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Resilience


Webster defines resilience as an “ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” It is a wonderful concept but can be difficult to capture. This morning, coincidentally, while warming up for a brutal workout, I heard the essence of resilience captured: “resilience happens when you realize there’s nothing left to do but to fight.”

When you move past all your excuses, when you are sick and tired of coming up with reasons to not act or to take more convenient action, when the pain of where you are and who you are is finally greater than the pain of change, that is when resilience is birthed. Resilience happens when a choice is made to act intentionally out of necessity and determination instead of reacting emotionally out of fear, doubt or anxiety. And it isn’t that resilience replaces fear and doubt, but it is the choice to fight through it – not an emotion that overcomes you, but a decision you make. 

Each one of us battles The Resistance. It looks different in each one of us, and even in your individual life, it will manifest itself it ever-changing ways. The Resistance will try to keep you from making the difficult decisions and taking the uphill path. It will attempt to seduce you with the comfort of the status quo. The Resistance is the enemy of Resilience.

Now, it’s important to know resilience isn’t necessarily overcoming obstacles and roadblocks, it is simply making the deliberate decision to fight The Resistance. Sometimes you will win, other times you will lose, but you will not get to choose the outcome. Your choice is to fight.

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