Chew On It – Resilience is not pretty
Resilience is an admirable quality, but developing it is one tough ride.
Resilience is usually forged when life throws difficult challenges and adversities at you. Your choice is either sink or swim.
Life can be painful, confusing, frightening, lonely and emotionally exhausting, but you still have to get up the next day and fight your way through it. Otherwise, it can destroy you.
It began when I was 11 years old, sent from Malaysia to boarding school in a foreign land, Sydney. On that first night, I felt completely abandoned and utterly alone. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I felt a huge black cloud engulf me. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my first bout of depression.
That was where my depression began. It began with trauma.
I would cry myself to sleep, wake up crying, cry through the day, and somehow survive to the next. It was emotional survival long before it was ever resilience.
Looking back, I now understand that this was the period that forged something in me. I had to keep functioning while carrying pain and loneliness. It was when I unknowingly began developing the habit of resilience.
I don’t believe you can train to be resilient in any real sense. Resilience is forced upon you through life. When life throws you a savage curveball, you discover whether you’re willing to fight your way through it.
Later in my adult life, in the 1990s, I faced depression again, for six years, during a brutal business war. A competitor came after my gym, and I instantly lost a large chunk of my business.
I was emotionally battered. It was frightening because my business and my family’s livelihood were at stake. It triggered depression and a deep sense of isolation. I had to keep leading, keep making the right decisions, keep presenting myself as though I was in control, all while internally I was in a very dark and ugly place.
That period taught me something important. Resilience is often about simply functioning while feeling totally downtrodden. It is doing what needs to be done while your mind is fighting demons.
It is refusing to give up, not because you feel strong, but because you refuse to let life crush you.
As a leader, I had to appear strong and in control while I was falling apart inside. I believed that if I showed weakness, it would affect my staff’s confidence. So I kept up appearances and did whatever it took, even while I was struggling internally.
That is where character comes in.
You may be frightened, depressed and completely overwhelmed, but you still have some power. You can choose whether to take responsibility or let a victim mentality consume you. You can choose whether to keep working on the fundamentals, seek help, or let chaos take over.
There is no magic switch. It comes down to determination, perseverance, and doing the right things to survive.
People often hope for the breakthrough, the answer, the secret that will suddenly make things easier. That is mostly fantasy. Whether in business, mental health or life, the answer is more often found in the fundamentals. Keep moving. Keep thinking about solutions. Keep adjusting.
One of the most important things I’ve learnt is that if you continue to fight on, circumstances can change and eventually a breakthrough appears. That has happened to me twice in a major way, because I refused to give up.
If you give up, you lose.
These days, I see resilience differently than I did when I was much younger. Back then I didn’t even know what resilience was, it was all about survival.
Now I understand the importance of self-awareness, wisdom, perspective and support if you want resilience to be truly effective.
Resilience is not about being unbreakable.
It is about being hurt, tested, confused, knocked down by life, and still finding a way to continue.
It takes courage to persevere and be resilient. And that courage gives you the best chance of surviving life’s difficulties, challenges and adversities.
