10. Resilience

Have you noticed that women tend to obsess over their mistakes?  We can’t stop talking about them.  We worry about what we should have done differently.  When we’re complimented on a success, we’ll start rabbiting on about all the things that went wrong.

You may have noticed that blokes don’t do that.

Blokes never fail.  If they don’t achieve a particular goal they just change the goal.  They never talk about their mistakes – and they talk about their successes all the time.

There is much to learn from this.

Never waste a setback – every mistake, every missed opportunity, every miscalculation has something to teach us.  Interrogate every aspect of the disaster to ensure that you’ve wrung every bit of learning from it that you conceivably can, and then wipe it from your memory.

Most parental advice is not worth the proverbial fizzy drink, but my dear old Dad did say something once that I still think is germane to any discussion about resilience.  He said “When you're young you worry about what people think about you, and when you're middle-aged you don't care what people think about you, and when you're old, you realize they never thought about you in the first place.”

Too often we assume that other people are obsessing about our mistakes in exactly the same way as we are.  Trust me – they just aren't!  The capacity to bounce back and move on is a valuable life skill we can all embrace.