In serious study or training in anything you will have setbacks. What you dot with setbacks determines how resilient you are.  When things start out hard and get harder, what motivates you to hang in there and continue to practice?

What is resilience?

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. In other words, how well do you continue after something gets hard? Do you have the flexibility to adjust your approach, mental attitude, and behavior to your internal self-talk, and external circumstances?

Motivation, determination, and commitment

As an example of resilience, one of the superpowers of my husband that I admire very much is his tenacity. When solving a problem, he doesn’t give up. He will wrestle with a problem and keep at it until he comes to a solution. It doesn’t matter if it is a hard Sudoku puzzle or building a tearoom. When he was building the tearoom, he didn’t know how to do it, so every day was a challenge in figuring out what to do and how to do it

There were so many details and so many places he didn’t know how to proceed.  There were some days all he could think to do was to work on another aspect of the room. Then he would go back and re-think and re-do the section he had previously been working on. One section of the room, the tokonoma, he built at least three times to correct mistakes and to make it fit.  It was a lonely project. He was determined to finish it and have a tearoom I could be proud of.

I asked him once how he kept at it for more than two and a half years. He said it was one of the hardest projects he ever did. There was nobody to tell him how to do it, what the next step was, or how to go about doing it. He was on his own and had to think and try and fail and try again. Nobody could consult with him because nobody we knew had built a tearoom before. I know nothing about woodworking or building, so I was no help to him. I could only point to pictures and tell him this is what I want.

That was part of his motivation. He promised he would build a tearoom for me, and he wanted to deliver on that promise. His vision was to do as fine a job as he knew how to make it look like an authentic Japanese tearoom. I am delighted to say he exceeded all my expectations, and I am grateful every time I step into that tearoom. I cherish every little detail and all the precision work that he put into that room. As I say, it is a love letter to me in the care and effort he put into it.

Weekly study and Chado presentations

When we come to keiko every week, we practice temae, and sensei corrects us. We learn when we are not doing it correctly and strive to take heed of the corrections. It takes resilience to continue, to perfect our temae, to pay attention, to remember so many things. Why do we come, week after week to keiko? How many of us practice between lessons, sticking with it even when sensei is not there to guide us?

Chado demonstrations are their own form of training in resilience. It takes so much effort to plan, pack, load the utensils, unload, set up, do the demonstration, clean up, pack up, load, unload, clean, dry, and put everything away. Some people think it is too much. Yet the discipline and effort must be worth it. If we understand that it is training, that is to share the way of tea, that all the effort is its own reward, then it is not a burden but a privilege to present Chado to people who know nothing about it.

Measuring progress

The world’s foremost cellist, Pablo Casals, is 83. He was asked one day why he continued to practice four and five hours a day. Casals answered, “Because I think I am making progress.”

In calligraphy shodo lessons, my sensei gives me assignments and I practice them at home. The next month I present my six best efforts and he chooses one (or none, and I re-do the assignment) that he asks me to keep. Often, I have no idea why he chose that particular work to keep. Sometimes I have ideas about why he didn’t choose some and not others such as the spacing is off, the centerline veers off, splotches of ink on the paper. But other times, I look at them and don’t really know why he chose a particular work. This lack of feedback has forced me to self-assess where I am and my own progress. Though I complained once to my husband that I was frustrated and didn’t know if I was making any progress in my shodo studies. He said, “Of course you are! Your assignments are getting harder and harder.”

Being able to self-assess your own progress without external feedback builds resilience. When you don’t need sensei to tell you that you are doing a good job, or that you are getting better, then you can be in charge of your own learning. Knowing where you are in your progression will enable you to focus on where you need to work and motivate your continuous lifelong learning.

Adversity and Setbacks

Every serious endeavor has obstacles, adversity, and setbacks. It is how you learn to overcome these that builds resilience. Solving problems and overcoming obstacles gives you the confidence that you can do it again. Working through adversity or a time of no progress takes determination and tenacity. If you believe that you have what it takes to continue even though right now you suck at it, it builds on itself to achieve even a little success you can count as progress.

Why cultivate resilience

When we work through problems success seems more worthwhile. Easy things are not as valued as when we put in the effort and earn it. The sense of accomplishment feeds the self-confidence that we are competent and can do more and achieve more. We can try new things and explore areas that we could only dream of before. It can also serve as an example to others that they too can be successful. They can work through problems and obstacles, achieve more, explore, and try new things.