Take Your L And Go On
Take Your L And Go On
How to build resilience in the face of adversity
Bite
resilience
/rɪˈzɪlɪəns/
noun
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Chew
Life is chaos. A mixed bag of good and evil randomly dispersed across existence. This condition makes it so that a great many of us will inevitably encounter many difficulties or hardships in the course of our existence. This condition makes it necessary to - if one intends to live a full life - know how to bounce back when one encounters obstacles or obstructions in our chosen life-path. This condition of existence makes it crucial that we understand the importance of resilience.
Jordan Peterson says, by way of Carl Jung, that the jester begets the saviour. We must prepare to be the fool (clip here) when starting a new venture. We are bound to trip up, to fail, when we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory and unfamiliar situations. It is most certainly some form of hubris or recklessness that causes us to expect smooth sailing or success, instant or otherwise, in any endeavour. It is arrogant to fear failure.
Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
- Robert T. Kiyosaki
It is crucial to understand that failure is a phase that represents our inexperience with the unfamiliar. It is a step in the process and a prerequisite of any undertaking, not an event outcome. Once we begin to conceptualize failure in this manner, the solution to our fear of it becomes clear. It is interesting to note that quite often, this fear of failure commonly manifests at two stages.
The first stage is when we begin an undertaking. We generally experience two conflicting emotions; Excitement, because our brains love novelty and appreciate the new stimulus; Fear, because of our ill-suited relationship with failure. If we are more excited than we are scared, we press on, if we are more afraid than we are excited, we become paralyzed.
The second stage at which the fear of failure often manifests is after we have had some measure of accomplishment in our undertaking. We reach a point where we consider ourselves seasoned and possessing expert knowledge. More often than not, this is not expertise. We have merely settled into a rhythm. A pace at which we are content to meander, telling ourselves our successes and failures are the necessary highs and lows. One day, when we are called upon, whether by fate or by chance, to tackle a new problem or dimension, our fear will once again rear its head.
One example I particularly like to use in explaining this is driving. There are over 5 million cars in Lagos state alone and just as many drivers. Some of them, professionals. These millions of people drive every day. They get to their intended destinations and back safely for the most part. You might even say that many of them are great drivers when you factor in the Lagos traffic craze. And yet, you wouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination say that they could compete in a Formula 1 race. Chances are, they would be afraid. Chances are, they would fail.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
- Paulo Coelho
When fear precludes our inevitable failings, our fears become validated every time they come true. We start to believe all the terrible things we imagine will become our reality. We become less and less inclined to try again. We lose our resilience, and we stagnate.
To solve this problem, we must see ourselves as lifelong students of our commitments, dedicated to the process of refining and improving our process. When we reframe the narrative as learning, our losses are easy to swallow. We can see failures for what they are; opportunities to take stock, to assess our performance and to do better.
We must trust the process and learn to accept things as they come, taking comfort in the fact that once we have experienced a thing, there is less likelihood of repeating the same mistake. When we do this, every failure brings us one step closer to our goal, and even the smallest events can have radical transformational potential on the quality of our lives. Most importantly, we become resilient.
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
- Henry Ford
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The fear of failure is the beginning of failure.