Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast.
Today we are talking about Resilience - let’s define it: Resilence is “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”
Lynn G. Robbins, a leader in the LDS church shared, “During my visit to Brigham Young University–Idaho in the fall of 2017, the school’s new president, Henry J. Eyring, told me that his foremost concern was the high dropout rate of college freshmen. Students leave college for a variety of reasons, but a lack of resilience is one of the leading reasons that many universities across the United States are experiencing this same challenge.”
He then mentioned that the military is noticing the same thing:
“Discovering a lack of resilience among its recruits, the U.S. Army started offering the Master Resilience Training (MRT) program to fortify soldiers against the stress, demands, and hardships of military service.”
Colleges, military, these are just a few places where this lack of resilience is being noted among us.
So let’s have a conversation….
University, the Military, Covid - these things are not causing the lack of resiliency, they are just exposing it. How do we become more resilient?’’
Stay tuned for a look at resiliency and the keys we need to help us bounce back.
Lower resilience among today’s youth may be caused by a number of things - I’ll throw a few out:
While the reasons are important so we can start making changes, what I want to talk about today is what resiliency looks like.
Is it just me, or have you also noticed, as we listen to the incredible life stories shared on this podcast, that one thing constantly pops up, a cross roads. This cross roads, in all our lives, may come up over and over, but that’s why it’s even more important to be aware of it. It is the cross roads of choosing victimhood/blame/depression and giving-up OR choosing growth/overcoming and keep on, keeping on.
This cross roads is a sacred place. It’s a place where the human soul does its hardest work. It is not a place to be taken lightly or to be talked about lightly. It is not the cause of the struggle, it is the choice in the struggle.
Today we talk about resiliency - because as Steve Goodier said, “My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present.”
I start out with this quote because I think when we are deep in the struggle that this becomes and important thing to remember. It might feel like life is unfair and you’re getting the shit kicked out of you, but someday it will be this process and what you do with it that create your character and your strength.
On today’s show we’ll hear from 3 people, clips of their stories and how they navigated the horrible spaces of paralysis from a rodeo accident, walking again after a bike/SUV collision, and taking back life after sexual abuse, and a deep emersion in alcoholic households.
We all have our own path with our own difficult struggles - no one’s is the same….but what is the same is the importance of resiliency. This one thing determines whether you make it through, and how you show up on the other side.
What does resiliency look like? It’s always best...
