediocre at best at what he or she does, yet exudes tons of self-esteem? Do you know someone else who always does things very well, yet lacks this important trait?

Chances are that you do. You may even fit into one of the above categories.

I tend to fall into that latter, typically thinking that I performed worse than I did or am not worthy of something great.

Self-esteem is your emotional opinion about yourself. Strong, healthy self-esteem serves like a protective shield that buffers you from feeling hurt by harmful criticism. It fills the gaps between compliments that you receive, as well, and what you need to feel good about yourself.

Having strong self-esteem does not mean that you do everything well and succeed in every endeavor. But it does help determine how much you learn after something goes wrong. Whether you learn from it, make the necessary adjustments, and then move on, or if you wallow in failure and decide that giving up is the path of least resistance.

Self-concept

According to Cynthia Vinney, self-concept is our personal knowledge of who we are, encompassing all of our thoughts and feelings about ourselves physically, personally, and socially. Self-concept also includes our knowledge of how we behave, our capabilities, and our individual characteristics. Our self-concept develops most rapidly during early childhood and adolescence, but self-concept continues to form and change over time as we learn more about ourselves.

To improve your self-concept, as I have been striving to do for the past few years, you begin by looking at our inner selves, our belief systems, and daily thoughts. If we feel that our true self (who we are) is vastly different from our “ideal” self (who we want to be), we should invest time and effort to address the differences. We should make adjustments by setting realistic expectations.

Our bodies and minds are connected. Sometimes, what we feel may reflect in our body language. Therefore, there are times when we can redirect our self-concept through our physical movements.

An easy “hack” if you will, that I use, is to walk more confidently than I really feel. As someone who walks many miles per day, this is no joke. But if you saw me walk past you on one of my daily walks, I would certainly look like the confident person that I am still trying to be after all these years.

Mistakes Will Be Made

One of the biggest problems that I have, the city that employs me has, and millions of other people and organizations have is the inability, or at least great difficulty, in admitting that a mistake or multiple mistakes were made.

To increase your grit and resiliency, you have to make some mistakes, look like an idiot, dust yourself off, and try again without dwelling on it too much. In a study conducted at the College of William and Mary, over 800 entrepreneurs were interviewed and the findings were that the most successful among them tend to have two critical things in common: They’re terrible at imagining failure and they tend not to care what other people think of them.

In other words, the most successful people do not waste their time or energy stressing about their failures as they see failure as a small and necessary step in the process of reaching their goals.

Hold Yourself Accountable

Holding yourself accountable for your actions, no matter what is no easy thing.

People are far more likely to remember how you handled a problem than they are how you created it in the first place. By holding yourself accountable, even when making excuses is an option, you show that you care about results more than your image or ego.

Make the Tough Call

By “tough call,” I do not only mean actually making calls, but doing some unpleasant task even though you would rather put it off indefinitely or until the last minute or, my personal preference, not at all.

Years ago, early on in my self-help journey, I read a book by Jim Rohn who advised doing something that has stuck with me for years.

Rohn cites an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re done with the worst thing you’ll have to do all day.

I took that advice to heart and, in my own profession, I have to tell people things that they do not want to hear frequently. I frequently tell potential business owners that we do not want their business in our town or in a particular location, that we are not amenable to rezoning a particular parcel, or that…

Although it is easy to let some looming challenge paralyze you into inaction, the most resilient people know that in these moments, the best thing that they can do is get started right away. Every hour spent procrastinating and worrying about the task subtracts time and energy from actually getting things done.

My own life has improved and I have increased my own perseverance and grit by tackling the most difficult tasks of my day as soon as I can.

There’s So Much More

You could literally read forever about strategies to become more resilient and increase your grit and perseverance. There are hundreds of factors, not just improving your self-concept, taking responsibility for your actions (or lack of them), holding yourself accountable, and the few others detailed here.

We so want there to be a seven-step guide to improving one’s grit and resilience. But there are so many other things, like being more curious to explore alternative paths to overcoming roadblocks, having a sense of humor to help get through the inevitable dark times, and the passion to want to do better.

All of our lives, even before COVID, had plenty of pressure and required us to constantly adapt to life developments that may have felt totally overwhelming at first.

You are reading this and I am writing this because we both want to handle unexpected challenges better and bounce back even stronger than before. The chaotic, volatile, and unpredictable period that we are going through today will most likely not end any time soon.

To sustain and improve life for yourself and those you love, you not only want to be but need to be more resilient than people had to be in the past.

Whether you are a stay-at-home parent, a struggling student, a multimillionaire executive, a blue-collar worker, or a middle-aged government worker like me, resiliency is an essential skill that you need to have to not only survive and thrive this year but in the foreseeable future.