Written by: Edmund Ellison, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When people think of resilience, we often imagine a concept of mental toughness. Resilience could be described as a process of adapting to various factors such as trauma, adversity, or threats.
It’s a topic I wanted to write about because since Covid I’ve been speaking to more and more people who feel burnt out, exhausted and finding it hard to stay motivated.
Let me ask you this, do you find yourself lately staring into your laptop wondering where the time has gone? Do you hear that inner voice whispering, causing you to feel demotivated and doubting your decisions?
Resilience is personal to everyone.
Maybe you’ve spent a while trying different strategies, showing up and getting ghosted by clients or facing a list of objections.
A recent client of mine was in that very position. They had been trying to get clients for a while and no matter what they tried, nothing was working. They described it to me like this, ‘how do you stay motivated every day when no one wants to buy from you. It’s disheartening and makes you wonder if it’s just me that they don’t want to buy from’.
It was very personal for them, and they experienced it like this before we worked together. Every rejection was just another hammer blow that slowly chipped away at their inner core.
Being resilient is hard. We learn from repetition. It affects our mood, our self-esteem. We develop experiential confidence through our achievements.
Yet when the opposite happens, and we go through a sustained period of rejection something curious happens. We start to doubt ourselves, our abilities and this causes us to start playing small, procrastinating, and not showing up.
Fixed vs Growth Mindset
After a while, it’s likely our mindset will switch from growth to fixed and each person’s view of the world changes with it. So, in that mindset, being resilient is tough because we’ve tied success to our self-worth.
Succeeding was the only option, to prove something to ourselves, our families, and friends. So, when things are not working out, it’s hard not to take things personally, as my client had described because we’d have to admit we were wrong.
Yet, everything in life is a learning experience, although it’s hard to see it that way unless your mindset switched from fixed to growth.
The 3 R’s
This is where the 3 R’s can help you to navigate your way back from a fixed mindset, to seeing a situation objectively and taking action:
Reality – examine your current reality without the lens of emotional thinking. Write down exactly what you are feeling, what you are doing and question the validity. There are likely reasons why people don’t want to buy: copywriting, the offer, emotional hooks, or maybe they don’t know you well enough. What have you tried? It is unlikely to work the first time. Test and measure several times before giving up on a strategy.
Reason – understand your reason why. Motivation comes from within. We are more likely to maintain resilience if we have a strong enough reason to push through. Create a vision board and use it to regain your focus when things seem difficult. Visualise your success using the board and picture yourself having achieved the goals using all your senses.
Role – give your inner critic a new role. Assign them the job of your inner coach. They will remind you of every success, to celebrate your failures as wins, to see everything as a learning opportunity. Each day practice gratitude because even a setback can be seen as a valuable experience for adjusting your strategy.
By reflecting daily on the 3 R’s we can start to separate emotion from logical thinking and reframe our negative thoughts to positive ones. Emotion drives us and it will continue to run on autopilot until we step in with logic.
Adapting to difficult situations is never easy. Like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes.
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Edmund Ellison, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Edmund is the Founder and Chief Impact Officer of Impactful Today. He has 15 years of experience in global learning, performance, talent, and people development. He is an award-winning high-performance mindset coach and executive contributor for Brainz Magazine who empowers business owners & leaders to remove mindset blocks using his CLEAR Impact model and methodology, so they can increase confidence, visibility, and profits.
