Morning,
I got up early this morning to prepare an online masterclass for students Entrepreneurship in The Hague in The Netherlands on Monday. Boys and girls including some milennials that want to start their own company.
And to prepare for an interview on the Dutch radio on Monday on our new book in Dutch ‘Groeien zonder te groeien’ (‘growing without growing’) and including the stories on resilience and personal and professional success of the 25 people that trusted me with their background story, their ‘why’ and how they coped with adversity, including Covid-19.
Yesterday evening my wife an myself spoke a lot about how we both coped with adversity in our lives and how many of our colleagues and friends are coping during this crisis.
Resilience plays an important role in all those things. All personally and professionally successful people are resilient in some shape or form, they would have never overcome failure or adversity in their lives otherwise. Perhaps you think of yourself as resilient, and in many ways, you could be correct.
However, if you find that the following ‘signs on the wall’ fit you, then maybe your resilience can be improved upon. Here are the top five signs that mean you need to improve your resilience and change.
1. You are afraid of failure. Failure is a natural part of success. You may fail several times before you succeed in something, it may even be necessary before succeeding.
Being able to face your failures, to face adversity, is a part of being resilient. If you let all your unsuccessful attempts keep you down, then you may never try again. Being afraid of failure may be a sign that your resilience is not as strong as you think
2. You let negative thoughts keep you down. Resilience is a sign of mental fortitude; that you can get through any challenge without pervasive thoughts discouraging you from trying.
Negative thoughts also impact your mental health and can lower your perception of self-worth.
If you find that negativity is a constant theme within your head, then maybe you need to improve your ability to think positively. Positive thinking is a tenet of resilience and can help you find success.
More: ‘7 Tips To Achieve A Positive Mindset During This Crisis’ & ‘3 Signs You Need To Pivot Your Life Now’
3. You don’t learn from your mistakes. Personal growth, personal development, is an important factor in resilience. Improving our skills and abilities will eventually lead us to success. How can you ever grow as a person if you keep making the same mistakes over and over and do not learn from them?
By looking at your mistakes through an objective lens without placing blame, you can improve yourself and grow. Don’t pretend your mistakes never happened, because then you cannot avoid them the next time.
4. You lack confidence. Resilient people are confident in their abilities, even if they aren’t successful on the first try. Confidence gives you the willpower to try new and intimidating things. If you’re too afraid to try and keep on trying, you will never succeed.
5. You don’t take responsibility for your failure. Its easy to place blame on outside factors and other people that you have no control over. You won’t always have power over everything, especially not in a crisis like this one, so you have to take every situation for what it is.
By acknowledging what you can control and change and what is out of your control, you take agency in your life. Acknowledge if something didn’t go right because of something you did, don’t always blame others for your mistakes.
So resilience is really important because it gives us the power to overcome challenges and adversity working at home during a lockdown for instance, when somebody we love dearly gets seriously ill or even passes away or when we have to flee our own homecountry for one reason or another.
Without it, we will never learn how to cope with adversity in a better way again, which means we will never succeed in our private lives and in our professional lives, including during a pandemic like this one with Covid-19.
We will keep on expecting other people including our Governments to solve our problems. If you find that some of these signs describe you, then you may need to take steps to improve your resilience.
But as the 25 people I interviewed and who shared their personal background stories, their challenges and their sometimes dramatic personal lifevents show, we can do a lot of things……if we act.
Well that was it for this morning. I hope that helps?
If you have any question or request, please do not hesitate to call me on Skype on tony.de.bree or email me here
Kind regards,
Tony de Bree
p.s.
Let’s connect on LinkedIn and follow me on Twitter here.
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