If you’ve been reading my blog posts recently, you know that I’ve been in a period of transition that has left me feeling particularly reflective. And these posts have obviously been resonating with many of you as well because I’ve had some great responses I wanted to share.
In my recent post on cultivating resilience in stormy times, I shared about the Hindu God Shiva the Destroyer. I sent the post to a dear friend of mine Sharmali Arumugathasan, who is Hindu, and asked her to look over my simplification. She noted that Shiva’s destructive role isn’t meaningless – it’s to remove impurities such as ignorance, ego, and attachment to facilitate our spiritual growth.
And this very much aligns with what I’m seeing both in my personal life and the work I do with others. It’s often when we surrender to this destructive energy that we can make space for the energy of Brahma the creator to visit us.
Another conversation I’ve been thinking about recently was with my friend Frank Hintz, who has also been going through his own challenges. He shared that he thinks of these difficult experiences as meaningful as long as you take the opportunity to learn something from them. You can’t bypass the pain but you can use them to help you build momentum for the next thing.
At some point, you have to make a choice to put difficult experiences in the rearview mirror. It’s definitely not as much fun as a big success, but I know that if you ask anyone you admire they’ll tell you that learning from their mistakes was just as essential to their success as their accomplishments.
These challenges also give us the opportunity to model what it looks like to be resilient to our teams. We also benefit from learning from the mistakes of others so we don’t have to make them ourselves.
THIS, learning from others’ mistakes, is what really separates you from the rest of the crowd and makes you stronger.
So don’t let your beating go to waste – use it to make you stronger! It’s a powerful brick in the foundation of resilience that we’re all building.