The Resilience Formula: Why You're Stronger Than You Think

Life inevitably happens.

When you’re standing in the middle of extreme hardship, the very centre of the shitstorm, it can feel like you have no hope to reach for. No tools, no comfort, no support.

It’s incredibly lonely.

Rock bottom can and does teach you like no other sensei.

The noise of the world grows until it’s unbearable. And then… falls into silence. Questions become irrelevant against the backdrop of perspective, shrinking into the shadows of far more important ones. Intense clarity comes from this place. Minor concerns disappear. Survival takes their place. Gratitude is harder to find, yet amplified because what you have is so little. Scarce, but impactful.

This place will teach you, define your life, and define who you become. That is, if you know how to navigate it.

Through years of hardship and my own rock bottom, I tested every piece of personal development knowledge I had acquired since I was 5 years old. I tested it all to its limits, and myself to my own. I faced my fears, my darkest thoughts, my most hurt and painful places. From this place of darkness, I watched. I noticed patterns.

I built The Resilience Formula from these patterns.

Your mind is the one thing that can pull you from anything.

The Formula is your roadmap.

The Resilience Formula

Acknowledge

Acknowledge your entire situation. Do not hide, do not balk, do not distract yourself. There is no throwing sugar over pain here. To find a solution to a problem, you first need to know the score of the game.

Feel

Acknowledge your feelings. They are there for a reason, and feeling them is a critical step in moving forward. You don’t have to name what you’re feeling, just allow yourself to feel something.

Process

Process your feelings in a safe and healthy way. This means allowing them to fully occupy the space inside you, understanding which emotions lie beneath the more dominant ones, and understanding that you’re allowed to feel everything you do.

Define

Now it’s time to leverage this situation. Without staying in logical parameters, ask yourself: What do I ultimately want out of this situation? Define exactly what that is. If you don’t shoot for the shore, you will likely stay adrift.

Face

Face your worst case scenario. Process the emotions that come up once again. This is the scary part. But this step disempowers fear and frees your power to point instead at what you do want.

Focus

Focus with absolute, unapologetic, relentless clarity on what you want. You don’t need to be perfect, but you do need to be pretty damn close. That said, this is a practice. You will ebb and flow naturally through these steps. As much as possible, do not allow negative thinking, other people’s beliefs, or your situation to creep in with doubt. Focus with everything that you have.

If anything pulls you back into focusing on what you don’t want out of your situation, use the TRM© Toolbox to clear that energy and refocus.

The Resilience Formula will never lessen or eliminate the pain and discomfort of where you’re sitting. It’s not meant to. You cannot bypass these difficulties, but you can take your power back from them. This allows you to direct that power You, as a human being, are meant to harness this intensity and use what you fear, what hurts you, as a springboard to something better. To this end, you can manufacture your own hope.

You can build your own light at the end of the darkest tunnels.

I grew the formula through all my worst times, and it defines how I operate today.

Commit it to memory, use it in any and all circumstances. Make it habit. Training these skills before you need them ensures they will not be forgotten or fumbled with when you do.

This is how you change your mind’s setpoint.

Your mind is your most powerful tool.

And that is something nobody can take from you.

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The Resilience Formula is the foundation of The Art of Being Human. The book takes you deeper into each stage and teaches you how to apply the framework when life gets difficult.