Resilience and Mental Toughness: Tardigrade Time

For hundreds of years, humans have tried to understand (and improve) what they can endure while remaining positive. The terms used to describe this ability include grit, courage, determination, willpower and fortitude. Do you have what it takes to persist (bounce back) in the face of challenges? Can you pick yourself up and carry on even when it seems like you have hit rock bottom? The term ‘mental toughness’ has been used in psychology to refer to the resilience and strength that people possess to continue in the face of struggles, challenges and yet succeed.

Tardigrades are amazing - trust me on this one fact (there are now thousands of Tardigrades on the Moon) - and I will show you why they are the best at being resilient. Resilience is the ability to bounce back (or be a 'rubber ball') in the event of adversity. Successful people tend to have high levels of resilience. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. It was once a popular 18th-century idea that every cloud had a silver lining. Voltaire, an 18th-century French philosopher, had a different view. If he were alive today, he would say that some contain lightning bolts. Which is why we need to step back, look at the neurobiology and how nature copes with harsh conditions.

…and the winner of the most resilient animal is…The Slow Steppers

 [a.k.a. The Tardigrades].  There Are Thousands of Tardigrades on the Moon.

It took me 15 years to become an overnight success. Successful businesses can take years and years. Let's face it, we all make mistakes, and I have made more than most. Failure is the most important step to my reaching success, but it can still feel like it's crushing my soul. Having talked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I have learned something critical - failure is the norm and essential. Accepting this failure as a lesson is one of the most important things I have ever learned.

Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and capacity to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after misfortune, resilient people have a positive outlook and can change course and plot new way points to the destination. Put simply, resilience is the ability to cope with and rise to the inevitable challenges, problems and setbacks you meet in the course of your life, and come back stronger from them.

Resilience relies on different skills and draws on various sources of help, including analytical thinking skills, physical and mental health, and your relationships with those around you. Resilience is not necessarily about overcoming enormous challenges; each of us faces plenty of problems on a daily basis for which we must draw on our reserves of resilience.

Back to those winners, the Tardigrades. They are water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals (the name means 'the slow stepper'). They have been found everywhere from mountain tops to the deep sea, from rain forests to the Antarctic. Tardigrades can survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from ?458 °F (?272 °C), close to absolute zero, to about 300 °F (150 °C). Pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.

Consider my new poster on resilience, which I have on my wall:

Most of us know that failure is a reality of life, and at some level, we understand that it helps us grow. Intellectually, we even acknowledge that the greatest achievers (past and present) also routinely experienced colossal failures. I believe and teach that failure can be taken one of two ways - either as a catalyst and stimulant for learning and doing better next time or as the ultimate defeat you never let yourself recover from. This is true in your professional and personal life. Charting a new course when the conditions have blown you from where you wanted to be is part of the process.

Here are my strategies for moving on after a tough break and being more resilient:

1.   Don't Look Back in Anger - Each time you fail, your fear of failure becomes smaller, which allows you to take on even bigger challenges. Making mistakes is not a big deal as long as you learn from them and avoid repeating them. Completely ignoring what happened isn't helpful, so set aside a specific amount of time to wallow as much as you want. 

2.   Take Time to Absorb - Take some time to be angry, upset, and frustrated so you can get it all out. If it's something small, all you may need is an hour to pace around or cry in a pillow. For something larger, give yourself a full 24 hours to let it all out and wake up the next day with a clean slate. If you need more than a day, that's okay, but make sure it's an amount of time set by you and that you stick to it. You get that time to be as mopey as you want, but when it's over, move on.

3.   Stay Healthy as a Discipline - Get adequate restorative sleep. Poor sleep patterns and stress go hand-in-hand. Engage in appropriate physical exercise daily. Exercise is a major buffer against stress, including stress from depression. Maintain a healthy diet and keep your weight within the desired range. You will have fewer health-related problems. 

4.   Try a New Point of View - Failure teaches you that an individual approach may not be ideal for a particular situation and that there are better approaches. One of the best things you can do is to shift your perspective and belief system away from the negative ("If I fail, it means I am stupid, weak, incapable, and am destined to fall short") and embrace more positive associations ("If I fail, I am one step closer to succeeding; I am smarter and more savvy because the knowledge I've gained through this experience"). Every mistake is a learning opportunity, and after you've moved past your emotions, it's important to revisit your mistakes with a new perspective. Look at what you did that went wrong, but also look at what you did that was right, and what you can do better next time. Failure is rarely so black and white.

5.   Challenge Yourself to Do It Again - Whenever you step outside the comfort zone, and whenever you try something new, failure becomes inevitable. Get back on the horse and ride again, even if the horse threw you off the last time. Prepare for battle: This is not for the faint of heart. You have to separate your feelings from this game. 

6.   Gather More Information - You want to engage the rational part of your brain in your decision-making about the situation. One of the best ways to do so is to actively gather more information on which to base your decision. 

7.   The Mental Game - Build tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty and you are less likely to experience anxieties related to a need for certainty. Express higher-order values, such as responsibility and integrity. This gives you a compass for taking a sound direction. Work to build high frustration tolerance. High frustration tolerance, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving actions are frequently interconnected. Stretch to achieve realistic optimism. This is a belief that you can both self-improve and act to make things more workable for you. 

8.   Focus on the Positive - Boost resilience with defensive actions where you reduce your risk for negative thinking and increase your chances for realistic thinking. Each failure makes you stronger, bigger and better. Don't brush mistakes under the rug, but also don't stop yourself from looking at all the positives you've managed to create. There's always a balance in business.

9.   Don't Make it Personal - Failure is a great teacher, and it allows you to learn some of the most valuable life lessons. Separate the failure from your identity. Just because you haven't found a successful way of doing something (yet) doesn't mean you are a failure. These are completely separate thoughts, yet many of us blur the lines between them. Personalising failure can wreak havoc on our self-esteem and confidence

Successful people will never laugh at you or judge you when you fail because they have already been there and they know about the valuable lessons you can learn from failure. Talk to somebody you know about how you're feeling. It's well known that just talking about something can make you feel better. Take a load off and express yourself. Chances are whoever you talk to will try to make you feel better, but even if they don't, saying how you feel out loud puts that information out somewhere besides your brain.

Resilience is a multi-faceted capability that need encouragement. To face challenges and respond appropriately can require us to draw on all our resources, both internal and external, including our personal relationships. The good news is that improving our resources can help to develop resilience, and there are many ways in which we can do that - starting with you reading this.

Be Amazing Every Day

Tim Dingle BSc (Hons), PGCE, MBA, has been involved in education, management and training for the last 30 years. Tim is a former Headmaster of a top school and gained an MBA with a distinction. His dissertation was on body language and interview skills. He has a unique insight into teaching, leadership and management and has now written 26 books on a variety of topics including motivation, leadership, education, training, communication, interview success and business. His background in management also includes being the Chairman of England Schools Rugby and is an active member of the RFU and MCC. His academic pedigree (in Biology, Teaching and Business) combined with his mediation skills, gained him a place on the Board of the Global Negotiation Insight Institute (which used to be the Harvard Negotiation project). He has lectured all around the world with keynote speeches at many national and international events. His facilitation skills are in constant use for difficult and complex problems. His work in the hospitality sector is making a massive impact and he is dedicated to making everyone feel empowered, successful and making training fun. He is a speaker, trainer, coach and mentor: inspiring people to be amazing every day.