Meet Atere…

If I am a resilient person, I will bounce back after a failure or defeat, and quickly rejuvenate my spirits.

The Beauty of Resilience

I have become familiar with the concept that failure is inevitable. By doing so, I gained a better insight of my optimistic nature. When I played little league and my team lost in the championships, we focused on our weaknesses and by understanding that everyone had them, we came back the next year and won the championship!

Our determination to analyze every aspect of the loss gave us the ability to conclude that without failure, we wouldn’t have understood what it took to figure out how resilience played a major role in becoming true champions. This became the rubric in my early years that I implemented to help build my knowledge of self, and the resilience I possessed. By looking for opportunities of self-discovery, I found that my strength was developed that I couldn’t attribute to any other characteristic than resilience. By regarding myself in a positive way, I know that I was pleased with myself. With resilience though, I must remain optimistic in order to validate my self-value. If I judge myself too severely, then I leave little room for growth and create a blind spot that inhibits me from learning how resilient I am. The paradigm through which I view myself isn’t what dictates my resilience.

If I am a resilient person, I will bounce back after a failure or defeat, and quickly rejuvenate my spirits. Two things that I cannot change are the way that I was designed and the type of failure that comes from any situation. The only thing that I can change is how I react to it. Striving for perfection isn’t the goal here; instead, I focus on the strength that I lack. Resilience for me is the strength I gain after suffering from defeat.

By gaining strength, I am better prepared to succeed when it comes to situations I find challenging. My growth should be measured by the things I achieve after a downfall, not by the pain that I suffered during the downfall. With my newfound resilience I have learned to be a stronger me after the toughest of times, I can and will utilize this strength in any scenario and that is the beauty of resilience.

Receive more inspiring stories and news from incarcerated people around the world.