A recent article published on Forbes ‘The Resilient Person’s DNA’ by Rob Asghar got me thinking about how resiliency is relevant to all of us (in our daily personal and professional lives), within the turbulent ever-changing times we are by now used to confront ourselves with.
Resiliency is a concept much more articulated than persistence because it is multidimensional in its essence. While being persistent is related to a sense of unbarred determination towards reaching a goal, no matter what kind of barriers are encountered along the way; being resilient means all of this integrated by an attitudinal make-up sourced by nature and nurture.
As Asghar points out by quoting Winston Churchill “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”, it is the attitudinal dynamic factor that in its essence constitutes the ‘DNA make-up’ of the resilient person.
Resiliency means to be genetically wired, reinforce or created this wiring through specific targeted thoughts that generate constructive behaviours no matter what we are set to deal with.
Key characteristics to this line of thinking are the solid belief that everything that happens to us has it serves a scope and it has a meaning: wins or failures set us on paths ‘to make eventually good things happen’ no matter what.
Sometimes a win can have a short term positive impact, while a failure can be the first step towards a longer lasting positive impact given that we handle it with resiliency: aware, constructive and proactive thoughts, behaviours and actions.
Given all of this, it is much tougher to be resilient than persistent; at the same time resiliency is the only way to truly deal with the complexities (including the all reaching negative influences) we cannot avoid to deal with and we can make work for us not against us.