Resilience

Built through physical challenge

Personally, I’ve developed most of my resilience through physical challenge. Through endurance sports and taking on physical challenges I’ve pushed beyond previous or perceived limits. Moments where things have felt uncomfortable or learning a physical skill has felt unreachable, have taught me how to keep going and find a way.

I’ve found that the results I’m chasing often come through mindset and perseverance as much as physical ability. You have to want the outcome enough to embrace what it takes to get there.

Choosing to continue

To me, resilience is about backing yourself, believing “you’ve got this,” and making a choice to continue even when the outcome matters enough to feel hard. It’s about wanting something enough to embrace what it takes to get there.

What hard moments teach you

If you’ve ever been in a really dark moment in an event and kept going, you’ll know the feeling that comes afterwards. Realising you can handle difficult things stays with you, and makes you better equipped to take on challenges, uncertainty, and calculated risks in other areas of life.

Comfort with uncertainty

Unexpectedly, I’ve also found that taking improv classes helped build resilience in a different way. In improv, you learn to accept what’s in front of you, respond to it, and keep building from there — even when it’s not what you expected.

That made me much more comfortable in ambiguous or uncertain situations, in both work and life. It’s a playful way to practice confidence, trust your instincts, and discover that you can handle more than you think.

If you’ve never tried improv, I highly recommend it — it’s fun, and it teaches you more than you might expect.

More capable than you think

Experiencing how capable you are — often beyond what you previously thought — is a massive confidence boost. Over time, these experiences have helped me build a solid foundation of self-efficacy and resilience that I draw on when I need to

A question worth asking

How might you evolve your resilience? What outcome do you want enough that you’re prepared to embrace what it takes to get there?

And sometimes, after all that, a cup of tea helps too.