Have you ever been kicked when you were depressed? Maybe you lost everything you had? Or something as simple as something didn’t turn out the way you wanted?

Did you recover? Or did you break up and slip into victim mode and spiral into depression and anger?

We’ve all been there, so today we’re going to talk about resilience – your ability to bounce back after taking a hard hit.

I have taken some hard knocks in my time and never realized it until now, but I am resilient. Growing up, my mother used to call me “her survivor.” Of the three children, I was the one to get up from her boots and move on.

When I was 20 I got married and had my daughter; The marriage quickly failed and I had to leave the comforts of a sustained lifestyle to raise my son on my own with no money, no home or profession.

When I was 30, my company was sold to another company that brought in the proverbial “manager from hell” and the job that I had for so many years, I no longer enjoyed.

When I was 40, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she overcame it, only to have it resurface years later. The same year I lost my job, my daughter lost hers, and the family business was taking a beating.

In short … I recovered from all of that and very quickly.

What I learned from this self-reflection is the secret to recovering and this is what I learned:

1) You need to have an honest conversation with yourself. – Ask those tough questions and provide really honest answers (not the angry answers or excuses you want to give) really sit back and reflect on what happened. If you had a part in it, own it.

2) Understand that you are in control of your own destiny and that you are exactly where you are because of the choices you made … not what others have done to you. You have been in control of your life and the results all this time. If there was a failure, it was your failure and you and only you will fix it.

3) To recover, you must act! You need to do something about it. All success in life comes from moving forward, taking the first step, and taking action. You know what went wrong (remember you just had an honest conversation with yourself) now think about your next move.

4) Don’t get stuck on what didn’t work. Focus on creating something new that works. Use your initiative and creativity to come up with ideas to help you reach your goal. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, so the simple logic is to do something different.

5) Give yourself a break. Allow yourself to laugh at yourself and learn from this mistake. People grow enormously with this kind of knowledge. Don’t be hard on yourself, find the humor in the situation and share it with others. This vulnerability will connect you with those around you and help you stay in a positive frame of mind.

6) Always take the right path. Integrity is your most valuable trait, keep it real. It will be easy to hit others and make excuses and find fault with everything around you. That’s the easy way, the hardest thing is not finding all the reasons why something went wrong, but finding the only reason to correct it. No matter what happened to you, live your life from a place of morality and high integrity. – What I’ve learned, the universe has a fun way of rewarding you.

Like the peak in the desert landscape, you too will begin to bloom and become something beautiful. The saying is “what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.” Well that’s resilience and something each of us has in our arsenal of weapons to be successful.