One of the hardest things to do as a human being is to always see the good in the ‘BAD’. Whether we like it or not, bad things happen to good people. So, the earlier you prepare yourself to understand this basic part of diversity, then the closer you are to taking your first resilient step.
I didn’t even know what resilience was all about until I found it in one of my former line manager’s comments about me in my year-end appraisal. It was a tough year on a job where I had to learn everything hands-on, using excel for measurement metrics, BIA’s, and word documents to record everything I was covering for exercise and testing, etc. It was a strange and interesting field that somehow synced to my core as a human being, the tougher it was becoming, the easier it was for me to surmount. Oh! Let me quickly add, this included closing almost midnight from the office to cover consolidating BIA’s for almost 20 units on excel while preparing for a surveillance audit, and no I didn’t live 30 minutes away from the office, I lived almost 2hours plus from the office. It was a crazy time in my life that I secretly lived for. Lol!
You can easily presume I am a different kind of special person to love the hustle, but you are wrong, it wasn’t the hustle I loved, it was the KNOWLEDGE I was deducing, every second, minute, hour, and day on the job.
Here’s the obvious, I have been practicing resilience even long before I knew what it was about, having lost my sweet mother at the prime of my adolescent years and losing a job at the beginning of my career, these were things that I never knew I could survive from. Losing some sort of balance to be able to learn how to stand up on my own two feet, define my true relationships, and ultimately become a better version of myself every day.
So, resilience found me when I was most unprepared, it gave me a fighting chance and means a lot to me, but I will spotlight the most important meaning to me, it means surviving and thriving, so Resilience to me isn’t just about surviving but rather also about thriving through the disruption, leverage on it, tell your story, ride on it, crawl, leap, walk, jump and fly through your struggles, it is always hard and heart wrenching but that is the beauty you get out of the cracks, it gives you more value.
A lot of people and organizations never knew what the pandemic would do to them but most people and organizations standing today, fell at some point, dusted themselves, and learned about individual resilience, organizational resilience, enterprise resilience, etc. Again, for me it’s a mindset, you must learn to climb on those same shattered bricks of the walls that came crashing down on you. You are alive, so you survived, so make your resilience story profound. Find resilience first, don’t wait for resilience to find you, survive your struggles and thrive through them, that is what resilience means to me.
Connect with Modebola Anne Ajibodu