RESILIENTLY LEARNING

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, writing about how to win and about wining in business and winning in leadership and management, calls for “heavy-duty resilience.”

“Every leader makes mistakes, every leader stumbles and falls. The question with a senior-level leader is, does she learn from her mistakes, regroup, and then get going again with renewed speed, conviction, and confidence? The name of this trait is resilience, and it is so important that a leader must have it going into a job because if she doesn’t, a crisis time is too late to learn it.” (Winning, 2005, p. 90)

The key to winning is not avoiding mistakes. When it comes to making mistakes, that is inevitable. Nor is the key to not take risks, that is, to avoid risks. Again, that is inevitable given the human predicament of fallibility. The key is learning. The key is picking yourself up and figuring out what you need to learn, learning it, integrating that learning into your actions, getting back on the saddle and going for it again. If something didn’t pan out as you anticipated, then you have something to learn, don’t you? The question is what?

Well, there’s actually another question. Are you willing to learn what you missed? Are you willing to take a long deep look into the mistake and figure out what didn’t go by the plan, what deviated from the plan, what is needed to regroup and “get going again with renewed speed, conviction, and confidence.” Are you willing to learn to become resilient?

There is a connection between learning and resilience. Do you have those two things linked within you? If they are connected, then obviously, the better your learning, the faster your learning, the more open and curious your learning—the fast and better your resilience. You can bounce back quicker and cleaner, that is, carrying less of the contamination of the past.

To argue this point I’ll run with the metaphor of “getting back in the saddle again.” You are riding a horse and you get thrown. Now you’re down on the ground, maybe in the mud, and you may be a little sore for wear. So what do you do now? Do you brush of the dirt, turn your back and walk back to town swearing, “Never again! I’ll never trust a damn horse again?” Do you pull out your gun and shoot the horse? (I’m supposing you’re a complete cowboy or cowgirl and have your gun with you!) “That’s for throwing me down!” Or do you brush yourself off, and go back to get into the saddle again, “Now what caused the horse to throw me? Did I pull on the reigns to hard? Did I urge the horse over terrain with briars and thorns? Did I not notice the snake until we were nearly on top of him?”

Here learning is the cure and resilience is the result. The more you accelerate your learning in an attitude of openness, responsibility, and curiosity, the quicker your resilience and success. Are you a fast and thorough learner in the presence of a mistake? Do you immediately default to the attitude,

“What can I learn here?” “What did I miss that I need to understand?” “Who knows how to handle this that I can talk to?” The ability to “get going again,” to bounce back, to get back in the saddle is the ability to not let a set-back defeat you, but to persist until you can ride with grace and elegance.

My first big set-back was a divorce, my second was getting fired and losing my first career choice, and my third was a severe financial loss. There were others, but those were the Big Three for me. Luckily for me, I had a learning bias. I had already learned that learning was an important strategy for getting ahead in life. The shock of finding myself on my back contemplating the Milky Way Galaxy, alone, pennyless, and confused triggered me to use the best coping skill that I had at the time, study. For awhile I think I could have made a career in the Library! I did spend a lot of time there tracking down the best works I could find on relationships, then psychology, then wealth creation.

The amazing thing is that sometimes one simple principle is all you need to turn things around, get back in the saddle and ride off to success. I have seen that time and time again with various people. Sometimes the set-back occurred because they were missing one piece to a great puzzle and when they found it, they were off and running with conviction and confidence. Like everything else, it depends on the mental model that you are using to do something—how accurate or inaccurate it is, how complete or incomplete.

Whatever it is, it is what you need to learn. If you spend time blaming and accusing, shouting at the horse, or worse, shooting the horse, you will learn nothing. You will just create more trouble for yourself. If you give up, change the subject, focus on something else, you also will learn nothing. You’re not even looking to learn. Some seem to have an aversion to doing the post-event review because they label it “negative” and think they will get more dirty and negative if they spent time on that. That hardly ever happens especially if your frame of mind is, “I want to know what I missed so I can fill in the missing pieces.”

Learning led me into doing Couple Counseling for years, from there into focusing on Communication and doing Communication Training. Learning sent me through the history of psychology until I was thoroughly familiar with every school of psychology and ended up with a Master Degree in clinical psychology and then a Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology. Learning turned around my financial mess, enabled me to stabilize it and later to reach my goal of financial freedom so that I stopped living paycheck to paycheck or worrying about money.

It’s out of the tough experiences of life, the crucible experiences, that we seem to learn more thoroughly and integratively. Well, you do if you have a learning bias. It’s out the set-back experiences when you get knocked down that can, if you let it, motivate you to learn what you need to learn to never get knocked down in that way again. [Want more about Resilience, see Meta-States, or look for the Neuro-Semantic Training on Resilience.]