What is resilience in leadership?
It can be challenging and despairing when you’re at the bottom of the ladder. There’s nobody there to help you. At the bottom of the ladder is where resilience is born. As soon as you take that first step, you become stronger every time.
You’ve been here before, and you will be again because life has its funny way of throwing obstacles at you.
But because you’ve been here before, you know you can get out of it. You have to step up the ladder one foothold at a time. Then one rung higher, the next, and the next. And sure enough, you’ll find yourself halfway up the ladder. And the view isn’t looking too scary anymore.
You look down and don’t want to return because it is brutal, awful and lonely. I get it. And as you look up now higher up the ladder to its peak, you know, you still have places you want to be and successes you want to achieve. A vision that you haven’t yet reached as much as it’s in your thoughts daily.
How to reach that next level of success?
You have the strategies to get this far, halfway up the ladder. You just can’t get any further as hard as you push yourself. Not on your own, anyway. You need help, and that’s not a bad thing.
Look to those around you, your network of support, and your friends and family. They might not have the skills and knowledge you do, but they can help with their own greatness. You can trust them to have your back because you don’t have to carry this burden alone.
You don’t have to carry all this weight on your shoulders of being the provider, the rescuer, the dependable fixer of everyone’s problems. You’ll never get to the top of the ladder with all that weight pulling you back down. No one said it should be easy. It might look like that sometimes when you look around at others. They somehow figured it all out. Life makes sense to them. But I assure you everybody goes through their version of climbing the ladder. It’s just that your ladder seems taller than everyone else’s. That’s because your ambitions are so much larger in scope.
You don’t just want to settle for what you have now. You want more, and you want to share that with everybody around you. And that is what makes a great leader. So keep climbing. Keep pushing forward. And don’t forget that you can return to where you are now when you fall or slip. You have already done it on your own so many times already.
What is the secret of scaling higher?
You are intelligent and skilled there is no doubt; everyone else can see that; the only thing stopping you from scaling higher is that doubt in yourself that you struggle to ask for help, to show your vulnerability that it’s somehow a weakness not to have all the answers. When a nagging thought gets left unchallenged, it can soon become an embedded untruth of a belief that doesn’t serve you well and slowly eats its way through your physiology like cancer. A belief that is unfounded needs to be expelled as quickly and as easily as a change in the direction of a wind, dispelling a dark cloud away from the sun.
So how do leaders succeed if they can’t do it all?
They become humble and reach out to those better equipped for help. And with this help, finally, on your side, you will achieve the stars and shine brightly so that others can find their way up their ladders in their darkest of moments, climbing higher than they ever thought possible.
