What is your adversity IQ – your bounce back ability; knowing how to deal with setbacks mistakes and disappointments. You’ve got to be able to emotionally take a punch, shake it off in a reasonable period of time, and keep fighting.
- It’s knowing how to let go of disappointments and to focus on what you need to keep doing to keep your goals and future in mind
- Knowing how to work side by side with your fear and not to be afraid to be afraid. If you need to work outside your comfort zone for a while, so be it.
- It’s knowing how to use your problems as stepping stones for progress. Problems give us the need to create solutions and those solutions are often the breakthroughs we needed to get us to the next level of our success.
Building our adversity IQ is similar to building other types of muscle. Every time we work outside our comfort zone and through our pain zone to achieve our goals, we add another layer of emotional muscle.
As our confidence grows we gain the mental assurance and stamina to know how we can fight back from adversity again and again if necessary.
The more confidence we have the more risk we are willing to take because we better believe in our ability to recover from setbacks and learn from them.
Goals automatically create;
- A set of problems that need to be solved
- Weaknesses that need to be fixed
- Setbacks that need to be dealt with
It comes with the territory of progress, growth and change. If we never learn how to work through these types of circumstances constructively were dead in the water.
Having a strong adversity IQ allows us to keep doing the right things in the heat of battle instead of throwing in the towel.
In 1982, I was watching an interview on the today show with Willa Shoemaker, one of the world’s greatest jockeys. After he had broken another record he was being interviewed by Jane Paulie and she posed this question, “If you had one jewel advice to all young jockeys just starting out in their career what would that be?” He paused, looked into the camera and said “When you lose your head your ass will follow”. That sums it up precisely.