Here is an excerpt from a commencement address I’ll be delivering tomorrow evening…

You are some of the most courageous individuals I know. For courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is overcoming fear. Without fear, there is no courage. You face your fears daily which makes you brave. It makes you courageous.

You are also among the most resilient people whom I know. And for that you have my respect and my admiration. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back from challenging, difficult situations. You guys are among the… bounciest… people I know. Many of you have had multiple chances of giving up, of throwing in the towel, and you refused.

Being able to bounce, being able to persevere, despite negative events is not due to luck. It’s due to resiliency.  

Resilience means you effectively cope despite inevitable loss, hardship, or adversity. Resilience has been compared to flexibility in metals. For example, cast iron is hard, brittle, and breaks easily, that is it is not resilient, whereas wrought iron is soft and bends without breaking - it is resilient.

In most cases, successful people have overcome many more difficulties than those who are less successful. While everyone encounters failure and trouble, it is what you do AFTER failure that is critical. Highly successful individuals have tenacity, a stick-to-it-iveness. They view failure as a learning experience. They don’t give up. They don’t throw in the towel. They try again.

From Barack Obama to the president of FedEx to Denzel Washington, successful individual fail repeatedly but they learn from their experiences and they keep going. They keep on walking in the direction of their values and their dreams.

[1] Video of top ’failures’ - famous folks who bounced back to succeed.

Keep on walkin’,

Dr. John Schinnerer

Positive Psychology Coach

[2] Guide To Self, Inc.