How to Be Resilient When Things Go Wrong

Screwing up is an unavoidable part of being human. How you recover from it is a key predictor of your happiness and success.

What you tell yourself when things go wrong can help or hinder your ability to pick yourself up and keep trying. 

Resilience is a teachable skill. I have presented some ideas on the topic to all 80+ fourth graders at my kids’ elementary school. One of the teachers shared her biggest take away was personal – that if she gets something wrong now, she can now see it for what it is – just one step on the path to the right answer.

My first go-to reassurance when I make a mistake is simple: I tell myself if it was easy to solve a problem, you would get it right the first time. Making a mistake is your first clue that it must not have been SOOOO easy after all.

If you find yourself noting that this sounds a bit like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques, you’re not wrong. How you get your brain off one track and headed in a more productive direction is a skill.

After you’ve given yourself permission to be ok with the “mistake” you need to pick yourself back up and try again (Intentional Bruce Wayne reference). To do that you have to believe that you might succeed if you try again, and you need ideas of what to do differently so you might be more successful.

Reminding yourself that you have succeeded before helps your confidence. I have a long history of trying again and improving. I focus on that track record and I frame the challenge as a “puzzle.” If the first attempt to solve the problem didn’t work, I can try to solve it again but now with a bit more information about what didn’t work.

The puzzle framing seemed to go over well with the fourth graders. No one expects to get puzzles right the first time, you expect to need some time to figure it out. If you try a piece and it doesn’t fit, you know it just goes somewhere else and you can set it aside for a moment. If you’re solving a problem and it doesn’t work out, that’s to be expected a lot of the time.

Often, just trying again and knowing you’ll need to do something different this time, is sufficient to solve the problem correctly. Other times though, you just get stuck. When that happens, you can analyze, experiment, or get a new perspective. Generally I analyze and experiment to try to solve a problem for a while. If nothing works, I try to see what I might be missing from my current point of view.

This three step process guides me in all of my problem solving and helps me be resilient no matter how challenging a problem might be. I first need to be ok with any “mistakes” that come up along the way. Next I need to have a mindset that supports creatively solving the problem. Lastly, I need strategies for actually solving the problem.

Let me know if this resonates! (feel free to just reply to this email)