Developing mental resilience is a practice. It requires challenges to struggle against, and, like athletic practice, it is helpful to rest between times of stress. Life doesn’t always offer us this rest. I have found it helpful to treat each challenge or issue as its own thing. When I was younger, I was lucky enough to have a pair of uncles who taught me that even small things can feel overwhelming if we bundle them together in our minds. I learned the lesson of breaking things into separate challenges to make them more manageable.

During his reign as emperor, Marcus Aurelius dealt with plague, treason, war and the loss of as many as 9 of his children. He struggled with poor health for most of his life before succumbing to an infection at the age of 58. His son and heir, Commodus, was clearly not the successor Marcus would have wished for (in fact, his solo reign may have led to the end of an era of peace and prosperity in the Roman Empire.) And yet, Marcus repeatedly admonished himself in his “Meditations” to focus just on the present moment and not be troubled by things outside of his control. He also reminded himself “Nothing that happens is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.” If life sometimes seems unfair and unrelenting, it is temporary and complaining will not improve the situation.

Bridgewater CEO and author of “Principles of Life and Work”, Ray Dalio, advises confronting our problems head-on. “The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.” He also advocates for identifying new challenges as examples of previously met ones – which can help reframe a setback or loss.

Marcus and other stoics remind us to note the things in our control and take action on them. By making progress in even one small area or addressing one issue out of many, we can regain some semblance of control when all seems to be conspiring against us.

Finally, it is worth remembering that our emotions are not facts, and we can control our emotions even at very difficult times. As Marcus put it, “When jarred unavoidably by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony of you keep on going back to it.”

Next time it seems to you that life is handing you an unrelenting series of shit sandwiches, try to remember that the events (and life itself) are temporary. We will move out of the period of struggle, and will be better able to respond while in it if we remember to act on those things we can control. We can also remember that our emotions need not drive us – we can decide how we react to life’s challenges. Repeatedly practising intentional responses will make a calmer demeanour easier to maintain, even in very trying circumstances. While very few of us are ever likely to deal with the level of challenge that Marcus dealt with, we share a common humanity with those who went before us. We can leverage the lessons of our predecessors to make our present more palatable.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.

Given Marcus’ other writings, this seems like a harsh judgement of his fellow men. Marcus, like other Stoics, believed in reserving harshness for himself. He also believed in being unsurprised by people behaving according to their nature. So, how should we deal with the ungrateful in our lives?

A completely different quote came to mind when I was thinking about this. I studied King Lear in school, and like many of Shakespeare’s works, it has many “quotable” quotes. The relevant one is “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” As the father of teenage daughters, I can empathise with this one, although none of them have yet accused me of outright senility. It can seem that no matter what we do as parents, our children have already moved on to the next thing they want or need without acknowledging our efforts.

As we go about our day, we may hold doors for others or let them into traffic ahead of us, only for the gesture or effort to go unacknowledged. At work, we may help a colleague with a project or go out of our way to support a leader with a problem they have. We may not receive what we consider to be the appropriate recognition for this or none at all. People can seem happy to benefit from the fruits of our labours without giving us credit for them.

All of this can feel heartily unfair and lead to us being less likely to offer this kind of assistance in the future. We could become bitter and determined only to do what benefits us directly. But there is something to consider beyond our hurt feelings.

As with many quotes taken out of context, the one I started this post with continues with additional language that shifts its focus and clarifies where Marcus is coming from. Marcus reminds himself that he knows the difference between good and evil, that the other person is his “brother in nature”, and that he must remember how to work with them. A common theme in Marcus’ writing is that we can and must choose how we deal with challenging events and people.

In addition, it is often our ego that causes us to want recognition for doing good deeds for others. Marcus reminds himself, and by extension, we as his readers, that we are insignificant in the overall scheme of things (and remember, he was a Roman emperor). Therefore, our ego is ridiculous in assuming we deserve admiration or recognition.

He exhorts himself to do the right thing and remember that doing good should be its own reward.

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honoured.

For us, too, we must remember to be grateful for all we have and not become someone who fails to recognise the good deeds done for us by others. Because while a good deed should be its own reward, our social brain craves recognition and seeks to belong. So, regardless of ingratitude (or sometimes ignorance) on the part of our fellows, we can choose to be grateful. Life is too short to be otherwise.

A very private man, I had met him only once, and didn’t know him at all.  Despite his private nature the crowd of people there was testament to the impact he had on many lives.  We were there to offer our support and consolation to his family, and to say goodbye to a brother, husband, father, co-worker and friend.  While we waited there, I thought that while it may not be obvious to us as we travel through our lives, the decisions we make have lasting consequences, and those consequences live beyond us.

We all suffer loss in our lives.  It is the nature of the human condition that we are destined to have spans that are shorter than most of us would like, and this man’s life was cut very short.  He left behind a wife and three teenage children.  He died of cancer on Christmas Day, which seemed to me doubly cruel – a day that was always celebrated  in their house would become a day of sorrowful memories.  My daughter’s friend always loved Christmas – she would get my daughter to dress up in Christmas jumpers for Hallowe’en, rather than any of the more traditional outfits.  I can only imagine that future Christmases will be very different in their house.

During the funeral ceremony, my mind kept drawing parallels between their lives and ours – my wife and I have three children, and it could just as easily have been me in the coffin.  My father died young, and was also a father of three (I’ve written about the consequences of one of his decisions here).  We all have these thoughts during funerals, I’m sure.  I’ve been to quite a few funerals over the years, and as I get older they are becoming more frequent than any other type of extended family get-together.  Most of the recent funerals have been for older relatives, which, while sad, don’t feel the same as those conducted for people who have gone “before their time”.

While I was thinking for what felt like the hundredth time how terribly sad it was for the family, one of their relatives stood up and read a reflection.  It was a simple poem, which I’ve subsequently found credited to a Cumbrian artist by the name of David Harkin.  I’m going to replicate it in its entirety because it turned my thought process around about the day.

You can shed tears that he is gone
Or you can smile because he has lived
You can close your eyes and pray that he will come back
Or you can open your eyes and see all that he has left
Your heart can be empty because you can’t see him
Or you can be full of the love that you shared
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday
You can remember him and only that he is gone
Or you can cherish his memory and let it live on
You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
Or you can do what he would want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.

I’ve written before about stoicism, and the fact that I am someone who lives very much in the present.  The above resonated strongly with me, and made me feel very hopeful – the family are pragmatic and stoical, as my daughter has previously told me, and the poem echoes that approach to life.

We finished the service with laughter – the primary celebrant couldn’t remember a key fact about his concelebrant, and encouraged us to laugh at his failings.  The final messages from the funeral were not of despair or sadness, but of hope, and of light, laughter and life in the face of the reality of death.

Why is it that the lessons that stick the most are often the most painful? When we are children we learn not to touch extremely hot things more than once.  From a work perspective, mistakes we make that embarrass, shame, or cause us to be removed from our positions in the worst case, are often the ones that shape our behaviour and that cause us to vow “never again!”.  Or to quote a certain president – “Fool me once, shame on .. shame on you.  Fool me … You can’t get fooled again!”.

There can be growth through pain, however.  In the case of physical exercise, muscles are broken down to promote growth; as a gym-goer for the last 25 years, hypertrophy has become part of my lexicon. The emotional and psychological pain we experience as a result of work-related failure is not something that causes hypertrophic growth, but it can lead to personal development in other ways.  It can, for example, build resilience.  Benjamin Franklin put it like this – “The things which hurt, instruct.”  This goes for both physical learning – “this is how far I can push my body”, “this is where the safe part of the path ends”, “these are things I should not do while carrying hot coffee” – but also for the mental and emotional learning that comes from experiencing pain from making mistakes in a work or societal context.  If we become “gun shy” as a result of experiencing pain, we may not take appropriate risks, because the possibility of failure (and the resulting pain) causes us to step back instead of forwards.

I’m currently reading “The Obstacle is the Way“, a book by Ryan Holiday, which is based on Stoic philosophy.  One of my colleagues gave a somewhat understandable snort when I told them this. As a title it feels extremely Zen, which can cause sceptical reactions.  There is some great life advice in the book, though, about treating obstacles (and the pain they can bring) as opportunity.  No significant obstacle is ever removed or circumvented without sometimes significant levels of pain.  It can be a tough sell for most of us to view pain as an opportunity, but there are great examples of people succeeding as a result of encountering and overcoming sometimes a lot of pain (psychological, emotional, and/or physical).

My favourite example so far is an anecdote about Thomas Edison.  I’m going to shorten it here, but essentially after a long day at the laboratory, Edison received news that his research and production facility had caught fire.  The sight was spectacular as a result of the chemicals stored in the buildings, and yellow and green flames soared sixty or seventy feet into the sky.  Rather than become upset, Edison excitedly sent his son to fetch his (the son’s) mother and all of his son’s friends, as they would never get to see a fire of this kind again!  He subsequently said that it was a great opportunity to clean out a lot of old rubbish – despite losing years worth of paperwork, designs, inventions and stock.  This represented a huge loss, estimated at the time at nearly $1m ($23m in current valuation).   Within a month Edison had the facility back up and running, and delivered $10m (~$200m c.v.) in revenue that year.  Edison embraced the pain of the loss cheerfully, and grew significantly from it.

I think Edison was so successful in recovering because he wasn’t afraid of the pain, and was willing to risk similar loss again by re-building from scratch.  He also put the pain into context – he hadn’t lost anything that couldn’t be replaced, like his wife or son or a close colleague or friend.

I think we need to be braver when it comes to pain of a certain type, particularly when it comes to work.  At the moment I’m personally pushing myself when I know failure is a real possibility, and pain could well result.  If that happens I’m hoping to be at least somewhat Stoical, and look for opportunities to grow from what I experience.