THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
7/17/2010 7:00:00 AM
Rely on resilience
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My tweet today was: "Resilience doesn't start with experience - it STARTS with attitude - your attitude."
It got more than 100 "re-tweets." Evidently people understood what I was saying and chose to tell others. But because Twitter allows only 140 characters, I want to elaborate on the word "resilience," because it has a much deeper meaning than I was able to provide in one tweet.
PICTURE THIS: Your boss says, "Make 100 cold calls this week." The first 20 people you call hang up on you.
PICTURE THIS: You have one prospect left this month, and if he or she doesn't buy, you don't make your quota. The prospect calls you and says, "We've decided to buy from your competition."
PICTURE THIS: You get an e-mail from your boss telling you that they've revised the comp plan and unless you do 20 percent more, you'll earn 20 percent less.
Resilience is how you react to, respond to and recover from those situations. Resilience starts with your own strength of attitude. If you are easily dismayed, your self-confidence level is low, your self-esteem is lacking, or your self-image is in doubt - each of these PICTURE THIS circumstances is taken as a disaster.
Attitude resilience challenges your thought process to get from a negative response of "woe is me" to a more positive response of "Here are a few ideas that I have right now that will help me."
Once you've processed each one of these circumstances and reacted to them mentally, it's time to respond to them. Your response is a combination of your attitude, your past experience and your resilience.
Most people fail to understand that response is triggered by thought. If you want to use the term "knee-jerk response," it normally means response without thinking, especially in negative situations.
Each one of you has experienced a dumb response. Something like: "I'm doing the best I can," or "I'm just doing what I've been told," or some response that's excuse-based rather than response-based. Anyone can make an excuse. But people of character figure out what they can do, are in control of their emotions, think quickly on their feet, and come up with something that is forward-moving rather than self-defeating.
Now it's time for your resilience to really shine. You've reacted in a positive way, you've responded in a positive way, and now you must recover in a personal way. You must take stock in who you are as a person, and take the lesson in how this will help build you and build your character instead of looking around to see who is to blame, becoming defensive or making some lame excuse about it.
Recovery lays the groundwork for the next reaction. Recovery after recovery builds the foundation of your resilience. Positive recovery after positive recovery builds a foundation of concrete and steel.
You build your stature, you build your self-esteem, you build your self-reliance, you build your self-confidence, and you do it with inner strength combined with mental strength. You can call it fortitude or you can call it guts, but I'm challenging you to think of it as resilience - because it's going to happen more than once.
So I've given you react, respond, and recover. Let me add a 0.5 to this list of three: integrity. Every time an opportunity arises, every time your character or your attitude is challenged and you react, respond and recover in a positive way, you build personal integrity.
You never have to talk about it. Others will see it and see that strength within you. Others will talk about you in a positive way. Others will seek to follow you.
Every time an opportunity arises to build my resilience, I eagerly welcome it and all the lessons attached thereto.
I hope you do the same.
Jeffrey Gitomer can be reached by phone at (704) 333-1112 or by e-mail at salesman@gitomer.com. © 2010 Jeffrey H. Gitomer
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