The secret to recovery
Have you ever been kicked when you were down? Perhaps she lost everything she had? Or something as simple as something not going as expected?
Did you recover? Or did she snap and fall into victim mode spiraling into depression and anger?
We’ve all been there, so today we’re going to talk about resilience: your ability to bounce back after taking a hard hit.
I’ve taken a few hard hits in my time and never noticed until now, but I’m tough. Growing up, my mother used to call me “her survivor of her.” Of the three of us, I was the one who would get up from her boots and move on.
When I was 20 years old I got married and had my daughter; the marriage quickly failed and I had to leave the comforts of a supported lifestyle to raise my son on my own with no money, no home and no career.
When I was 30 years old, my company was sold to another company that brought in the proverbial “manager from hell” and the job I had for so many years, I no longer enjoyed.
When she was 40 years old, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she beat it, only for it to resurface years later. The same year, I lost my job, my daughter lost hers, and the family business was taking a beating.
Long story short… I recovered from all of that and very quickly.
What I learned from this self-reflection is the secret to recovery and this is what I learned:
1) You need to have an honest conversation with yourself. – Ask those tough questions and give really honest answers (not the angry answers or excuses you want to give) really sit down and reflect on what happened. If you had a part in it, take charge.
2) Understand that you control your own destiny and that you are exactly where you are because of the decisions you made… not because of what others have done to you. You have been in control of your life and the results all this time. If there was a fault, it was your fault and you and only you will fix it.
3) To recover, you must take action! You have to do something about it. All success in life comes from moving forward: taking the first step and taking action. You know what went wrong (remember you just had an honest conversation with yourself), now go figure out your next move.
4) Don’t get stuck on what didn’t work. Focus on creating something new that works. Use your initiative and creativity to generate ideas that will lead you to your goal. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, so the simple logic is to do something different.
5) Give yourself a break. Allow yourself to laugh at yourself and learn from this mistake. People grow tremendously from this kind of knowledge. Don’t be hard on yourself, find the humor in the situation and share it with others. This vulnerability will connect you with those around you and help keep you in a positive frame of mind.
6) Always take the right path. Integrity is your most valuable trait, keep it real. It will be easy to criticize others, make excuses and find fault with everything around you. That’s the easy way out, the hardest way is not to find all the reasons why something went wrong, but to find the one reason to correct it. No matter what has happened to you, live your life from a place of morality and high integrity. – What I’ve learned, the universe has a funny way of paying you.
Just like the gutter in the desert landscape, you too will begin to blossom into something beautiful. The saying is “what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger” – Well, that’s resilience and something that each of us has in our arsenal of weapons to succeed.