Resilience is a Noun. To Prosper is a Verb. Get Moving.

Author Thomas Friedman cautions that the world is getting hot, flat and crowded in his current book of the same title, and I postulate that the answer is to love, to learn and to prosper.

They don’t call me Dr. Success for nothing, so let me be direct. Being resilient and developing your resilience is not some optional human characteristic that you can debate about, deciding whether to invest the time to strengthen it. It is a “human operating system” necessity. This is not new information. What is new is that the number of people who are being called to be resilient has increased, and a whole new generation has a need to be informed. The information is old, the need is current, and the demand is great!

So what exactly is resilience? Why not look at your own life to answer that question. Have you ever taken a test, failed, and thought the world would never be the same? Have you ever fallen in love, thought you knew exactly how your life together would play out, and then the relationship ended? Have you ever had the perfect job, or perfect boss, or perfect client – and then lost one or all of them? Well, the fact that you have carried on, after you thought you would not be able to do so, is an example of you being resilient.

Dr. Success Challenge: Now is the time to recall as many “I can’t go on” instances in your life, to embrace both the feeling of not being able to go on, and then completely acknowledge the reality that you obviously did go on.

I also want to offer you a shortcut to getting back on the road of life success. When you believe that things can’t get any worse and you doubt you can go on, take some time and observe all the love that surrounds your life. Look under every rock for it. If you have a pet, start there. The love of a pet is usually the least conditional and the most apparent. Then move on to the humans in your life – don’t stop at just those you might live with either. Look for all the people who spontaneously smile just because you enter a room. If you just said to yourself, “What people spontaneously smile when I walk into a room?,” do this: consciously smile at every single person you see, every day, no matter what. I will lay odds that you’ll start to get a lot of people smiling when you enter a room.

Next, make an effort to learn from any and all current frustrations and disappointments. When you enter into a conversation, instead of leading with what is frustrating or disappointing to you, lead with what you are learning from the situations. You will not only be helping yourself build resilience, you’ll also begin to help others see what is possible in their own lives. And in the end, helping others is what it is all about.

Your resilience will be built stronger and more reliable as you help others be more resilient in their lives. This is not simply about paying it forward, this is about creating true prosperity. Remember to love yourself, remember to learn from your past experiences and remember to prosper really means to be strong and flourish. Get moving.

Thank you Stew Gibbons for the beautiful photograph of an Alaskan mountain scape shown at the top of this blog.