Author: Muriel McClymont

According to Wikipedia, “Psychological resilience is an individual's tendency to cope with stress and adversity.”  There are many other articles on the web explaining the key aspects of resilience, such as optimism, feeling in control, adept social skills, flexibility, problem solving ability and positive values.

For me, when I think of resilience, I remember the Weebles, a toy from my childhood. If you’ve never heard of this, take my word for it, a whole generation on hearing the name, will burst into the, “Weeble’s wobble but they don’t fall down,” song. Sad but true.

You can hold a Weeble flat on its side and it will bounce straight back up when you let it go. Some people do this too. Take Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa. After spending 27 of his prime years in jail, he came out and continued to work against apartheid with more compassion, wisdom and determination than ever - definitely a human Weeble in my book.

We’re not born with a fixed quota of resilience. Like every other skill, it can be learnt. Setbacks come in all shapes and sizes: missed opportunities, mistakes, bad decisions, personal problems and human tragedies. Most of these happen to all of us at some point. It’s how we react that makes the difference.

How can we learn to be more resilient?

To develop resilience, I suggest using these three key steps:

1. Detach any inappropriate meaning you have applied to the event/s

One of the most important aspects of how we deal with a crisis is not what has happened but what meaning we apply to it. For example, losing a job might result in reduced income, more free time and some new information about what that client did and didn’t want. It doesn’t change who they are or many other aspects of your life.

However, if you apply meanings to it such as: “I’m useless”, “They hate me”, “My life is ruined”, the event can become a catastrophe rather than a surmountable set back. It’s important to recognise what the real effects of the external event are rather than take it to the dizzy heights of ruining your life – a state of mind not a fact of reality.

Instead, take a step back and look for facts and evidence. Keep your finger off the play button of your own mental disaster movie! What does it mean? It means you have lost this job and now you need to do something about finding the next one.

It’s important to put this event in the context of your life. Take a moment to get in touch with all those areas that have gone well and are still in good shape, e.g., relationships, family, health etc. So whatever happens is only part of the picture not your entire existence.

2. Consider what you can learn from what has happened

The most useful activity now is to understand what happened so that you can learn from it. This is not an opportunity to feel bad about set backs or mistakes. Mistakes are an integral part of learning. None of us learned to walk without falling down a few times. In fact, we learn more from our mistakes than we do from doing things perfectly. So really, this is an opportunity! Now what is needed is information:

• What else was going on that influenced this decision?
• What part did you play?
• If you received negative feedback, was it justified?
• How is this situation perceived by someone who’s opinion you rate?
• What could you have done differently?
• What lessons can you learn from this?
• What can be salvaged, if anything, from the situation?
• How was this experience useful to you?

Once you have answered all of the above, you can put whatever has occurred into perspective, and into the past, and move onto making decisions about your next steps.

3. Identify what actions you are going you take next

Resilience is getting up again and taking action after a setback. I love the Japanese saying: “Fall down 7 times, get up 8.” Now, it is the time to look into the future, make or amend your existing plans, and do something. If you are not sure what to do, do anything. If that doesn’t work, do something else. This is the time to focus on what you can do.

Resilient people have an optimistic belief that somehow things are going to work out fine. Not necessarily how they envisage them now, but fine. This is a powerful belief because it makes everything bearable - no matter how bad it is, it’s only temporary. Just like being rolled onto your side if you are a Weeble!

All together now, sing… “Weeble’s wobble but they don’t fall down!”

Ever had a really great plan, clear goals, and actions so obvious it didn’t seem possible to fail… and yet somehow, nothing got done?

Having a fantastic plan but no motivation is like having a brand spanking new Ferrari, but no petrol. Nice to look at, but it’s going no-where!

So how do you find the motivation to act? One way is to take your plan, pull out your most important goal and ‘chunk it up and down’.

To explain what I mean, imagine your goal is a tree in a forest. If you consider that tree in isolation, you’ll notice that it’s an upright structure with branches and leaves, producing food (and oxygen) by photosynthesis from carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water.

To chunk that up, imagine floating up above that tree, and seeing it in the context of the forest it’s part of. Chunk up again, and see that forest in the context of the countryside it’s in - how it supports animals and other plant life.

Chunk up again, and you’ll understand the role that tree and its forest plays in the ecosystem of the planet, regulating oxygen, CO₂ levels and the global climate. When you chunk anything up like this, you get a completely new perspective. You understand where it fits in, and how it contributes to the overall picture.

Similarly, when you chunk your goal up, you can change your perspective of it stratospherically. You can recognise how that goal fits into your life and your world, and how it plays a significant part in your personal ecosystem.

When you do this, you not only understand your goal’s importance, you feel highly motivated to take the necessary action to make it happen. You fill your emotional fuel tank.

To do this with your goal, consider your most important goal and ask yourself: “If I achieved this, what would it give me?” Take the answer to this and ask yourself: “If I achieved that, what would it give me?”

Keep going with the same question until you can’t take it any further, until the answer is a gesture, a word or a value. When you get there, you will have discovered what this goal means to you - why it matters and why you are doing it.

Now go back to your original goal to see if your feelings about it have changed. Sometimes, this process makes you feel instantly more motivated to make it happen, sometimes you recognise that your goal needs to change. If this is the case, amend your goal, and chunk it up in its new form - all the way to the top.

Once you have found the source of your fuel/motivation, how do you start to pump it around the system to get your engine really motoring?

If we go back to our tree, we need to chunk down now. What could stop this tree from doing its job? To achieve it’s goals, our tree needs to grow tall enough to get it’s share of the sunlight and it needs to sink it’s roots deep enough to get a good supply of water and nutrients, even in drought. It needs to overcome all of the obstacles that might get in it’s way to make sure that it stays standing, to do it’s job for itself, the forest, the landscape, and ultimately the globe.

To chunk down your goal, ask yourself: “What stops me?” Then take whatever the answer is to this and ask: “What would I like instead?” Then ask: “What stops me doing that? Then ask: “What would I like instead?”

Keep going until you reach a point when there are no obstacles. You have then found your starting point.

An example of this might be:

• What stops me? – lack of confidence
• What would I like instead? – to be more confident
• What stops me? –  constantly questioning myself and my abilities
• What would I like instead? – to support myself by telling myself I’ve done well
• What stops me? – nothing apart from lack of practise.

The action point here would be to start working out ways to support yourself more and criticise yourself less. When you start to take action on this, you will have the confidence to take the next steps.

Think of it as a ladder of opportunity that you are trying to find the right point to step on. Once you identify this, you just need to step on and you’re on your way. It’s hard to take action if you don’t chunk down to a manageable level.

If, at any point, you find you’re not making enough headway, then park up, take the goal you are currently working on, and chunk it up and down by way of a car service. Do this whenever you need to.

OK, so you have fuelled up your Ferrari by chunking up to what the purpose and point of it all is for you. You have also checked the tyre pressures, charged the battery and filled the windscreen wash. You are ready to jump in, and see what this engine can do!

Enjoy the open road ahead!

So What's Good About Rejection?

Who doesn’t love that scene in Pretty Woman, after Julia Roberts, while ‘escorting’ rich businessman Richard Gere, takes his credit card shopping, but is patronised by the shop assistants and buys nothing.

Then shops again, this time with Gere, and pops her head into the shop where she was made unwelcome, carrying several, expensive shopping bags to say: “Big mistake, BIG, HUGE!”

Who wouldn’t love to be able to do that after a hurtful rejection?

There have been some pretty spectacular rejections over the years, which must have had the rejectors kicking themselves for a long time afterward. For example:

• JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was turned down by 12 publishing houses before Bloomsbury took it up after Chairman Nigel Newton’s eight year old read it, loved it and nagged him to publish it.
• Fred Astaire was told after his first screen test: “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Can dance a little.
• ”Walt Disney was fired because he “lacked imagination.”
• The Beatles were rejected by Decca Recording Co. in 1962 because: “We don’t like their sound and guitar music is on the way out.”

So if you are experiencing some challenging rejections at the moment, just remember what good company you are in! Did any of them just throw the towel in? Obviously not!

So, how do we make rejection into a good thing? Basically, we need to view it as a learning experience that gives us something to work with so that we can grow, develop and achieve what we want next time.

People don’t learn half as much when things go well as they do when things are tough. When you read autobiographies of successful people, they pretty much all have their crisis years, which they use as a platform for their later success. For example:

• Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs was a college drop out and was sacked from his own company;
• Tony Robbins, self help author and inspirational speaker, experienced financial ruin;
• Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Saunders owned nothing but his recipe after the depression
• Einstein was considered slow because he didn’t speak until he was four or read until he was seven!

I’m sure it is less common for people who never experience truly difficult times to find the incentive and motivation to go the extra mile and to achieve exceptional successful.

Rejection is an experience from which you can learn. It is feedback through which you have the opportunity to extract all its informative goodness before you throw the husks of it away.

However, you need to develop the right mindset. It doesn’t do anyone any good to keep sifting through their near misses. Once you have taken all that is worth learning from that experience, then it should be filed and forgotten. Combing over past rejections is an unnecessary form of masochism and should not be indulged!

There are many occasions in life where people are trying to connect a need with someone who can fulfil it. They have to consider several people until they find the right fit. It’s not a process of separating good people from bad, it’s just about finding appropriate links!

I can think of many occasions where I am grateful, with hindsight, that I was rejected. Jobs that wouldn’t have suited me, flats I wouldn’t have been happy in, partners I wouldn’t have thrived with. As I look back I am grateful for all of those rejections, which really worked out for the best for me. I’m sure we all have examples of those.

Trite sayings like: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, exist because there is truth in them. And, one of the most powerful ways to assist this process is to develop a sense of humour about rejection. First find out what was good about it and then why it is funny! People often say: “Someday I will laugh at all this,” but as NLP co-creator Richard Bandler says: “Why wait?!”

Check out these spoof rejection letters created by Andy Ross a literary agent who was a bit frustrated by some of the rejections he was receiving on behalf of his writers. He guesses how these same publishers would receive books by Shakespeare and Hitler.

So, next time you experience rejection, remember, ask what can you learn from it? Then in the words of the song sung by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Swing Time: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again!”

Who’s driving the bus?

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare

Rejection for a freelance is something that happens when you apply for a piece of work and someone else gets it, and that’s all it is. A creative freelance generally has to apply for every single piece of work via an audition, pitch or short contract. Rejections are just normal.

What makes it a positive or negative experience depends on what meaning you apply to it.  Or to paraphrase the great bard, rejection is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so!

Take a recent situation I was involved in, where a group of journalists were being made redundant from a national daily newspaper. All were initially shocked and needed to take a bit of time to process the news, but the reactions from all those people were startlingly different, two in particular stood out, I’ll call them Jack and George. Both were in their early 50’s, good pensions, due a respectable redundancy payment, and reasonably financially stable.

Jack, once he got over the initial shock, was really happy, he had plans for travelling with his partner, which he had never had the opportunity to do, so he very quickly saw this event as freedom and an opportunity to catch up on his dreams.

George, however, didn’t seem to get over the shock, he only seemed able to focus on what he saw as the underlying message that he was not needed, and therefore useless and worthless. He couldn’t initially see how his life could ever improve from this, as he saw it, condemnation of him.

The rejection was the same, the consequences were similar, but the meaning, freedom, versus condemnation, made all the difference to the experience.

As Eleanor Roosevelt said “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

The truth is, no one can make you feel anything without your consent!

What people often don’t recognise is how much choice they have in how they react to events in life, even seemingly tough ones like rejection. When we are tied up in the moment, it is easy to feel like we are at the mercy of our thought processes, but we can learn to steer our reactions in a more useful direction, it just takes awareness and practice.

Some ways to achieve this are:

• See this experience in context, whatever is happening is only happening in part of your life, it does not define you, and it does not change who you are. You are so much more than whatever is happening in your life right now. Take some time to think about other areas in your life that are good, family, friends or your health for example.
• Step back from the experience, physically take a step back and imagine stepping out of your upset self, and see yourself standing where you were. Giving yourself space in this way, can allow you to take a break from the feelings and let you gather good quality information about the situation, from a more analytical position, rather than an emotional one. This can be a great source of new insights and an alternative perspective to any stressful situation.
• Step across into your best friends shoes, and offer yourself some advice and support from their position. We often talk to ourselves in ways that we would never talk to another living being, learn to talk to yourself in a more positive supportive way, learn to be your own best friend.
• You may not be able to control the situation that is upsetting you, but there are many things in life that you can control. Take a walk if it’s a nice day, go meet a friend, do something you enjoy. Do something constructive about another work opportunity. This will not only take your mind off the thing that is bothering you, it will remind you that there is so much more to you and your life, than this single event.

You don’t have to be a passenger in your own life, grab the steering wheel and start driving yourself!

Rejection for freelances is as much a part of that lifestyle, as accumulating manure is if you keep horses! Do horse owners buy bigger premises so they can keep collecting all the horse manure that is deposited around them, combing through it regularly to see if it has changed? No. They recognise that this is an inevitable by-product, and sell it to local gardeners?

In exactly the same way, there is nothing to be gained by any of us sifting through the minutiae of our rejections solely for purposes of self torture! We need only sort through them once, make sure we benefit from anything that can be learned from the experience. Then we need to spread them out on our metaphorical roses and let the sun and rain rot them down, so we can benefit and grow from the experience.

So, who’s driving the bus? You are! So go pick the nicest possible route for yourself!