Elegance & pride are confidence embodied

Elegance is extremely important to our emotional resilience because it grounds us. When we operate out of this high self-confidence and self-worth, so much more becomes available to us. Our capacity increases for handling business challenges, reactive people, our own reactions, and the unknown.

The more emotional anchors we have, the more resilient we feel.

No one these days thinks of pride as an important skill we need to spend time developing. It seems like a waste of time. But it isn’t! 

When all else is gone, there is always something that no one can take away from you – things that you have already achieved that you can be proud of. When we tap into pure pride and get present to it, in the body, it creates an emotional anchor that we can hold on to in times of turbulence.

As change-makers, it’s critical that we help our teams build pride so that they have long-term resilience that builds long-term success. When people rely on external rewards like money, promotions, raises, etc., to build their sense of self-worth, they become less resilient long term. Those who develop an internal system for rewarding themselves, by building their pride, win the marathon.

The problem is that when we go through a tough time, we might shoot these achievements down. We might say: “But it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, look at me now. I don’t have this anymore.”  No, you don’t, but you are the one who did it before and that cannot be taken away from you! It’s yours for good. And you can do it again!

A friend told me during the lockdown of the corona pandemic in 2020 that an extremely wealthy friend of hers was going through a really hard time and was really depressed. When she asked her friend why she explained: “You fell out of the 2nd floor. I fell from the 40th floor. I can’t do anything that makes me happy. I have all the money in the world and I can’t travel, can’t go to my yacht, buy anything, go to luxurious restaurants…”

As far-fetched as this story may seem, it happened exactly as described here, word for word. It’s hard to believe that someone can be this unaware of themselves, but her happiness was based on the wrong things.

Happiness should depend on internal and not external things.

This is a great example of someone whose base for happiness is external, while happiness should be coming from within – from being happy with who we have become or what we have achieved. The rest is just the cherry on top.

In some cultures and religions, people view pride as a negative thing. That’s because pride is sometimes mixed, by mistake, with arrogance.  Pure pride is just a GOOD FEELING we have about something that we have achieved, who we have become, or being proud of someone we love. Arrogance is when we feel that we are better than someone else because of the above. When everything falls apart in our lives, we have the anchor of pride to hold on to for dear life inside us. And this is true emotional resilience.

The more you develop things in your life that you are proud of, the more emotional anchors you have to hold on to. Life goes up and down like a rollercoaster ride – many cards are dealt to us without us wanting them.

So the more emotional anchors we develop the more resilient we will be during the hard times.