Run Through the Fire: How Resilience Turns Setbacks Into Strength

Achieving your goals means persevering through the tough challenges you may face – in other words, staying resilient.

Being resilient means adapting in the face of adversity by remaining flexible – whether mentally, emotionally, or behaviorally. Resilience is not about avoiding difficult emotions. It’s about developing the skills to bounce back, cope with challenges, and even grow from them.

In practical terms, resilience means to be open to modifying the way you work towards your goals to make the most of the situation.

Qeap is a 13-week program designed to help you achieve a yearlong goal in one-fourth of that time. It’s not an easy solution. You have to do the work to get you there, plus the mindset work that gets you closer to your goals, regardless of how ambitious they may seem.

To be successful with Qeap, you’ll need to live by a set of principles that will get you to the finish line. Resilience is one of those principles. 

In this blog, we’ll get into the science of building resilience, but first, let’s first talk about how resilience helped get one man to the finish line – literally – quite a few times.

Before He Broke Records as a Runner, Meb Keflezighi Faced Many Challenges

Meb Keflezighi is known for his record-breaking marathon wins – New York City in 2009 and Boston in 2014 – but by the time he did either of those things, he was already not only a four-time NCAA running champion at UCLA, but had competed in four Olympics, winning the silver medal in marathon in 2004’s Athens, Greece Olympics. 

“Sometimes, I can’t believe all this has happened to me,” Meb wrote in his 2010 autobiography, Run to Overcome. Standing at the starting line in New York City in 2009, where he became the first American to win the race since 1982, he reflects, “I couldn’t help but think of how far I had come – and how much I had overcome – since my childhood days in a war-torn African village.”

Meb grew up without access to electricity or running water in the East African nation of Eritrea, a nation embroiled in a bitter, decades-long war for independence from its neighbor, Ethiopia. Children who grew up in Eritrea were expected to enlist in the military to join the war effort, so Meb’s father took drastic measures to avoid that fate for his 11 children.

“I didn’t see television until we moved to Italy when I was 10,” Meb writes in Run to Overcome. “I was so naïve that I thought real people were inside the TV set. Now I was about to compete in front of 2 million spectators and a worldwide television audience of 330 million. It was just one of many examples of the incredible arc of my life from the third world to the modern world,” he says as he looks back on his NYC Marathon starting line feelings.

After the short stopover in Italy, Meb emigrated to the United States, where he got into running in middle school after his PE teacher told him he would get an A if he could run a 6:15 mile. He bested that time, so his teacher told him he could go to the Olympics – except Meb didn’t even know what that was at the time, though he ended up winning his Olympic medal 25 years later.

“[…] I have been running to overcome all my life,” writes Meb. “When I commit to something, I’m all in, all 5 foot ½ inches and 123 pounds of me. I am often at my best when things look the worst.”

Indeed, Meb proved his resilience again in 2014 when, the year after the Boston Marathon bombing, he became the first American since 1983 to win that race.

This journey was not an easy one for Meb. Besides the adversity he faced as a child, he also faced setbacks and career-threatening injuries, not to mention disbelief and underestimation from critics.

So how did Meb, now retired, make history despite it all? He learned ways to help turn falling short of a goal into fuel for overcoming future challenges.

He managed disappointment by readjusting his goals when his primary goal was no longer possible, helping him look for success via a different route.

He embraced strategies such as motivational self-talk and visualization in tough moments to help him push through race fatigue.

He put things in perspective.

Ultimately, he redefined “run to win” as to mean not always finishing first in a race, but putting in one’s best effort.

We can all build our inner resilience – keep reading to learn more about that.

How to Build Resilience

Once you figure out what your goal is – the next step is to figure out how to get there. Setting a goal is like setting a priority. You have to give up things that don’t matter as much to you to make space for the things that do. You’re also sure to face roadblocks and have those moments where you feel like none of it will ever be possible.

So how do you deal with all of that while also managing losses and allowing disappointment to fuel your greatest successes? 

Here are some tips to break out of that mindset to build resilience that can help you achieve your goals – tips straight from the scientific literature on resilience. A study based out of Mount Sinai School of Medicine reviewed several studies on resilience and identified the following factors.

Adopt a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is an attitude that every failure is an opportunity to learn – and that hard work works. Instead of expecting yourself to travel in a linear path from point A to point B, accept that there will be some roadblocks and obstacles that will help you grow. 

Learning and improving is at the core of developing a growth mindset. Reflect on outcomes, especially when you fall short of your goals, as that is a chance to improve.

Meb didn’t always get the results he wanted, but it set the stage for the next achievement. In an Instagram post, Meb says, “I always say to write 3 things you can learn and improve from every race, and 3 things that went well. Improvement is always in focus.”

With Qeap, every outcome, whether good or bad, is a learning opportunity and chance to become stronger and smarter. Each 13-week sprint, called a Qeap, has one week (Week 0) to reflect on past outcomes: what was done well, what could be better, and how to make that happen. 

Be Positive

Having a positive view of yourself and your purpose in life can help you stay resilient; altruistic behavior, which is behavior that creates a sense of connection with others, may also be associated with improved resilience. 

Checking in with your feelings regularly and adjusting your behavior can help, according to Oscar Romano, a graduate of Harvard University who learned lessons on resilience as he adapted to his first two years at the challenging Ivy League. 

“When I start feeling negativity, it’s […] a sign to share positivity,” Romano writes. “Even if I’m feeling lonely, sad, or wanting to keep to myself, I strive to share positive thoughts with others.” He also works on his gratitude practice, which, according to him, ends up filling his cup even more.

Lean on Your Support System

Social support helps individuals develop a sense of connection, maintain a positive self-image, and find meaning, which can help them better cope with stress. Feeling in community can also improve one’s strength to face tough challenges in life. Support doesn’t have to be emotional in nature – it can also be helping someone solve a problem, or providing advice and/or information.

Having a support system can serve as a buffer against feeling hopeless, which can be particularly important in times when you are working towards your goal but fall short, for whatever reason (which may also signal that it’s time to go back to the drawing board with the strategy or plan for achieving your goal – see the “Growth Mindset” tip above).

Don’t Neglect Your Physical Health

When you’re going all in on a new goal, it can be tempting to want to dedicate all of your scarce free time to that endeavor and skip the gym. Besides the obvious physical benefits of exercise, however, working out provides a mood and self-esteem boost that can support greater resilience. The scientists conjecture that the psychological boost from physical activity can contribute to the “mental fortitude,” as they write, needed for resilience. They also suggest that the mood boost involved can improve the quality of social and interpersonal relationships. 

If your goal involves a physical component – let’s say you are running a marathon – your resilience will need to come both from your mindset piece and your physical performance. Check out this article for more on the mindset piece involved in running.

Do the Hard Thing (instead of Avoiding It)

Sometimes, when faced with a challenge, our first response is to avoid it entirely, but that can just make the problem worse. It is a natural human response to avoid doing the hard thing because we do not want to feel fear. However, when you face your fears and tackle an issue head-on, this can solve your problem, which in the long-term, reduces your anxiety a lot. 

Being able to face stressful things happening in life is actually a skill you can develop by facing stressful situations head-on. It’s called “stress inoculation” when people face their fears despite the feelings of stress and anxiety that might bring. You may need to work on mindfulness techniques or reframe the situation to be able to do the hard thing with less stress, and facing stressful situations can help you do that. Over time, facing different stressors, you will approach a new challenge with a sense of resolve and a calm developed from navigating difficult challenges in the past!

Build Your Resilience with Qeap

With Qeap, you can get one year’s worth of work done in an action-packed 91 days. Qeap helps you develop resilience by encouraging a growth mindset approach to advancing towards your goals. Each week, you check in with yourself about the small, incremental tasks you have created for yourself, and figure out what’s working and what’s not. This can help you make consistent progress towards goals, so you tackle the difficult thing you might have been avoiding in smaller, bite-sized steps that can set you up for success. Learn more about Qeap here.