The overlooked entrepreneurial superpower

What's the entrepreneur's most honorable, critical, overlooked, and underrated character trait?

Resilience.

Resilience plays a significant role in our journey as entrepreneurs, giving us the confidence to take risks, pushing us through the challenging early stages, overcoming growing pains, carrying us from startup to maturity, and so much more.

Despite its importance, resilience is rarely taught.

We invest hours into developing our product or service, learning the skills to market and sell what we build, but we also must learn the skill of resilience. How do we persist when it all goes to shit, and we have to fight our way out?

Today, we'll focus on resilience and how we can develop this skill to navigate challenges and reach our potential. We can utilize science-based tools and resources to build and flex our resilience muscles to push through the hard times and do work we love.

What is resilience anyway?

Resilience is a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity. - NIH

The core ingredient of resilience is positive adaptation. It's the ability to maintain or regain mental health, despite experiencing adversity.

Here's what we know to be true...

Research shows your level of resilience is situational. For instance, you may be more resilient at work and managing those stressors but less effective at home in your personal life or vice versa.

Resilience changes throughout your life span. As we get older and encounter more stressors, we get more practice.

More Practice = Greater Resilience

Therefore, resilience can be trained.

The more we successfully handle stressors and become resilient, especially in the context of entrepreneurship, the happier and more fulfilled we'll be.

Isn't that the ultimate goal? Most of us went into business for ourselves to do work we love. Yet, we need sufficient resilience to persevere or bounce back from setbacks.

Our most difficult moments are what strengthen us and allow us to grow the most. We all know this. But it isn't just motivational hype lingo. It's science.

It's quite literally how we build resilience.

To become more resilient, we first need to figure out where we're at. Like anything, you need to understand your starting point before you can improve. Conduct a self-assessment to see where you fall on The Resilience Scale.

Can you think of a time in your life or business when you were resilient? What happened? How did you cope with the situation?

This question will put you in the right frame of mind to start thinking about resilience. Hit reply and let me know. Take this as your first accountability step and commit to building your resilience.

Next week, we'll dive into techniques and frameworks to develop more entrepreneurial resilience.

Stay tuned...