Life is a series of challenges. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about business, finance or your career. You’re going to have to fight. “Never give up” and “keep at it” are well-worn phrases with a strong motivational message, but they won’t stop you from falling. And you have to get up and keep going, and you’ll probably end up kissing the ground again.
Resistance and resilience are two fancy words that become indispensable qualities for success. We have to withstand life’s blows and learn from the blows we take, not to get used to them, but to stop taking them, or simply to keep moving forward while they keep coming. Is it just me, or is this part of Rocky Balboa’s speech?
(Read: Success in life isn’t a marathon, it’s a maze)
Some people have been through very difficult situations, even a fight between life and death. What do winners do, and what do losers fail to do, in that situation? Now let’s apply that way of thinking and acting in hard situations to more everyday ones (which can still knock us down), such as unemployment, personal tragedies, financial ruin or problems as business owners.
Resist, persist, fall, learn, persist and resist. And not always in that order. These are some ideas drawn from the excellent work of Eric Barker, someone who has studied human behavior in depth and how our actions can lead to success or failure in certain circumstances.
How to become more resilient
1. Perceive your real surroundings
“I was expecting the company to make a second round of layoffs, but I never thought they’d fire me.”
Not knowing your surroundings and situation is what can lead us to build false illusions and live a life based on them. The person who recognizes a problem immediately, even before it arrives, usually has a clear advantage over everyone else. Such people admit and accept what can happen to anyone, and we’re no exception.
Most people waste too much time in the stages we go through when life deals us a setback: denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance. That is:
- Denial: This can’t be happening to me; maybe they’ll think it over and won’t fire me after all.
- Anger: You’re going to fire me after all the years I’ve worked here? After everything I’ve done for you? You should be ashamed.
- Bargaining: I have two kids, please, I promise I’ll work more for less money.
- Acceptance: In many cases it ends in depression.
The longer you live unaware of a problem, or in denial about it, the more time you’ll waste and the more energy you’ll burn. You need to take the bull by the horns quickly, skip the first stages and go straight to the last one, acceptance, so you can start looking for solutions rather than lamenting.
In the situation described above, faced with mass layoffs, some people already have a new job lined up before they’re even fired, while others wait for that day to arrive before getting down to work. Clearly the first will have a better chance of being hired by another company.
2. Manage your emotions
Barker says that when some scuba divers drown, it turns out they still had air in their tanks.
How is that possible? Simply because they panic, and the natural survival instinct overrides reasoning, which is itself overridden by panic. So they end up pulling the regulator out of their mouth because they think they’ve run out of air, when in fact the feeling of breathlessness is caused by panic, not by a lack of oxygen.
For years, army diving instructors searched for an explanation of why divers came to the surface saying they couldn’t breathe even though they still had air left. It was a psychologist who found the answer and put the problem down to panic.
Life is no different. If you make decisions while feeling a strong emotion, there’s a good chance the decision will be a bad one. If you’re afraid or panicking, you won’t be able to think clearly. That’s why, sometimes, when facing a very serious problem in your business, it may be better not to tackle the problem head-on but to step away for 10 or 30 minutes, do some yoga or hit a punching bag, and come back with a clearer mind and clearer ideas.
Resilient people recognize difficult situations, stay calm, weigh up the possible ways out rationally and draw up action plans. Is there a way to stay calm under pressure and face a problem positively? Yes.
But there are more ways to avoid some problems. Yes, and that brings us to the next point.
3. Know when to quit
What? But you said we had to insist, persist and never give up…
But we also always say you shouldn’t be an idiot. I’m 1.70 m tall and weigh 66 kg, so becoming world heavyweight boxing champion, well, I won’t say it’s impossible, but I’m sure there are other things I could do in less time and with better chances.
One secret of resilient people is that they know when to drop something. As the saying goes:
“You can’t win every battle, so choose very carefully which ones you’re willing to fight.”
We can learn a lot from people who survive life-or-death situations: many of them survive because they’re smart enough to analyze the situation and get out of trouble as soon as possible.
You can’t do everything, so at some point you have to be smart enough to realize you should stop trying to make a living as a tango dancer and perhaps put other skills to more productive use. What if tango is my passion? Then dance in your free time, because your passion can’t always be monetized. (Read: How to figure out what to do with your life and what your perfect job would be)
Question: What does surviving a beating from a gang of thugs have in common with surviving a hurricane?
Answer: You avoid both the same way: by not being there when they happen.
People should have objectives and goals, because they keep you motivated. But watch out for “almost impossible” or flatly unreachable goals: far from motivating you, they can cripple you for life.
4. Prepare, even before you need to be prepared
People often say that “in life you take the test first and learn the lesson afterward”, but the truth is that preparing in advance is the most important thing you can do to face any problem.
When a serious problem hits, there are 3 kinds of people:
- The one who has already been through the problem.
- The one who has studied the theory in case the problem ever came up.
- The one who had never prepared for the problem.
Clearly the third one is in deep trouble: they’re going to take the hit of their life and then either sink into depression or learn.
One problem I personally see today is a lack of interest in opening your mind to new knowledge. If you focus too much on specializing in a single subject, you’re not really wiser; you’re what I call a closed mind. You have to anticipate scenarios that could arise in the future and prepare for them, even if they never happen. Of course, while you might learn how to defend yourself against an assault in the street, it’s not about learning how to react to a zombie attack (or maybe it is, you never know).
It’s a way of learning without having to fail, and it may keep you from failing in the future and from reaching for that fashionable consolation line: “I didn’t fail, I learned.” The hell you didn’t! You failed, and once you’ve failed, the only thing you can do now is learn the lesson so it doesn’t happen to you again.
At least in our field, business, investing and careers, our mistakes can cost money, but not lives. And personally, I like to learn from the lessons and the kinds of decisions made by people who hold lives in their hands, including their own.
Further reading
- 10 things to avoid doing in the first 30 years of your life
- Arnold Schwarzenegger: the rules for succeeding at whatever you set out to do
Featured image: David Rosen, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
