The MONTHLY Motivator - November 2012

Resilience

No matter what you do, no matter how spectacular your efforts are, you’re not always going to be successful. You’re not always going to get the results you were after. In fact, success is really based on failure -- not permanent failure, but temporary setbacks. The people who are most successful at what they choose to do, are the people who are willing to experience the most setbacks, and who are willing to quickly and decisively move beyond those setbacks.

That’s resilience. It’s getting up and bouncing back, almost as soon as you get knocked down. It doesn’t really matter how many times you get thrown off track or knocked down. In fact, if you’re experiencing a lot of setbacks and disappointments, that means you’re putting out a lot of effort. You’re ambitious. You’re pushing your life in a specific direction. And that of course is a very, very good thing.

On any given day, anything can happen. Sometimes you’ll just totally screw up and get it wrong. Everybody makes mistakes—honest mistakes—and that’s just part of the learning process. You usually learn much more from the mistakes than you do from the successes precisely because those mistakes can lead to such painful and memorable results. You don’t consciously intend to make mistakes, but you’re not all-seeing and all-knowing, so you’re going to end up making some mistakes and they will absolutely teach you some very powerful lessons.

Other times, you’ll have setbacks that are completely unrelated to anything you’ve done. After all, there’s a whole world of other people out there, all doing their own things, and on a regular basis you’re going to cross paths with people who will knock you off track. It doesn’t even have to be other people. Totally natural things such as weather can disrupt your plans.

So the point is, you’re going to get interrupted, you will get thrown off track, you’re certainly going to experience disappointments, whatever you attempt to do, and however good you are at doing it.

So what’s the best response?

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--Ralph Marston

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