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Becoming resilient

There are 2 important parts. The first is the original motivation for whatever it is you are trying to accomplish, the second is to leverage disappointment.

The motivation

Why did you go down this path to begin with? If you haven’t read the article on motivation, please start there. Unless the reasons for your motivation have changed and it no longer matters, why would you not continue forward? Usually it’s because we’ve been toiling away and nothing good has come out of it. It’s a bummer I know. But, our goals are real and they are valid.

This is where we have to re-asses if what we’ve been doing has been the right way to solve the problem we’re facing. What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Have we missed something? It’s time to circle back and review. And time to do more research on the subject matter.

And through all of this work that we’ve now created for ourselves we have to keep in mind why we’re doing it. We’re trying to get somewhere that matters to us. It’s important to ourselves and the lives we’re living. If it’s important then it’s important that we continue. And let’s be honest, what would we be doing if we didn’t continue forward? Likely sitting on the couch being miserable. What’s the point of that? Be honest, what’s the point?

Leveraging Disappointment

Why should your circumstances decide if you get to enjoy your life or not? You are likely pursuing a goal in order to improve some part of your life. And likely you are doing so because your current circumstances are unpleasant. Maybe you have a terrible job that pays you too little and you’re not being treated well. That’s a shitty circumstance you’re in. What if we leverage bad situations to motivate us? Sometimes, it’s ok to get pissed off.

The power of leveraging disappointment became apparent to me after watching every single series of Amazon’s All or Nothing sports show. They embed a film crew with various teams in various sports and go along for the ride all season. It’s a bit of a male real life soap opera but there are a lot of insights in the series.

One of the big ones for me was: the teams that came to the locker room after a loss with their heads down and sat quietly were the ones who ultimately had a bad season. The winners? Well, the winners would come in after a loss pissed off. People were yelling and throwing things. They were NOT happy to lose. They were NOT ok with it. There was urgency and a need to not feel like that again. That made them more focused and made them push themselves in both practice and during games.

So go ahead and get pissed off if your circumstances are unpleasant. Don’t be pissed off at the world or life (life is AWESOME!) or people. Just the circumstances. And when you wake up every morning start the day by telling your circumstances that today you’re more powerful than they are. Then back it up by doing the things which will improve your life in the long term.