Bouncing back to get that BHAG!

There are many moments in my life that I wish I could take back, many moments I wish never happened and some moments where I wished I knew exactly what to do. For the most part, I only wish that I could have been more secure in my early teenage years.

Drawing on a lesson about personal development, one concept resonated with my experiences until age 16 and the present, and that concept is Resilience. This is the ability to withstand stress and stressors and focuses on an idea/behaviour aptly called bouncebackability, which is the ability to recover from a setback. At this point of my life, I realise that my entire journey has been about this behaviour and had I known this at age 16, I would be a completely different person today.

By understanding my resilience, I understood who I am. My threshold for resilience helped me to build a better version of myself throughout all my experiences. When I recently took a resilience test, it scored me a total of 72, which reinforced my idea of how strong my resilience is.

During those early teenage years, through all the insecurity, there was a significant amount of setback due a lack of personality, self-perspective, and a general aimlessness about my ambition because at that time, I wanted to be like everybody else, I did not want to be me.

What I did was miss the big picture. I did not understand the importance of understanding myself before understanding everybody else. Eventually, through a lot of soul searching and discovering my likes and dislikes, I finally became my own person. I did not realise exactly what I had done until the personal development module introduced me to the “who are you?” exercise. These questions were the same questions that I constantly ask myself and because of this, I found them extremely easy to answer, however one question did to some extent introduce a slight existential crisis when asking me about my BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

It provoked a thought that I had not acknowledged for years: what is my endgame? How do I want to be remembered?

After my experience with this exercise and my practice of bouncebackability, my perspective has been adjusted toward working on myself and building my mind and my ambition to achieve the BHAG. I have not narrowed down my BHAG to one yet, but I do know what it will take to make it possible.