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Becoming resilient

As you may have read elsewhere on the site, after a decade of doctors’ visits, I spent 5 years in bed with an undiagnosed condition (don’t ask me my opinions on the healthcare system).

The most difficult thing to do was not give up. I needed a reason to get through every day. I needed some way to drag myself through hellish day after hellish day. I needed to become a resilient person.

Inspiration and personal triumph

The first piece was finding inspiration. Something to make me believe that it’s possible to overcome my circumstances. Again by accident I stumbled on a solution.

A friend told me the story of her father. He had grown up in a very difficult situation but made something of himself. As an adult he busted his ass mowing lawns to put food on the table. Little by little he started a landscape business. That grew into a multi-million dollar business. His life had started as a situation that you wouldn’t expect anyone to get out of. Yet he persevered no matter what and achieved what most people hope for.

I thought about his story and how it made me feel. How it showed me that there’s a path. At the time I didn’t know what my path was but I knew that there IS a path.

I started seeking out and regularly exposing myself to stories of personal triumph. Books, tv shows, articles, anything. And slowly I started living in a world where anything is possible. It was another mind-shift. A mind-shift that helped me keep going.

The Angry Dog

The next helpful mental tool came to me by accident. I’d been watching a show called All or Nothing. It’s basically a guy’s reality soap opera. A film crew gets imbedded with a professional sports team for an entire season and films what happens. As I watched more and more series with different teams in different sports I noticed a pattern.

Those who didn’t do well all had one thing in common: after a loss they would go to the locker room and drop their heads. And they were quiet.

The better teams were different after losses. They would get back to the locker room and be pissed off. They yelled at each other and threw things. They were ANGRY.

So I thought “ok, don’t be happy with the way things are. Get pissed off and fight. That’s the way of winners.” This led me to another thought: there are two types of dogs. When cornered, one type of dog will go quiet and hide. The other type of dog will get angry and stand its ground. Just like professional sports teams. From that point on, every morning I woke up and my first thought was “I am the angry dog”. And whenever I felt like I couldn’t continue I repeated that to myself. I am the angry dog.

The Bigger Asshole

This was the last piece of the puzzle. It’s a mental shift and it goes like this:

Circumstances can be assholes. Assholes that want us to give up and quit. So what I did was decide to be an even bigger asshole…and NOT quit. Even if the only reason to not quit was to spite the circumstances. Like anything else, if you want to this to work, you have to consistently remind yourself of this fact. The fact that you’re a bigger asshole than your circumstances.