Embracing Resilience

Resilience isn't just about bouncing back—it's about thriving through challenges, uncertainty, and change.

It’s also a skill you can learn and continue to evolve. To me it’s about embracing being uncomfortable, backing yourself, believing ‘you've got this’ and not giving up.

Personally I’ve developed most of my resilience through physical challenges. You experience discomfort, need to overcome fear, and you have to keep trying and trying to get there. I’ve found ultimately, I can get the results I am chasing through mindset and persevering. You’ve got to want the outcome enough to embrace the resilience needed to get there, especially in the moments where it gets really hard and you want to give up. You’ve making a choice to continue.

If you’ve ever been in a really dark moment in an event and kept going, that feeling of being able to handle difficult stuff stays with you, and makes you better equipped to take on things you want that are difficult, or involve some calculated risks.

Endurance mindset

I’m naturally drawn to outdoor endurance activites such as swimming, cycling and running which has definitely helped. Through competing in these sports and taking on challenges I’ve pushed beyond previous or perceived limits.

I’ve also found weight and agility training has helped, such as setting a goal to be able to do something you really want to do like lift a certain weight, and working through a training program to achieve that. A few years ago I worked through goals of being able to do 10 chinups, popups and a front vault which took months to achieve, but helped me see it was possible to do something that previously seemed impossible.

Improv - becomeing confident in uncertain contexts

Unexpectedly, I’ve also found taking improv classes, which I did for fun over a decade ago in Wellington, had the spin-off effect of making me feel very comfortable in ambiguous or uncertain contexts, in both work and life.

In improv you learn how to ‘accept the offer’ of whatever is said or being done and respond or build on that, whatever you might have been thinking was about to happen or you were planning to say. This helps you deal with what’s in front of you, and also give you confidence you can handle whatever is thrown at you, because you’ve experienced that already in a ‘safe’ (and also playful) space. If you’ve never done improv, highly recommend a term or two, it’s a lot of fun.

You are capable of more than you think

Experiencing how you are capable of more than you previously thought is a massive confidence boost which spills over into other areas of life. All of these things have helped create a solid foundation of self-efficacy and resilience that I draw on when I need to. That and making a cup of tea, after which everything is always a better!

How might you evolve your resilience? What outcome do you want so much you are prepared to embrace what it takes to get it?

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