After Years Of Watching Successful People, I've Noticed They All Have One Rare Trait In Common
mizunokozuki | Pexels When challenges and obstacles occur, we often admire those who seem to act with ease to do or say all the right things. But the truth is: these people who seemingly do everything right really aren't any different from anyone else, and they earn this admiration by doing things the rest of us are totally one-hundred percent capable of doing.
We all experience trying and difficult times throughout life — that's life. But what sets some people apart is the responsible way they've chosen to manage their feelings and emotions around said hardship, and more importantly, if their view of themselves has little, if any, ring of victimhood in it.
The rare trait that strong and successful people have mastered? Resilience.
Karolina Grabowska / Unsplash+
There are three major parts of resilience, which are much more than just being able to bounce back from hard times:
- Resilience is effectively communicating when challenged
- Resilience is maintaining a positive and outgoing view of ourselves
- Resilience is managing stress and emotions in a responsive manner
The area of our lives where we learn to expand our ability to stay the course is our beliefs. Thus, if you are seeking resilience, you may want to start by questioning some of your beliefs.
Consider Thomas Edison's philosophy about his many attempts to improve the light bulb filament invented by others: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Another example would be Nelson Mandela's heroic battle to defeat apartheid in South Africa. Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, tells his story of perseverance in the face of seemingly certain death every single day when he was imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp.
All three men believed their mission would be successful against all odds. All three men were the definition of resilient — so how do we become more like these examples? Start by practicing. For instance, when we review the past, we tend to focus on the negatives and rarely look for opportunities to grow in such events.
Now is the chance to reframe and flex those emotional muscles. Most of us have at least a few instances of success in our past, and we can reflect on these times as good evidence of how we acted upon supportive beliefs. Learning isn't just about repeating failures, with only the pain as the byproduct. We must ardently seek the lesson in each moment to become increasingly resilient.
Five questions will help you build your resilience muscle:
1. Have you experienced success in your past, and what behaviors made the difference?
2. Have you experienced failure in your past, and what did you learn?
3. Are the lessons from failures and the results from successes present today?
4. Are you in regular communication with a support team to keep you on track?
5. Are you taking full responsibility for your life?
If these questions are difficult to answer, ask a friend, a coach, a mentor, or a therapist to help you separate your supportive beliefs from those that keep you small. The key is to stay in the solution, not the problem.
Can some of life's challenges be problematic and even traumatic? Of course. Again, it's a matter of choosing response versus reaction to bring desired results. Most failure occurs because people either fail to effectively plan, don't effectively communicate their plan, or give up in the face of adversity. Do you want to add your dreams to the junk pile or the mountain of jewels? It is truly your choice. Choose resilience.
Joe Palmer has been a business and life coach since 2002 and is the author of Help Wanted, Inquire Within: Your Guide To Life Coaching, available via Amazon. He also facilitates teen leadership trainings throughout the United States.
