3 Ways to Develop Your Resilience

In essence, being resilient means knowing how to cope with setbacks or failure. To build your resilience you need to understand that how you deal with failure is crucial. In fact, it’s more important than failing to achieve something or missing a sales goal.

If you fail at something, and inevitably you will at some stage in your career, here are some tips to help you be more resilient and bounce back quickly:

1. Remember, failure is only an event. It doesn’t define you as person
2. Failing to achieve something is one of best ways to learn. Examine what didn’t work to make sure you don’t do it again
3. Don’t obsess about the event. Learn what you can and move on fast
4. To boost your self-confidence, remember all the times you have achieved your goals
5. Talk to a positive thinking colleague about what went wrong. An outsider can often see things you can’t because you’re too close to it. If they’ve been through a similar situation, ask them how they reacted. As the saying goes, ‘A problem shared is a problem halved’

If you don’t move on from failure quickly it can become an obstacle to achieving success. Do what you need to do to fix the problem, learn everything you can from it then leave it behind. When it’s in the past there’s nothing you can do to change it so move on to the next challenge. You can only control what you’ll do next time.

Three things resilient people know:

1. They have no control of the past, but they do control the future through their attitude and behaviour
2. Only you can control how you react to a negative event. If you stay positive, you’ll learn more from failure than you will from achievement
3. Everybody fails. The only people who don’t fail also don’t achieve anything

It’s also important to spend time with the right people. As Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Hence, we recommend the following:

1. Spend time with people who strive to succeed no matter what obstacles they encounter
2. Listen to their war-stories to learn lessons from their experiences
3. Share your challenges and ask their advice and make sure you help them too

It’s a great feeling to know you’re not alone on your journey and there are others striving for the same things you are. Let them inspire to you achieve your next great success.

Failures and setbacks are part of life, they’re inevitable if you’re striving to achieve something worthwhile. It’s how you respond to them that really matters. As we’ve found from coaching countless salespeople worldwide, developing your mental resilience takes time. Keep a copy of this article for the next time you need help in responding to a setback.