Resilience — Developing a Visionary Personality

Resilience is the ability to straighten our backs after a minor or major setback has knocked us down. It is also the positive tension we can use when we are faced with a major challenge. In other words, resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and stress. It is a personality trait that is especially characteristic of people who live from their visionary power.

Visionary personalities are resilient

We all have resilience. It is not a characteristic of certain people, but a process. We can use this process with the help of resources, or: resilience enhancers. These resources include perseverance, self-acceptance and autonomy.

People who know how to use resilience enhancers well are called resilient people. They are often visionaries. Because resilience helps to translate vision into action. Visionary personalities possess this resilience. They are able to take people around them with them in this. They succeed in elevating to the norm what was considered impossible for generations. They are able to overcome the wall of disbelief.

This is because visionary personalities live entirely from their visionary power. The latter, as defined by Visionary People Mentoring, is the power that lies in the constructive vision we have about our lives and that has a positive impact on others.

We all have this power, because everyone is a visionary. Without visions about how we see our lives moving forward, we are not able to build a life project. But by strengthening visionary power, we can develop visionary personality and at the same time use resilience to turn visions into action.

Famous people have shown us this in a great way. In other words, we have real-life examples that we can learn from.

For example, the most successful writer in the world, Paulo Coelho, was sent to a psychiatric institution by his parents because they wanted to make him an engineer and prevent him from writing. Michelangelo, to give another example, suffered a similar fate. Whenever his parents saw him painting, they beat him. They saw in him a good tailor. As history shows, neither Coelho nor Michelangelo could be deterred by coercion from heeding the call of their visionary power. And how they successfully harnessed their visionary power in their lives!

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) is another example of how visionary personality implies resilience. This genius in science

loved developing theories. He became world-famous for it, especially with his theory of black holes.

Hawking is the genius who is known for the enthusiasm with which he could spread theories to millions of people, even though he could not fully prove them as expected by scientific standards (and why he never won a Nobel Prize for it).

But behind this story of scientific genius lies a life of resilience in the face of adversity. At the age of 20, Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive, incurable muscle disease. The disease eventually left him almost completely paralyzed. But this could not stop Hawking's scientific spirit. The Cambridge professor not only became a brilliant researcher who published numerous scientific articles. The handful of books that flowed from his pen are a source of inspiration for the general public. Hawking succeeded in his goal and sold millions of copies of his books.

Banish failure from your vocabulary

In conclusion, developing resilience is the opposite of accepting failure. It is a way to transform positive thinking into perseverance and make the latter your true vision of life. The most successful basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, expressed this attitude best as follows:

“I have missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. 26 times I have been trusted to take the winning shot and I missed. I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I am successful.” —Michael Jordan, NBA Hall of Fame

by Thierry Limpens