Key Takeaways
- Being part of a team of people you trust can boost your resilience.
- Strengthen your self-efficacy—your belief in your capabilities.
- Don’t demand a “win” in every instance.
Adversity in life is a given. You will face difficult situations on the path to becoming—and staying—successful in your personal and professional life. And sometimes, those challenging moments will not work out in your favor.
Conceivably, it’s possible that you’ll never experience adversity—but it’s extremely unlikely. Setbacks pretty much come with the territory when you strive for significant success.
One character trait that distinguishes the very wealthy—particularly those who earned their wealth through entrepreneurship or employment rather than via an inheritance—is their ability to cope effectively and move forward when they face those setbacks. It is their psychological strength that helps them progress: The fact that they want to achieve and they want success very badly helps them overcome obstacles and limitations in their path.
In short, they possess resilience—an ability to recover quickly from difficulties—that helps push them forward following setbacks. Moving past difficult times racked with tension and disappointment is problematic for just about everyone. But resilient people are better able to keep going and adjust.
Some prime examples of resilience include author Stephen King (his first novel was rejected by 30 different publishers), Abraham Lincoln (who suffered numerous major political defeats on his path to the presidency) and actor Charlize Theron (who, at age 15, witnessed her mother murder her alcoholic, abusive father after he threatened to kill them).
Becoming more resilient
The good news: Whether you’re resilient or not isn’t some roll of the dice. Many of the characteristics of resilience are in your control. They shape the way you approach situations and often life in general.
Consider these five ideas and action steps that can potentially help you boost your resilience:
Step 1: Be part of a team you trust.
Research done by ADP on resilience and engagement across 25 countries and 26,000 participants shows that workers who completely trust their colleagues, team leaders and senior leaders were 42 times more likely to be highly resilient. The idea here is it’s far easier to do our best and keep moving forward if we’re not worried that the people around us will undermine our efforts or act in other dysfunctional ways that create suspicion in the work environment.
Of course, your trusted team doesn’t have to be in the workplace at all. It can be a group of people you volunteer with or even a social group with a common purpose. The key point is to surround yourself with people you trust as you pursue any group endeavor.
Important:
Simply being part of a team can also make a big impact. The ADP study also found that people who said they were on a team were seven times more likely to be highly resilient than those who didn’t identify as team members. In short, if you’re trying to make things happen all by yourself, stop—and enlist some support.
Step 2: When confronted with change and uncertainty, seek out information.
It’s commonly assumed that frequent or significant change in our lives drains our ability to cope and persevere. However, the ADP study revealed that people who reported five or more changes at work during the pandemic were 13 times more likely to be highly resilient. Ultimately, it’s not change that crushes our ability to push forward—it’s not knowing what’s happening during periods of change. By gathering information and being more informed when change occurs, you can potentially become more resilient.
Important:
This rule works in reverse if you’re in charge of people or running a business. Inform your team of changes that are on the way, why they’re happening and what the impact (positive and/or negative) is likely to be.
Step 3: Work on your locus of control and your self-efficacy.
Other research out of Asia suggests that there are two specific aspects of resilience that have the biggest impact on whether entrepreneurs—who tend to face lots of uncertainty and failed efforts—are ultimately successful over time.
One is called internal locus of control. This is the trait that gives people the conviction that they have the ability to influence (to a large extent) what happens to them and their outcomes. It’s the belief that success or failure depends on what they do or don’t do—and that by working hard toward goals, they can generally reach those goals. Fate and luck may contribute to the journey, but they’re not the main forces that drive success or failure to those with a high internal locus of control.
Note: Having an internal locus of control has also been associated with positive health behaviors.
The second key aspect of resilience identified in the research is self-efficacy. People with high self-efficacy see themselves as highly capable, with the ability to achieve what they set out to do. In the study, entrepreneurs with high self-efficacy saw their failures as valuable learning opportunities, with lessons that could help them strive for better results going forward.
The Upshot:
Look to strengthen your confidence in your ability to control your outcomes as well as enhance your capabilities. Mastermind groups and other “lifelong learning” outlets can be helpful in these efforts.
Step 4: Cultivate a growth mindset versus a static mindset.
Enhancing traits like self-efficacy requires a growth mindset—a belief that continuous improvement and development are both possible and likely. “I can’t do it … yet” is a classic growth mindset phrase, with the “yet” being the key word. In contrast, people with a static or fixed mindset see their current abilities and knowledge as set in stone. Cultivating a growth mindset can potentially help you navigate challenges or outright failures, because it can help you view such moments as temporary instead of a permanent condition.
One approach that helps build a growth mindset is to actively resist so-called catastrophic thinking. It can be easy when something goes wrong to focus on how it could spiral and morph into a situation that ruins your life or family or business. The key is to train your brain by asking yourself in such moments, “How likely is it that the worst-case outcome I can envision will actually happen?” Over time, this exercise can help you short-circuit the idea that problems are sure to lead to catastrophes.
Step 5: Don’t count on victory every time.
Resilient people understand that life is a combination of wins (and sort-of wins, with compromises) and losses (and sort-of losses). By accepting that you will not—that you cannot—always come out on top, you can be in a better position mentally and emotionally to handle setbacks as well as full-on losses.
There will be times when you lose out for reasons beyond your control. Serendipity does indeed play a role in our success, even if you’ve got an amazingly strong internal locus of control. Sometimes you will lose just because you were unlucky. There will also probably be times when your failures are mainly the product of your mistakes and bad judgments.
Being able to accept that you are not perfect and that you will make mistakes (large and small) can help make you more resilient. Such acceptance also will likely translate into your being more successful in the future. In short, while you strive to always succeed, you must be mentally prepared for the fact that you will sometimes fail. That’s just how life works.
Conclusion
Life can be hard at times. There is probably no one in the world who breezes through each and every day—not even the wealthiest of the wealthy. You are going to take a lot of body blows along the way, and some of them could really hurt.
You need to be aware that this is going to happen. Whether the business you founded is crashing to the ground, a loved one is sick or you are facing some other emotionally draining situation, you are going to have to manage and move forward through the shock and disappointment.
Being able to deal effectively with the trying times is a major advantage in business as well as in your personal life. Start by adopting the habits and actions of resilient people, and you’ll be on a better path for when the next challenge comes your way.
VFO Inner Circle Special Report
By John J. Bowen Jr.
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