Adversity doesn’t make you stronger
It looked so cool on TV.
Sitting at the top of the snowy hill, the bitter wind attacking my cheeks, I scanned left to right to make sure there was a clear path. Then I stood up, adjusted the board attached to my boots as straight as I could, and leaned forward.
I’m sure it was fun for a few seconds, but I don’t remember.
What I do recall is discovering that snow is not soft when you’re spinning out of control down a mountain.
Shaun White I was not.
While that experience was rather harrowing and dramatic (or at least melodramatic), I can tell you one thing for sure: It did not make me a more resilient snowboarder.
It made me quit.
Failure isn’t fatal
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
There are thousands of inspirational Instagram posts, stories, blog posts, videos, and books written about the benefits of failing. I do it, too. In my motivational speeches on college campuses and at high schools I often say, “Failure is not the opposite of success.”
What these memes often fail to address (see what I did there?) is that merely failing does not breed success. It doesn’t increase confidence, and it certainly doesn’t build resilience.
In order for failure to be worthwhile, to recast our failures as positive experiences, we must actively make changes based on those missteps or mistakes.
Learning is voluntary
The act of tumbling down a mountain did not, in-and-of itself, make me a better snowboarder or more resilient person. I could have chosen to assess where I went wrong, make a plan to improve on those things, and hiked back to the top of the hill.
But I didn’t.
Alternatively, I could have chosen to examine what about snowboarding wasn’t right for me, learned about my strengths and weaknesses, and applied that new knowledge to make better decisions in the future.
I didn’t do that, either.
My snowboarding misadventure was simply a painful experience that led absolutely nowhere and improved absolutely nothing about my life.
The key to “failing upwards” is to voluntarily learn something new from each mistake, the way a scientist or engineer categorizes failed experiments as data points. They’re not failures to be discouraged by, but knowledge to build upon.
Resilience is a growth commodity
My friend Dr. Deborah Gilboa, professionally known as Dr. G, is a practicing family physician and resilience expert. She takes a hard stance on resilience:
“The idea that we build resilience simply by going through adversity is a myth. Think of someone in your life who has been through a lot of hard things, and it never gets any easier for them. Every single setback is a tragedy, is a story, is a struggle. They’ve been through all these things, but they’ve not gotten much more resilient.”
I asked Debi to explain why this is. Here’s what she said:
“If I want to be more fit, maybe I build a little bit of fitness when I park at a concert and I can’t remember where I parked my car. I get a little bit of exercise, but it’s nothing like a planned exercise program.”
It was starting to sound like building resilience is a ton of dedicated work. Who’s got time for that, right?
“The good news about resilience,” Dr. G says, “is you don’t have to get a trainer and a regimen and have lists, at all. You have to simply name what you’re doing, be a little bit intentional, and your resilience grows by leaps and bounds.”
What doesn’t kill you doesn’t kill you. Whether it makes you stronger is up to you.
How to become more resilient
I recorded an entire 45-min conversation with Deborah for Year of the Pivot on the Beyond Networking podcast. She helped me understand why so many otherwise talented and bright individuals and organizations failed to Pivot in response to COVID, and what those who succeeded did differently.
More importantly, she taught me and you how we can be more intentional about building resilience so we can be better prepared for the next adverse situation that comes our way.
Listen or watch this jam-packed, actionable conversation here: https://beyondnetworkingpodcast.com/deborah-gilboa
