If you play it safe in life, you can normally create a simple and comfortable life for yourself, achieving what you aim for, as long as you keep your aim relatively low.
If, however, you are someone brave enough to seek to achieve your absolute personal best and to make your own greatest possible “dent in the universe”, inevitably you will run into obstacles, challenges, disappointments.
This post is for those brave individuals who aim high, and also for those who lead others
What I am here to remind you is that you will hit hurdles, run into walls, fall down holes. Some will hurt, some will hurt a lot.
One morning I woke up to an email with some news that really hurt. The reality is it was really rough news, and it would have been all too easy to fall into a spiral of doubt, of “woulda, shoulda, coulda” self-flagellation.
This was a personal area of a deal falling through, but in business it could be a major deal going down, someone you thought was ideal for a hire turning down the job, receiving a resignation letter from a star team member where you had no idea they were unhappy (happened to me once in my career, it still smarts that I missed this!) etc.
I’m not saying that I was totally calm and zen-like in this recent case. I wasn’t. It was rough.
However, one resilience tool I had that was helpful was the simple phrase every Scottish mother and grandmother teaches their children, You see, the Scots are Stoics by nature too !
That phrase is the subject line of this email and the picture above, which readily translates to : “What’s for you will not go by you”
If you were expecting something to happen and it doesn’t, and if you did everything you could, honoured your values and ethics, it simply wasn’t meant to happen.
I realise in running a search on this site of the term “resilience”, counting this one, I have now written at least ten posts talking about this in different ways.
The higher you aim, the more likely that you will have some setbacks along the way. They can either defeat you, or you can learn from them and rise every higher. Part of being able to do the latter is to recognise you will have setbacks and to build practices, structures, support well before you need them.
Please do read some of the posts you will see from that link above, and take notes on what resilience tools you use. Please also share any with me by commeting on this post, by twitter, email, whatever medium you choose. I’ll absolutely review anything I receive and look to share with others in future posts.
Thank you, and remember, “Whit’s Fur Ye’ll No Go By Ye” !