Pressing On Through Criticism
The word resilience is thrown around a lot today. Some of the ideas are powerful and life changing. Others’ ideas? Not so much.
To me, resilience means being able to face challenges that life gives and thrive through them. I would like to take a moment to think about some of the challenges that everyone who faces life will experience.
You will put in all your effort and everything you have and you won’t get what you want at some point. Maybe you work four times harder than everyone else and you still get overlooked for a promotion.
People can be unreasonable. They may get upset and angry at you for things you haven’t done. You will get ripped off and treated unfairly.
Not everyone will like you.
Many good people lose the people or things they love a lot. The person you have a crush on who you believe is the love of your life will reject you.
You might think I have a miserable view of existence, but I assure you, it’s not so. Despite working in the field of trauma and suicide prevention, I generally believe life is wonderful and worth living. So how on earth do I fit what I have just said into a positive view of the world?
Overall, I tend to see life as a thrilling and exciting journey, with a number of significant obstacles along the way. Part of it is having a view that the world is not perfect and challenges are to be expected. I have called this article “Real World Resilience.” To me, being resilient is being able to face and overcome the challenges I have just mentioned.
Let’s take a job as an example. Maybe you go above and beyond on a project. Maybe you work on it after hours and on weekends. When you show it to your boss, he is dismayed and thinks it is useless and he is very upset with you and rewards someone who did an inferior job to you.
Many of us would be tempted to give up. A resilient person sees this as a road bump along the way. They know many successful people had great setbacks, such as Walt Disney being fired from a cartoonist from a newspaper. They decide to try and learn from this example, maybe after a long and careful thought process they may decide the company is not for them, but they do this from a measured and thought-out
response rather than a knee jerk reaction. Maybe they take on board the feedback and they learn that actually what they did was not as good as they thought it was.
Resilient people are not always focused on self esteem and feeling good in the moment. Resilient people can face discomfort and learn
from this. The person who works hard and is rejected by their boss will feel a lot of pain – it is natural. That pain can be a powerful awakening that either their work was not so good or they are, in fact, in the wrong company.
An important aspect of resilience is knowing that even great companies will not always see your worth and will sometimes overlook good ideas.
I worry that we are setting up so many young people to fail. If we reward everything with certificates of participation,
we avoid giving critical feedback to protect self-esteem. If we deny people challenges that they will fail at, we are not getting people ready for the real world where they will face these things in abundance.
You don’t learn resilience in a classroom, you learn resilience by being put out of your comfort zone, getting knocked back and deciding to press on.
If we want people to have genuine resilience, we must give them real world obstacles to face in school, so that when they encounter these in real life, they can thrive through them.