How to build resilience and conquer adversity

You’re lying awake at night. Every click of the clock a reminder, like a tap on the head, that all is not well. Seconds become minutes and minutes become hours.

The waves of panic ebb and flow. Sometimes you feel OK, like it’s going to be fine then a rogue wave wells up inside you. It’s almost imperceptible at first, but it builds and you can begin to sense it. It crushes like a weight on your chest, stopping you from breathing.

In a child-like response, you turn on your side, draw your knees up to your chest, and curl your head forward to meet them. In time, exhausted by the emotional energy you spent you drift off to sleep.

I’ve spent more than a few nights like that over the last ten years since my marriage broke up, and I decided to change my career from something I had come to hate to something with purpose and meaning.

For me, money or the lack of it was my biggest fear. As a single Dad with two kids and a mortgage the battle was to stay afloat. My subconscious would keep the score of my finances better than my conscious self would. I’d often get a deep sense of dread or panic, hours before the text alert would come in telling me I was over my overdraft.

Walking the talk

In time I simply decided I had enough. I was tired of curling up into a ball and worrying about things. It was time to start taking control. It was around this time that I started to get interested again in mental toughness.

As a keen sportsman I’d always been fascinated by it and the role it played in separating the best from the rest. Roll forward seven years and I’ve invested thousands of hours of studying the subject. I’ve become an accredited coach, trainer and mental toughness assessor.

Most importantly, I’ve changed career, clawed my way out of the debt, stopped the fear, and curling up the foetus-position. You can too.

Clarity matters

The first step is to define what resilience is. Google the term what is resilience and you’ll get back 129,000,000 results and probably a similar number of definitions.

Many talk about ‘adaptive’ resilience. Of being able to cope with adversity and bounce-back to where you were. To recover your shape like a willow tree or an elastic band. I prefer a more transformative type of resilience. One that enables me to grow from the adversity and not merely recover my position.

Therefore, I use this definition

resilience is the ability to recover from setbacks and still achieve what you set out to.

You might be dealing with all sorts of adversity in your life but it doesn’t mean it should stop you from achieving your goals whatever they may be.

The two Cs of resilience

The most well researched and well-used model of mental toughness of the 4Cs model. Developed over 30 years from the work of multiple academic researchers and some of the world’s top sports psychologists like Jim Loehr.

You’ll notice that Control and Commitment form what we call resilience — the ability to cope with difficulties and still achieve our goals.

It begins with Control; emotional control and life control. The more you are able to choose your emotional response to an event the better you can set yourself up to achieve the outcome you want.

Think of the equation O = E – R (Outcome equals Event minus Response)

How many times have you reacted to a person or an event without pausing to think about what you want to happen and how our response can best get you there? Did response move you closer or further away? Did you ever regret how you acted? When you extend the gap between the event and your response, you gain control.

The next thing is to focus on the things you can control in your life, of which there are only two: our mindset and our actions.

Through those two, you can influence other things such as people, but you can not control them. Beyond that, there are things we can neither influence nor control so don’t worry about them.

One of the hallmarks of resilient people is their locus of control. They have a high internal locus of control which means they focus on what they can control and little else.

The mentally sensitive person focuses on what they can’t control. They make excuses and lay the blames at the door of others. For what they have done or not done.

There are three great questions to ask yourself:

What don’t I control here?

What am I trying to control here?

What could I control?

What it comes down to then, is a simple choice. This is what Epictetus, the founder of the Stoic philosophy realised. “It is not events that disturb people,” Epictetus taught, “it is their judgements concerning them.”

As @SteveGambardella noted in his article “Epictetus’s solution to this problem is so influential that the ancient philosopher is a credited influence on the development of modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by its founder Albert Ellis.”

Now you have mastered what you can control it’s time to look at Commitment.

This is about stickability. Do we stick at something or quit. To improve this focus on setting two types of goals. Your Outcome goal (the thing you want to achieve) and your Process goals (the smaller actions you need to do to help you achieve the outcome goal)

Suppose you want to lose 14lbs in weight (outcome goal) so you might set three process goals such as: eat 1,500 calories a day, walk two miles every day and drink two litres of water, for example.

By focusing on those process goals you feel more in control because it breaks down the big goal into smaller manageable tasks. You can celebrate the smaller successes every day, which keeps you motivated and buffers you against the small setbacks that will inevitably happen, as sure as the sun will rise.

What separates those that do from those that don’t is stickability, perseverance, commitment, whatever label you choose to attach to it.

As Ryan Holiday says “There’s no magical process for creating something of magnitude, you just need a few small wins every day.”

How can you apply these two elements of resilience to meet your challenges, be more resilient, and achieve your goals?

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This was first published in The Innovation on Medium.com

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