Resilience is crucial to our success in the bigger game of life. Not only does resilience help us to cope better with major crisis and traumatic experiences, but it helps us cope better with the smaller, more mundane, events and circumstances that often take the biggest toll on our health and happiness on a daily basis.
When I took on the role of “Kyle Comfort Services Manager” I couldn’t afford to be too proud. I had bills to pay, and wanted to save money for more adventure travel. Yet I constantly encounter people who let a false sense of ‘pride’ – driven by a fear of losing face and maintaining a certain image in the eyes of others – keep them from doing things that would ultimately serve them.
Martin Luther King Jr once said, “You don’t have to see the whole stair case, just the first steps.” And so when it comes to doing something that leaves a wide cavernous gap between where you are now and where you ultimately want to be, don’t think that you need to know how to bridge it before you take the first step forward.
What matters most is knowing the direction you want to head, even if you aren’t clear on a specific end-point destination (I sure wasn’t at eighteen!) Once you know the direction, then think about what you would like to be doing 12 months from now that would be moving you toward it. Then think about what you’d be doing 6 months from now. Then 2 months from now. Then 2 weeks from now. Then tomorrow. Then today.
Life rewards action!
As our online networks have grown ever more expansive, our relationships offline have thinned, leaving many people feeling more alone with fewer confidents than they had in the era “B.F.” (Before Facebook.) As social media appeals to our vanity and vulnerability, we must be vigilant not to hide behind the technology in communicating with the people around us, escaping the ‘real work’ of addressing the issues which arise in real (and truly authentic) relationships.
we human beings are wired to be risk averse. In other words, we find it much easier to settle with the status quo, keep our mouths closed and our heads down rather than to make a change, take a chance or speak up and engage in what I call a “courageous conversation.” When weighing up whether to do something that makes us vulnerable to failing, losing face or some other form or loss, we have an innate tendency to over estimate the size of risks and under estimate our ability to handle them.
If Angelina Jolie’s bravery has a lesson for us all it is this: That sometimes life calls each of us to decisive amidst uncertainty; that sometimes after weighing in all the probabilities and measuring out the pro’s and con’s, we each need to tune out all the noise and opinions around us and turn inward to listen the voice within making whatever decision feels most right for us, even if we’re not 100% sure it’s 100% right. We then have to trust ourselves more deeply to meet whatever challenges those choices may give rise to.
Is how you define success keeping you from achieving it? How you define success determines not only how successful you feel throughout your life, but how successful you become in terms of the impact you make on those around you, the quality of your relationships, and the value of the contribution you make along the way. Taking time to decide how you want to measure your life, framing those measures in ways that enable you to feel enjoy success today – and tomorrow –enables you to stay more purposeful, more courageous and more optimistic, even when your efforts don’t produce the outcomes you’re working toward. Which, let’s face it, can be more often than we’d like.
As you go about getting your mother a token of gratitude this Mother’s Day, think about also about how you can help support the millions of equally deserving mothers (as well as their daughters) in those parts of the world who’ll never get to experience the joy we’ve come to associate with Mother’s Day. As Nicholas Kristof, author of Half the Sky wrote in his New York Times column, it’s time to “think about moving the apostrophe so that it becomes not just Mother’s Day, honoring a single mother, but Mothers’ Day – an occasion to try to help other mothers around the globe as well.”
Don’t should on yourself and don’t let others should on you. This term was originally coined by Dr Fritz Perls to describe people who let others expectations and judgements determine what they will do and say ahead of what they truly want for themselves. I’m sure there are people who think that as a mother of four I shouldn’t be gallivanting off to the far side of the world for two weeks of book/self-promotion. But here’s the deal, and what I had to remind myself of this morning:
How can I tell my kids to follow their dreams if I’m not following my own?! Who say’s I shouldn’t?! And why would anyone else’s opinion matter more than mine?!
Making changes to our regular schedule, much less our life, is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. If it were, I wouldn’t be falling on my sword right now! But whether in our work, relationships or how we manage our daily lives, sometimes we are called to make a change, to let go the familiar, and say no to something that is “good” to open up the possibility for something better.
Indeed there’s a science to success when it comes to achieving goals and making life changes – whether on January 1st with your New Year Resolutions – or any other time of year. On the link below are 7 strategies to help you make the changes you want in the year ahead – including making the right resolutions to begin with. I hope you will read it, but more so, I hope you will apply them so that 2013 will truly be the best year of your life. Not because everything will go as you want, but because you be firmly at the helm of your own life – living by design rather than by default.
The marathon is an event that challenges those who enter it to dig deep into their reserves of strength, determination and courage in order to cross the finish line. Many didn’t get the opportunity to finish this one. Yet if ever there was a marathon that challenged us to dig deeper and called us all to greater courage in an increasingly fearful and turbulent world, it was this one.
Losing your job is tough, whether it had everything to do with your performance or nothing at all. But regardless of why you lost your job, it’s how you respond in the days and weeks that follow that will set you up to get back to work quickly and successfully. Here are 8 keys to helping you do just that.
Margaret Thatcher once said, “You can’t lead from a crowd.” She certainly didn’t. However it would be a mistake to think that she didn’t have moments of doubt, nor fear the wrath she would face by standing up against the powerful unions of 1970’s Britain. However her conviction to stand by the principles over rode her fear of the consequences for doing so. When many might have cowered, she stepped forward. When many may have watered down their stance, she held firm to hers. And when many might have succumbed to the pressure of their peers to take an easier path, less frought with conflict and volatile emotions, she kept walking straight along the only path she saw would create the changes Britain so needed.
Courage is saying ‘Enough!’ to the fears that urge you to play safe, speak safe, love safe and live safe, knowing that becoming vulnerable to you fears lies at the heart of everything worthwhile.
Ten years ago today my son Matthew arrived into the world. As I made the kids a special celebratory pancake breakfast this morning (complete with chocolate milkshakes and a special operatic rendition of Happy Birthday) it dawned on me that it’s also ten years today that I became a mother of four kids. So I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learnt since..
Lesson # 1. Forget perfect…
When we surround ourselves with people who believe in our success, it makes success so much easier to achieve. And so if you want to achieve something exciting, or make a big change in your life, it’s crucial to deliberately surround yourself with people who will support you and cheer you on, particularly when the going get’s tough. (Sometimes they may also give you an equally much needed kick in the pants.)
When we’re willing to step outside our emotional comfort zone, and become vulnerable to what we fear, we discover that most our fears are either exaggerated or unfounded, and that we are far braver than we thought ourselves to be. Not only that, whole new worlds up opportunity open up in the process.
By not taking a risk in our job or career – whether making a change or proactively trying to adapt to those going on around us – we run the bigger risk of being left behind. Professor Philip Bobbit from the University of Texas has even given a name to the human tendency to assume the present situation will remain the same. He called it Parmenides fallacy after the Greek philosopher who argued that the world was static and that all change was an illusion. So don’t kid yourself that choosing to do nothing isn’t a choice and doesn’t have consequences. As I wrote in Stop Playing Safe, “Usually things that aren’t working well only get worse.”
Having stepped out of my comfort zone so many times since growing up on my parents small farm, is that the more we act with courage, the more courageous we become. While something may initially be terrifying for us to even contemplate, as we try new things, we build our ‘muscles for life’ and equip ourselves with the psychological strength, resilience and self-confidence to take on bigger goals, and engage in braver conversations – with ourself and others – in the future.
