Resilience – why your origin story can define your future – Part 1

I said in my last blog that I was going to talk about resilience, resourcefulness and reflection – why they’re important, how they work and where they come from.

Where they come from is crucial, especially where resilience is concerned, because it feeds very strongly into your journey as a business owner and the support I can give you as a business coach.

But tracing it back to its origins can be tricky. Something that happened to you as a child – an event you might not even remember – could dictate your behaviour and reactions decades down the line. Some people spend years digging deep to find it.

In my case, my origin story casts an enormous amount of light on the level of resilience I’ve been able to build up…

Where does your resilience come from?

I’ve written before about the events early in my life that made me into the husband, father, business coach and man I am today.?

Like many people, my upbringing and background were not perfect. I’ve had various roles and responsibilities, I’ve been doing well and then all of a sudden, the carpet has been pulled out from under me. But I moved on.

This latest iteration of me as a coach and mentor is one of many pivots in my life, all of which have demonstrated resilience and, in turn, made me even more resilient.

When I was 10 years old, I returned to London – where I had been brought up – from Nigeria – where my mum and dad had moved out to six weeks earlier – on my own.

Where did I find the resilience to survive without my parents?

Having thought long and hard about this, I’ve concluded that my mother and father prepared me for it. They had multiple jobs when I was little and there was a very clear element of me being encouraged to find my independence from a very early age.?

For one thing, they never walked me to primary school or picked me up at the end of the day. One of my primary schools was at the bottom of my road, Santley Street School, which shut down in 1997 and is now a private development. I’d just run the 500 meters to school and then home again afterwards.

I was taught how to cook from the age of three or four, just watching how things were done and made. It was never taken for granted that anything would be done for you.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the only one in that boat. There were other Nigerians of my ilk and boys from other cultures who were in the same position, left alone a lot of the time.?

We were latch key kids – there’s even a photo somewhere of my sister and I as kids with our door keys round our necks.

Get into good habits early

So where did I get the strength to be alone, to live, to survive? I feel there was almost an unspoken bribe in the air – if you can manage on your own as a child, if you can behave, you will do well in life.

I remember my dad’s words: “Don’t hang around with that gang. Be polite. Look smart.Be intelligent. Go to school. Enjoy school. Enjoy sports. Enjoy everything that the world outwardly can see you doing and you'll be allright.”

He was putting the building blocks in place for me to avoid being pulled in other directions, establishing the resilience I would need to succeed in whatever I went on to do.

And I draw on that advice every day in my coaching work. Putting good habits and processes in place early is essential for a business to flourish or for an individual to maximise their potential.

Something else that was important for me was loving every day at secondary school, Salesian College in Battersea. I absolutely loved those years – getting on a bus in Brixton or Clapham Common, meeting some mates and having a laugh.?

At my school, 60 per cent of the teachers were priests and Catholicism was rammed down your throat. There were three black guys in my class and only five in the whole year but I could pull out my phone right now and 20 people I met when I was 11 would have been in touch over the previous 48 hours.

Salesian College was a massive part of what my life has turned out to be, a big building block for where I am now.

There are always points in life where things can go wrong

There was a lot of turbulence for me as a teenager. There were riots – I wasn’t involved. The Special Patrol Group were out in force, I got arrested, beaten up.?

But I was lucky. I knew some hard people and I felt protected to some extent. Yes, there was some excessive behaviour and I’d been visiting friends in different prisons from the age of about 14 onwards.?

But – back to my dad’s building blocks – I would only ever go so far and then stop before things got too out of hand. This was years before CCTV but I used to think my parents were watching me.

I was also spending at least 10 weeks a year in Nigeria and that brought another perspective on life. There was excessive wealth there as well as excessive poverty and my mum and dad were somewhere in between.

They weren’t really part of the system over there because they’d spent time over here so they weren’t quite accepted and neither was I when I went over there.

So there’s lots of checkpoints in my youth, lots of opportunities for things to go wrong – but it was discipline that kept my life in check.