How well do you weather hardships?
Resilience is a skill that can be acquired. I think it’s all about the little things. You build resilience by finishing little goals you set even if you feel like quitting. For me, one thing I focus on is time on the treadmill. If I say I’m going to be on the treadmill for 30 minutes, and 23 minutes into it I feel like quitting. If I stay on, and fight through the pain screaming from my feet and/or quads, I have contributed a bit to my resilience quotient (RQ). HBR did a piece on this more than a year ago and called resilience a highly underrated part of a leader’s quiver.
As my friend Andy from school put it, “If I can get up today, I can get up any day, no matter what’s thrown at me.”
During the perfect storm, will you have a deep RQ?
(Further reading: Is resilience partly genetic? NYT chimes in.)
Even little things can build up and set up camp right where your motivation is trying to charge through, making a mental block that even constant practice might not be able to overcome. Of course building up this “RQ” can help overcome little things, but bigger catastrophies aren’t as easy to take on. Packing up your depression to save for later so you can head to school and get through the day is a much higher hurdle to jump than motivating yourself to just wake-up in the morning (as hard as that can be sometimes :P). I agree that resilience can be built up, but the “perfect storm” is perfect for a reason– it can take down anyone.