I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience these days. Injuries, aviation mishaps, career SmackDown‘s, you name it… It’s happened to me! And yet, here I am, after all of it… 

And I’m just . . . Fine. 

It’s a minor miracle I’m doing anything anymore, let alone at a high-level and as a lifestyle! Hell, I didn’t even think I live until 40 for a long time, let alone be thriving at 41 with a brighter future ahead of me than I ever imagined!

And so, I’d like to share a few thoughts on resilience. At a minimum, I’ve earned some stripes on how to be resilient. In fact, it might be the best silver lining out of all of it. 

As it turns out, life never actually gets easy. Especially if you’re kind of living on the fringes, pushing limits, breaking glass ceilings, on a hunt to see what’s actually possible. The truth of such endeavoring is that things go wrong, undesirable experiences occur, and the challenges never stop.  But then again, at least half of them we bring on ourselves.  And truth be told, we probably wouldn’t have it any other way.  

All this means that the critical skillset is knowing how to find grace in the struggle. It never actually gets easy, but rather with intention, hard things somehow find more grace the more you do them. And perhaps that’s the oddity of it all. Hard things take practice. They’re hard until you learn how to make them easier. It just feels like a struggle until you learn to embrace the struggle and work with it, rather than resist it.  

Culture would have you believe that struggle is some thing we should avoid. I disagree, wholeheartedly. Without struggle there’s no flow. And the most fulfilled people on earth are the people who experience the most flow in their lives! So I personally would never want to life without struggle, because I would certainly never want to life without flow.

Stay tuned for tactical tips on resilience and lots more information on flow coming your way!