Resilience — The Ultimate Team Leader
If you have ever been part of a team, you know that a good team leader is important. They do not need to be the best, the smartest, the hardest working, or the strongest. They need to make every member of the team better, smarter, stronger, and working together. Each on their own might fail but all together are unbeatable. Resilience is like that. Resilience is our team leader. Let me illustrate and explain.
When we are young we usually don’t need anyone else on our team. Watch a 3 or 4 year old play. They go and go, they bump their head or bang their knee and spend 5 minutes on mom’s or dad’s lap, big hugs and maybe a kiss where it hurts and they are off again doing what they were before. Day in day out it is the same. Resilience is enough. But what happens when you get older? What happens when life starts to wear on us, disappointment, judgement, failure, loss, and so many other things?
Don’t get me wrong, resilience is truly a superpower. Its problem is like superman, it has its kryptonite. Those are the worldly negative things that happen to all of us. In time, it’s armor loses its luster and begins to have dents.
Many find rock bottom. For me, that was lying in a bed in a hospital on morphine, lungs filling with fluids, me having pulled out the tube they had put up my nose and down my throat to drain it. A face in front of me, two comforting hands on my face, hearing the words “we are trying to save your life, please stop pulling out the drainage tube”. I surrendered to what was happening. I was an insulin dependent diabetic from then on. It took me months to have the energy to make it through the day. It took me weeks to even get out of a hospital bed to walk at all.
Being a well-controlled diabetic is itself a lesson in resilience. Each morning when I test my blood sugar I see how I have treated my body the last 24 hours. There are many great days, there are some bad ones. On the bad ones I know that tomorrow’s test has nothing to do with today’s and tomorrow I can be a winner. For others in our group it is not what I deal with but it may be anxiety, depression, or some other battle. But resilience shows we can win today.
Like so many of my other ramblings I eventually get to my point. Resilience is a superpower, but like the Justice League it does better as a team. When we add tools like mindfulness, discipline, self-love, self-forgiveness, reflection, meditation, and other tools to resilience we have our super team. Then resilience is back at its strongest.
Resilience knows which of its fellow superheroes to call on at that moment. It seems to know if we need a kick in the ass, a self-hug, or a break from people. The ability to then wake up and scream “OK life bring it, we got you this round!!!”
Assemble your team; your army is never too large. Go kick some ass!!!