Resilience

Resilience

Part 1

Resiliency is a great trait that you need in order to succeed in anything that you do.  If you don’t have resiliency, you are going to fail one time and never get back on your horse, you are going to find something easier to do that is less fulfilling.  You are always going to think about the time you failed and never tried it again.

One important trait that they talk about in Parent Resources is staying calm under pressure.  If at the first sign of pressure, you crumble, you are never going to be able succeed.  You need to be able to take a deep breath, gain your bearings and handle what is going on.  For example, if you are feeding your infant and he starts to choke, what do you do?  You can’t run away and start hysterically crying.  You need to react to the situation.  You need to keep calm and think about what is happening.  OK, my child is choking, he didn’t completely swallow his food, it is lodged in his air way, I need to dislodge it.  And that is what you do.

Another thing that I agree with in Parent Resources is how they talk about controlling our impulses.  You need to be able to wait to eat that marshmallow, because the reward is greater when you wait.  If you don’t have the ability to control your impulses, you would never be able to get anything done.  I know from my own experience that if I got up and got a candy bar out of the vending machine every time I had the impulse to eat candy, I would be getting out of my chair every five minutes and wouldn’t have any teeth left.

Something that they talk about in Weathering the Storm that I liked is how they talk about using ex-pro athletes on the trading floor.  They say that you can’t get emotional attached.  Sports players are great at this.  If they let every loss get to them, they wouldn’t be able to go on in their sport.  They would get so caught up with that loss that it would affect the way they played the game for the rest of their lives. 

Another trait that is talked about in Weathering the Storm is humiliation.  It is what drives you to not make the same mistake twice.  No one wants to feel humiliated, so your brain won’t allow you to make that mistake again that humiliated you in the first place.  You learn from this and move on.  You can move forward more cautiously.

Something that I liked that Angela Duckworth talked about was how she was measuring grit in the different groups of people.  She talked about it in the children who were in the spelling Bee’s and how the ones who really succeeded were not the ones who were spending time studying the things that they already knew.  They put themselves out of their comfort zone and really spent time studying the information that they didn’t know.  This is dedication. 

I also liked how she talked about the study that she did at West Point on the first term cadets.  They were trying to figure out the formula to predicting the cadets that wouldn’t drop out.  It wasn’t always the ones who had the best stats.  They weren’t always the ones who did the best on the SAT’s or could do the most push-ups.  The ones who lasted the longest were the ones who had traits of perseverance. 

Part 2

Some part of resilience that I hadn’t thought about before is the way that Angela Duckworth spoke about Grit and what that means.  I hadn’t ever thought about grit as being a useful attribute in success.  I thought about resilience, determination and perseverance, but I don’t think I had ever thought about grit before.  I think grit is a combination of all of these.  Grit is what gets you drives you to keep going even though you are exhausted and at your breaking point.  When you have grit, you are able to keep going through all types of adversity. 

Duckworth talked about how the cadets that really had grit, were the ones to make it furthest in the program.  It wasn’t the ones that scored the highest or were the most physically fit.  It was the ones who could dig in and go the extra mile when they were already fatigued and on the brink of defeat.  I believe that grit is a key part of being resilient

I think that being in the military has made me a little gritty.  Looking back at my career, especially early on, I can recall many times in basic training when I just wanted to throw in the towel and quit.  But part of my personality is to never quit.  I was raised in a way that quitting wasn’t an option.  No matter how hard or difficult or meaningless I thought something was at that point in time, I was taught to stick it out, because the lesson I learn from that is going to be valuable later on in life.  I owe this completely to my parents.  I think that if I wasn’t raised like this, I would have given up on so many things at the first sign of adversity.  Being in the military just allowed me to take this even further.  It prepared me for basic training or being deployed away from my family for some number of months.

Another part of the readings that I hadn’t thought of that relates to resilience is; impulse control.  Now that I have read this, it makes a lot of sense.  You can’t let your emotions get the best of you when you begin to get stressed.  If you are at work and something or someone makes you angry, it probably wouldn’t be the best idea to shout at them.  It would be unprofessional and everyone around you would think you were not a professional and can’t handle stress. 

I can think of quite a few times in my short career that someone has made me so angry that I needed to do something.  One way I have learned to deal with this without being unprofessional is to write an email and address it to this person or their boss and just write all the things I am feeling.  Once I was done writing everything that I was feeling, I would read it a few times and not send it.  Maybe I would re-write it so that it was in a more professional manner and then send it to this person.  This would allow me to get all my feelings out, rather than have them bottled up inside.

Another part of impulse control is the ability to delay gratification.  I think this is important because more often than not, the payoff is better the longer you wait.  At the time you may feel like I really need this now, but it usually is better and worth waiting for.  A simple example of this is a bond.  You can cash out a bond after a couple years, but it won’t be worth its full potential.  Do you really need that money right now?  Probably not, but because it is there, you think you do.  It is better to wait and cash it out after it becomes the most valuable.