Our inner resilient self is the quiet voice we can all listen to
IT IS customary at this time of year for me to write about a pretty important, yearly, event for nearly five million people in the UK – GCSEs. This year was going to be particularly close to home for me, because my eldest daughter was due to start them.
I have to confess that we all had a weird feeling on Monday, which was due to be her first exam, although we have grown to accept the situation, part of us was still wondering, was this real? Was she missing one? Were they still going ahead and no-one has told us? All these feelings were then underpinned by feelings of loss, disbelief and concern for the future.
I suppose when we first went into lockdown and all the exams were cancelled, we couldn’t envisage what the following months would look like. Perhaps part of us still hoped that we’d be coming out of it more by then, that life could quickly go back to what we were used to, to what we knew. It made me reflect on my life and my hopes and dreams.
When I was 16, I simply assumed I would do my A-levels and go to university. It was something that I didn’t question, I just thought it would happen. However, life for me had other plans. A combination of events and factors all outside of my control meant that my college experience wasn’t a great one. I didn’t get the grades I needed and university wasn’t an option. I had no idea what I was going to do. After applying for various training contracts I ended up with one with our local authority, a job that I really enjoyed, by the fact that I met and married my husband, but that wasn’t the main reason.
Later in my life, after my change of career, I believed my life to be mapped out again. A clear linear line ahead of me, with opportunity and progression. Again, life would deal me a hand I hadn’t expected and the career I had worked hard for would be abruptly taken away from me. My bounceback from that would take me on a very twisty, turny journey, and one that was a lot longer than the one I had enjoyed before. There were countless times when I simply didn’t know how we were going to be OK, when it felt like I was not in control of my future.
However, there was something there, something that kept me going, even through the darkest moments when I had felt like giving up, sometimes it felt like a hand guiding me, sometimes it felt like hope and sometimes simply like a kick up the backside.
Often when we talk about resilience, we do so in terms that make it sound like a skill we need to acquire, that it’s something that some people have and some people don’t, or that we need to feel resilient to be resilient.
There have been many times when I haven’t felt resilient at all, far from it, I have felt like I had lost all hope of getting up ever again and dusting myself off. However, every time I did.
It’s not that I have a special talent for it, in fact all of these times happened before my personal development training that enabled me to understand why I did.
Resilience lies in each and every one of us and it simply lies in that quiet voice. All we have to do is tune in, listen to it, and then follow it, as often as we can.