Resilience Always Starts With Belief

I exchanged messages with a friend after Rory McIlroy won The Masters golf tournament yesterday. I said, "Talk about resilience. So many times he could have let the tournament beat him."

Resilience can be an overused word. Mainly because people have so many different definitions of what resilience means. But to me, after delivering countless presentations on the subject, I've come to believe resilience is the capacity to navigate challenging situations in a healthy direction.

That will look different from person to person, but it will always start with a belief that a healthy direction is possible. If one does not believe they can get where they want to go, they will never get there.

Over the weekend, McIlroy faced many challenges that threatened his pursuit of a second consecutive Masters championship. Each time he stood up to the challenge.

In a post-tournament interview, he said that when he fell three shots behind, he imagined the score he'd have to get to in order to win the tournament. He could have been imagining collapse, instead he was mapping out victory.

That's not as easy as it sounds, this whole belief thing. Because our brains are wired to expect the worst. When we fall behind by three shots, our brains are wired to make us believe it's all over.

Why?

Why would our brains do that to us?

Well, believe it or not, our brains are actually doing that FOR us. If we have brains that are always expecting the best, our brains will quit looking for the worst; they will quit looking for threats. Which goes against the brain's primary job of alerting us to the threats that might compromise our survival.

This means the idea that there are 'naturally positive or optimistic people" is a myth. Rory McIlroy has had to spend countless hours forcing his brain to believe good was coming in the face of a setback to have the belief he had this past weekend in the midst of setbacks.

WE ALL have to spend countless hours practicing this with our brains.

If you have not started your day telling your brain this is going to be a great day, you've given your brain permission - even if unintentionally - to believe otherwise. And if at the end of the day you don't count all the ways your day went well, you'll go to sleep having given your brain permission to count the day as a defeat.

We will all encounter challenges today. And I'll be the first to honor that not all challenges are created equal. Yet, the path to navigating them in the healthiest way possible does start at the same place.

Belief.

Belief is our friend. But it can feel like an enemy to our brains. So you may have to fight for your belief.

But do it.

Fight that fight. That's where resilience begins