You Don’t Have To Wait For Adversity To Overcome It — 4 Ways to Live A More Resilient Life
By: Wes Cochrane
“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small. ”
Nobody – rich or poor, male or female, young or old – can escape adversity. Life guarantees it. Despite this truism, an alarming number of us live as if we have no control, whatsoever, over our circumstances. Too many of us are drifting toward frailty instead of moving toward strength. We spend little time or energy preparing ourselves to handle adversity when (not if) it comes. We are content, instead, to give in to the powerful pull of frittering away our evenings watching more Netflix, venturing down more YouTube rabbit trails, and aimlessly scrolling through our social media feeds. Instead of fortifying ourselves, we do the opposite: we spend our limited energy harmfully comparing ourselves with others; we nurture inner dialogues that are harsh and self-critical; and we make no effort to take care of ourselves physically.
Operating on this default program will leave us feeling inadequate and unequipped when life’s storms hit.
If we’re not prepared, when adversity does arrive – as the notable English Bible commentator, Matthew Henry, wrote several hundred years ago – “[o]ur spirits sink, and then our hands hang down and our knees grow feeble, and we become unfit for anything.” While we can’t insulate ourselves from adversity, we can prepare our minds and our bodies to weather it. In short, we don’t need to wait for adversity in order to start overcoming it. We can build resiliency now.
Four Ways to Live a More Resilient Life
1. Have a Vision for your Life
Have you ever heard the mantra, time management is self-management? When I read that phrase in Dr. Stephen Adei’s book, Called to Lead, in early 2022, it rattled me. Naively, I had long thought of time management merely as a means to increase productivity. But this raises the question – “increase productivity to do what?” It dawned on me that time management is only as good as one’s end purpose or vision. Without a vision for our lives, our time management is pointless.
When considering how we spend our time, as Dr. Adei notes, “what is at stake is not the clock, but what we apply our lifetime to achieve.”
How does this relate to resilience? I’m glad you asked.
Like any epic adventure story you’ve read or watched, the protagonist often is gripped by a vision for his or her life – a quest or mission. Think of Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. When his “uncle” Bilbo Baggins unexpectedly departs “the Shire” for good, Frodo inherits his home, as well as Bilbo’s mysterious ring. As it turns out, this ring is the one ring of power sought by the Dark Lord Sauron who seeks to find it and use it to conquer the entire land of “Middle Earth.” Frodo’s guide, the wizard Gandolf the Grey, sets Frodo on a long and dangerous path to destroy the ring before Sauron can recover it. On his mission, Frodo is repeatedly discouraged, wounded, and burdened as he ventures further on his quest. He is often beset by adversity and many times his outlook is beyond bleak. He is even tempted early on, after some initial challenges, to give up his mission and simply rest and unburden himself.
But, with his vision anchoring him, he is able to press onward, toward his goal. In the end, with the help of loyal friends and allies, he successfully navigates his way to Mount Doom, in the land of Mordor (where Sauron resides). There, he destroys this ring of power by casting it into the fires from which it was forged (the only substance in Middle Earth that can destroy it), thus defeating Sauron and ushering in peace in Middle Earth.
This is what having a vision does for us. It has a centering effect on us. Even in the face of difficulty, tragedy, or turmoil, we know what to do. We have a destination. We know who we are and what we’re working toward.
Without a vision for our lives, we lose the benefit of its anchoring effects – the hope and direction it provides.
This idea is summed up best by Holocaust survivor and author, Victor Frankl, who wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
2. “ABC” – Always Be Curious
We are too enamored with frivolity. Hear me – I’m not trashing having fun in life or enjoying time with friends or relaxing or unwinding or doing something that is deliberately unproductive. I am a massive fan of watching college football and the NFL. My wife and I have watched (and thoroughly enjoyed) a number of Netflix series. I’m currently enjoying Man in the Arena on Hulu (#TB12) and the series The Chosen (the story of Jesus and His disciples). My kids and I love to crush Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Nintendo Switch, and my entire family watched each new episode of the Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett weekly, as they aired on Disney Plus. These are things I intentionally do.
There is a massive difference, however, between deliberately choosing to do something with your time versus passively reacting to the day’s stress by taking solace in Netflix or losing yourself in hours of scrolling social media.
These things just become digital pacifiers for adults. And what do we have to show for it? We can quote all the hilarious lines from Parks and Rec or The Office? Yay.
Another critical way we build resilient lives is by always being curious (ABC). We need to wake up to the massive return on investment (ROI) that comes from reading. Reading is the cheapest and easiest way to gain knowledge, wisdom, and discernment. Just like the beauty of compound interest in the stock market, where the money you invest earns interest, which is then reinvested into the principal, growing it, over and over, reading or listening to books has its own ROI.
Reading expands one’s framework for life. I picture the difference between a pitiful Charlie-Brown-type Christmas tree and the collosal, foyer-filling Christmas trees you see in hotel lobbies during the holidays. Reading is like that. It’s like raising the height of the tree and adding more and more branches. The result is a larger tree that has more room to hang decorations and ornaments.
As I’ve written previously, “[e]ach book you read has a cumulative impact on your knowledge, understanding, ability to communicate, capacity to contextualize, and potential to problem solve.”
It’s no mystery why that would make navigating adversity more doable – you are more equipped! You likely have more space and more context to process what is happening. You’re better able to entertain different perspectives. You have more wisdom about how the world works – wisdom about success and failure; wisdom about suffering and joy; wisdom about grief and disappointment; wisdom about your own frailty and your own potential.
The real benefit from reading doesn’t come from episodic, unpredictable forays into reading (although that is better than nothing). Rather, it comes from a pattern of reading. As Brigadier General Pat Work has said, imagine what life could look like if you were to remember even one big idea from each book you read – that would be life enhancing.
Retired Marine General and former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, got directly to the point when he wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
3. Be Physically Fit
Everyone wants to ditch their love handles and look better at the beach. But, the real benefit of physical exercise is the insane physiological and psychological impact to the human body. This is why the military is obsessed with physical fitness. Physical training (PT) in the military is not just about creating more physically capable and lethal combat soldiers. More profoundly, it’s about building resilience (a necessity for service members on lengthy training events and deployments), which has been defined as “the ability to withstand, recover, and grow in the face of stressors and changing demands.” In 2013, doctors from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences specifically found that physical fitness directly confers resilience. These results were echoed by a 2013 Rand Corporation study commissioned by the Air Force which determined that improved physical fitness may help airmen cope with the stresses of military service.
Numerous studies have confirmed clear links between exercise and two key parts of the brain: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for short and long-term memory consolidation. Not surprisingly, the hippocampus is one of the first areas to deteriorate in Alzheimer’s disease—a disease resulting in increasing memory loss and disorientation. The prefrontal cortex particularly affects our brains’ executive functions such as reasoning, planning, organization, consequence evaluation, learning from mistakes, maintaining focus, and working memory.
When we exercise, we activate these parts of the brain and stimulate our brains’ abilities to learn and perform other cognitive functions. Dr. John J. Ratey, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says that exercise creates Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), a protein which floods the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, causing new brain cells to grow and “log” new information. Dr. Ratey has called BDNF “Miracle Grow” for the brain. This process of growth is called “neurogenesis.” A 2007 Columbia University study concluded that exercise increased neurogenesis and reversed the effects of memory loss.
Finally, exercise may be as powerful, if not more, than our most effective anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications. In fact, a 1999 Duke University Medical School study took over 100 patients suffering from depression and divided them into three groups: (1) a group that took the drug Zoloft for 16 weeks; (2) a group that exercised 30 minutes a day, four times per week, for 16 weeks; and (3) a group that took Zoloft and did the exercise. Remarkably, at the end of the study, all three groups experienced the same average drops in levels of depression. This means that exercise had virtually the same impact on mood and depression as Zoloft, but with none of the side effects.
All of this adds up to an increased ability to weather and not wither. Exercise fortifies the mind and body for the unknown and unknowable. A stronger mind, body, and spirit aren’t a silver bullet; but, they will make navigating the stresses of adversity more doable.
4. Be Kind to Yourself
Last, but not least, we must learn to be kind to ourselves. I could present this as stress management, but it is bigger than that. I know I don’t speak for everyone, but in America, we are brutal task masters when it comes to loving ourselves.
In the New Testament book of Matthew, chapter 22, Jesus is asked by a lawyer which of the Old Testament commandments is the greatest. Jesus answers interestingly – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
But… the lawyer didn’t ask for the “top two” commandments. He asked for the greatest. Jesus went beyond his question and made a dramatic declaration–love your neighbor as yourself.
To love one’s neighbor, one must first love oneself. In America, we do anything but love ourselves. We criticize ourselves. We compare ourselves to others we deem better or more successful. We guilt ourselves into thinking sleep is for the weak. We don’t take time off. We work absurdly long hours. We embrace a “hustle” mindset. Rise and Grind, we say. We don’t exercise. We skip meals and eat on the run instead. We suffer from relentless FOMO (fear of missing out). We overspend and put ourselves in debt to keep up with the latest trends. We don’t cultivate much time for quiet reflection – it’s always go-go-go. In short, we don’t love ourselves.
It’s no wonder we escape to our digital pacifiers for comfort and refuge from the world we live in.
This fourth means of building resilience is vital because it can be an antidote or a healing salve to the grinding, work-yourself-to-death culture we live in. Loving ourselves can take on myriad different meanings. Some may include:
being disciplined and zealous in pursuing sleep and its restorative benefits;
paying attention to and calling out the lies in our self-talk (inner dialogue);
taking time to do something fun for ourselves (on purpose);
reducing our commitments and saying “no” to seemingly good things;
giving our phones and devices a “bed time” so we aren’t sucked into the comparison trap during the final hours and minutes of our days; and
finding ways to incorporate quiet into our days and weeks.
This list is in no way exhaustive, but cultivating a habit of being kind to ourselves is a means of living a more resilient life – a life more inoculated to the disappointments and setbacks that will inevitably come.
When the storm strikes is not the time to try to begin these habits; rather, that is the time when these habits are most needed.
Vitamins and Marathon Training
I look at these four means of building resilience in one’s life as taking a multivitamin or training to run a marathon – they can’t be sporadic things we dabble in. If you want to fortify your body and maintain a strong immune system, you take a multivitamin every day, not once or twice a month. Likewise, if you’re training to run 26.2 miles straight, you need to hit the pavement 5-6 times a week, steadily increasing your mileage, until you’ve put enough hours on your legs to handle the strain of a full marathon. You don’t just do a few long runs and call it a day. That’s a recipe for a bad day at best, and injury at worst.
Take the concepts in this post and think about your own life. Start small. Maybe you want to start a small, manageable habit of reading. Great – do 10 pages a day of a single book that interests you (fiction or nonfiction; it doesn’t matter). Maybe you want to slow down a bit and reduce your commitments. Great – find one commitment that doesn’t align with your vision and nix it. Just say “no.” Living life on your terms and working toward your vision or calling is way more important than people-pleasing. Don’t be afraid to say “no.”
Start small. Don’t compare yourself to others. Be curious and non-judgmental. See what works and what doesn’t. But don’t give up. Don’t give up on living an intentional life, as opposed to the default reactive one. In this way, you won’t “faint in the day of adversity.”
Leave a comment below and let me know what is the most frustrating obstacle you’ve encountered when it comes to living an intentional life? What would life look like if you took more control of your time and redeemed the hours in your day in a way that aligns with your vision?
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Wes is passionate about leadership development and is a gifted speaker, coach, and teacher. Wes recently spent the last two years as a military prosecutor at the 82nd Airborne Division, where he was consistently praised for his advocacy skills by seasoned trial practitioners.
Wes is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the University of Richmond School of Law, and the US Army’s Ranger, Airborne, and Air Assault schools. Prior to attending law school, Wes served as an infantry officer in the US Army where he led a rifle platoon, served as the second in command of an infantry company, and deployed to Afghanistan. He is now a major in the Army and is attending the Graduate Course at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, VA.
Wes and his wife, Anne, have three children.