Resilience: The Key to Overcoming Life's Challenges

 I came across a television show the other night called Hell’s Kitchen. It was some type of cooking show where hopeful chefs compete against each other in a ridiculous challenge, then work in teams to prepare multi-course meals for a dining room full of guests. Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay yells a lot and calls people donkeys. I didn’t really get the appeal but there was something about one of the contestants that caught my attention. He was a young, squat guy with a big ego and a keen ability to trigger annoyance in anyone within earshot. It was clear that his teammates weren’t big fans. But every time his team made a mistake, faced a setback, or lost a challenge, he always had the same response: “Gotta bounce back.” He must have said it a dozen times. It was like his catch phrase. He didn’t stop and get angry, he didn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself, he just wiped the sweat from his brow and got back to work. “Gotta bounce back.” The kid had a quality that many people struggle with, a quality that is essential for success – Resilience.

Your ability to tolerate discomfort and “bounce back” is proportional to the transformation you can achieve. Discomfort comes our way in many forms. It might show up as a setback at work, a challenge in a relationship, issues surrounding health or body image. But the greatest source of discomfort is change. Even positive change, change we have cultivated, can cause discomfort because our brain sees any change at all as a threat. Remember, the brain is wired for survival and the easiest (but not always the best) path to survival is maintaining the status quo. Any little bump in the road, even when that road is leading us toward our vision, causes the brain to stomp on the brakes and send up distress flares.

The irony is that the brain is incredibly resilient; it just doesn’t like to be. It can “bounce back” from just about any challenge you throw at it, but it will fight you at every step along the way. So what can you do about it? Lean in. Learn to identify when your brain is throwing up those roadblocks and train yourself to lean in to the discomfort. Embrace it. Take your brain's survival instinct and turn it upside down. Rather than viewing change as a threat to survival, you can develop a new belief that change is necessary for survival. Resilience. Like building muscle with exercise, you can build resilience with training. It can be your superpower, taking the challenges before you and, rather than turning away from them, using them as the building blocks of the path toward personal mastery. 

At IMS we offer the tools and the training, and a community of like-minded individuals, to help you recognize when fear and discomfort are trying to block your way and how to develop resilience against them. Click HERE to learn more about the programs we offer and start your training today. Because when you take one on the chin, you “gotta bounce back.”