[November 8, 2015] When my daughter entered college with the desire to graduate with a degree in Applied Physics, I alerted her to the difficult requirements of advanced mathematics. She brushed me off as if she already knew how to do well. After making a “D –” in her first Calculus course (can you get closer to fail?) she came to me and I told her the secret of passing. My solution was encouraging resilience in her.
Yes, my secret was simple and not really a secret. I recommended she work every problem in the Calculus text book and ask the professor for additional problems to solve. I’d used this technique successfully while studying engineering and I had a weak background in math. I told her jokingly that many pencils “sacrificed their lives” so that I could do well. My frustrations had resulted in many broken pencils but what I learned was that a technical education takes hard work and practice, practice, practice. She passed the course and graduated five years later.
Resilience offers protection against future mental or physical pressures and provides a buffer to stress and anxiety. When it comes to assisting leaders, helping them discover the benefits of a resilient personality pays dividends. A resilient leader will view obstacles as a challenge to overcome instead of something to evade; an advantage to themselves and to their workplace. Leaders who evade tough problems or have a false sense of confidence will inevitably lack the moral courage to do what is necessary to succeed.1
Someone once said that the greatest threat to building resilient leaders is early success in the leader’s career. Failure is a better and strong teacher. It forces us to be adaptable and flexible. The more “tests” we have in life, the more resilient we become. When we fail that first course in college it awakens us to the fact that we are doing something wrong and it builds strength of character when we might not be up to snuff.
As the mentor of several leaders, I always reinforce the idea that they will only do well if they are strong, flexible, and persistent. Those are the key ingredients to a resilient personality. Too many leaders fail when they can’t take the pressures of their position. Resilience will get anyone over any obstacles thrown in your path.
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- There has been an enormous effort over the past decade to instill resilience in leaders and in school-age children. Most are successful and helpful. An early program in schools that attempted to improve a child’s confidence had the goal of making them better people. But the program had the unintended consequence of creating less resilient children. The reason is that confidence building without actual stressors is doomed to be false. The slightest real resistances those children face will cause them harm.