Perseverance and resilience are crucial to life.  We’re guaranteed that life is going to throw us a curve ball, knock us down, and take us out at some time or another.

Perseverance is the ability to keep going, keep finding a path through the storm, and resilience, the capacity to quickly recover from difficulties or change. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be to have a huge supply of these?  We’d sail through life’s challenges.

The problem is, we’re not born with these.  We only develop the muscle of perseverance and resilience as we journey through tough times, force ourselves to exercise perseverance and find a way through it, and as a result, build resilience which enables us to bounce back quicker next time.

Show Notes

• [0:30] Why I take a day out each month as part of the 'Rhythms' process I use to ensure success

• [3:03] The quote that struck me this week: Perseverance, character and hope

• [4:35] Reverse engineering what leads to Hope

• [4:56] The self-fulfilling circle of success: Perseverance

• [5:27] Resilience and why it's so liberating when you realise you've built it

• [6:45] Why it's so important to focus on building perseverance and resilience

Quotes

The Rhythms of Success help to keep me focused on living my Best Life - Lisa Linfield

I struggle to stop and reflect as I do, do, do - so I journal to force reflection - Lisa Linfield

When you go through a storm, the pain feels magnified - Lisa Linfield

The temptation to give up is great - Lisa Linfield

Character is built by not giving up - the outcome of perseverence - Lisa Linfield

If you're going through a tough time, reach out - Lisa Linfield

Relevant posts and episodes

• Listen to the episode on Hope

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Spotify

Please do Subscribe to our Podcast on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review.  This helps the podcast to rank higher and therefore makes it more visible to others browsing podcasts in the hope they too may benefit from our content.

Get my book - Deep Grooves: Overcoming Patterns that Keep you Stuck

• You can get the first two chapters of my book FREE here

• If you want a paperback copy and you’re in South Africa, visit my site LisaLinfield.com

  If you want a Kindle copy or a paperback anywhere in the world, visit Amazon
  

Transcript

This week I took a day out as my CEO day. 

It’s part of what I call, The Rhythms of Success.  Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly rhythms that help keep me focussed on leading my best life.  I’m not a structured person, so these structures don’t come naturally to me, but I learnt them as part of an executive team that managed 18,000 people.  You only get that many people to achieve a common goal if you put in place the disciplines of rhythms.  It’s effective, and I learnt how to adapt those into my own life to ensure success, and share them with you in my book, Deep Grooves which is launching next month.

So every month I take a full day to review the month that’s been, journal gratitude for the successes and reflect on the challenges.  I look at the month to come and plan firstly the major projects, and look at what needs to be taken off my plate to achieve the big goals of the month.

As God is my CEO, this time is rooted in prayer, and executed through journaling.  You see, I’m a doer, which means that I struggle to stop and reflect.  As I write about in my book, Kolbe’s Active Learning Cycle talks about optimal learning going through four phases

1. Experience

2. Reflection

3. Learning or conclusion

4. Plan or experimentation

I’m what he’s call an Activist – I do – plan – do – plan and don’t really stop and think, reflect etc.

So these rhythms force me to take time to journal, reflect, gain insight and wisdom as to how to make my life and business better.

As many of you would know, this last month has been tough, and I was shocked to read back on my CEO day reflections and see only slight signs of the storm brewing.  I think I was still in denial.  I was also shocked to find out it had been less than a month – when you go through a storm, its pain feels magnified, and you feel like you must have been going through it forever.

It was great to get perspective.

The process of reflecting, of having Ah-ha moments can significantly transform the way you see an issue, and this day was no different.  Listen to this: Because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, Character; and character, hope. It’s from Romans 5 vs 3.

Now in episode 129, we chatted about how the highest correlant of success was… HOPE.  So initially, that’s what struck me about this verse.  And if you remember, the great prof, Rick Snyder pointed out that two things needed to be in place for Hope to be a generative energy

1. Agency – that you personally owned the goal

2. The deep belief that you were able to find successful pathways

 So, if hope was what was needed for success, I needed to really believe that I could find successful pathways, come what may.

To be honest, there have been times over this last month that I just can’t see successful pathways. I’ve tried so many different pathways, and the temptation to just give up and say, “it didn’t work”, is high.

So, interested in hope, I looked at what the author of the verse thought led to hope – reverse engineering it.

1. In order to have hope you needed Character

2. And Character was produced as the by product of perseverance.

And there it is again – the self-fulfilling circle of success – persevering, finding pathways at a time when you just want to give up. The character that’s formed by not giving up, returning to your comfort zone, which leads to the hope next time that you know that you can in fact, and have done way harder things before, because you persevered.

Which brings me to resilience.  Here are some of the definitions of resilience that resonate:

• the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

• an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

Now, I would not describe myself as one of the world’s great perseverers or an example of a reservoir of resilience.

I feel like whenever change, difficulty, adversity or criticism come my way, their feather like impact seems to knock me like a sledgehammer.  I don’t feel able to recover quickly from those difficulties, and I desperately wish I was more resilient.

Yet, I remember the second time I didn’t get a position I was going for, it was truly liberating.  It took just a few hours, a good sleep and I had bounced back the next day.  The first time, it felt like it took years, and I lived in fear of the next time disappointment struck.

And so, as I took the time to journal and reflect, I came to the realisation that as much as I hate the lessons of perseverance and resilience, I realised that this is a process I need to see through.

I need to continue trying every different way I can to make this business work.  I need to persevere in creating pathways to success so that I can build the character and then hope I needed to live my Best Life.

Because each time I make it through a difficult situation, I build resilience.  The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.  Because let’s not kid, whilst it’s been just less than a month, I want to get through each knock more quickly than the previous one, so that each one floors me less and less.

So whilst I would never say tough times are good, it does bring me a sense of peace knowing that through every experience I get to build strength, resilience, perseverance which mean that I go into the next one more able to get through it with more grace than the current one.

So if you are going through a tough time, keep trying to find a path through it, and reach out to me through my private Facebook group, Brave to be Free which you can find off the Working Women’s Wealth page.

Take care friends

I’m Lisa Linfield, and this is Working Women’s Wealth