I’ve run into a phenomenon of late that has given me great pause. Are we as a society losing the ability to bounce back from adverse situations? A recent instance where it came up was when I submitted a presentation proposal for a University counseling conference, was accepted, and then found out that everyone who applied was accepted to the point of having double the number of presenters for the time allotted for the conference. As a result, some presenters would not be presenting at all but merely standing next to a small bill board of their presentation.
This situation left me scratching my head because I was perfectly willing to face the consequence of my presentation being rejected or not making the cut. It seems the university holding the conference felt that everyone’s ego was so fragile they would not be able to endure rejection. Never mind that these are the people who are suppose to help the rest of us deal with set backs.
Now before you think that I’m encouraging a massive dose of bad tasting medicine or being rude and judgmental toward those around you, I want you to understand that a certain degree of adversity is actually good for us as human beings. When we create a world where everyone feels they deserve to be told that he or she is a genius, we set ourselves up for those Emperor has no clothes moments that are without a doubt painful and sometimes life altering.
Psychological resilience is defined as “An individual’s tendency to cope with adversity. This coping may result in the individual “bouncing back” to a previous state or maintaining persistence in a quest.” What also comes to mind is Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset” where she posits that children continually told they are “good students” will resist attempting tasks that contradict that mindset. On the other side of the equation, if a child is told they are hard workers or persistent, then they will work to fulfill that mindset and attempt tasks that stretch their skill set.
Many of the world’s great achievements have come about because someone was tremendously disappointed, had to ask why, then set about doggedly working to create the results they wanted or realized they have discovered something even better. I fall back on a tennis analogy and mention Serena Williams, love her or hate her. 
In 2012 she showed up to the French Open thinking she could play herself into condition and the result was that she was eliminated in the first round. This was a huge embarrassment for a top 10 player and forced her to confront the fact that she was out of shape and not playing at the highest level. As she put it: “It was a wake up call”, and she then set about better conditioning which resulted in her going out and winning everything in sight.
I fear we are losing a tendency toward resilience because we now live in a world of instant gratification. If you watch almost any program on TV in America we are told there is a pill to cure any problem in our lives, that we can eat as much of the worst food possible and still lose weight, or go to the movies and see that all challenges have a happy ending. This is not how the real world functions and often times we run into that road block we were not expecting that knocks us on our under worked butts. Getting up time and time again, means we have to first accept that adversity is to be expected, and then challenged; often time after time. That working toward overcoming a failure is what causes us to stretch and get better. It means accepting that each of us can be quite good at something… if we are willing to persist. And, in the case of that University; if they had rejected my presentation I would have worked harder to next time be accepted. As a result of their actions I refuse to ever submit to them again because the game is rigged toward the lowest level possible, which is mediocre masquerading as excellent. I for one am not afraid to fail because each failure helps me push that much closer to the thing I desire.