Self Realized, Shatter Your Limits

Discover the Power of Resilience

• Linton Bergsen • Episode 96

Share episode

Resilience isn't just a quality—it's a power that can be systematically developed through a counterintuitive approach. In this thought-provoking episode, join me Linton Bergsen host of the Self-Realized, Shatter Your Limits Podcast as I unpack the critical relationship between resistance and resilience, revealing how they work together to create transformative results in your life.

Drawing on the parallel of resistance training in physical fitness, you’ll explore how deliberately exposing yourself to challenges—at your own pace and comfort level—builds the mental and emotional muscle needed to withstand life's inevitable storms. This controlled approach to building resilience puts you firmly in the driver's seat of your personal growth journey, allowing you to progressively strengthen your capacity to overcome obstacles while honoring your current limitations.

The episode delves into three crucial domains— career choices, relationships, and spiritual beliefs— where resistance is not only inevitable, but also necessary for authentic living. Each area requires the courage to stand firm against external pressures and opinions that might pull you away from your true path. Yet standing firm (resistance) is only the first step—maintaining that stance over time despite ongoing opposition (resilience) is what ultimately delivers the results you seek. This three-part formula—Resistance + Resilience = Results—has proven effective throughout history, from social movements to individual journeys of self-realization.

Whether you're facing personal challenges, professional obstacles, or simply seeking to live more authentically, this episode offers practical wisdom for transforming resistance from something to avoid into your greatest ally for  personal development and power. Subscribe now, and discover how becoming truly resilient can help you build not just a temporary sand barrier, but a concrete wall strong enough to protect what matters most in your life.

Let me know your thoughts on this episode. Text me your feedback! 🙂

https://www.selfrealized.com

Linton Bergsen:

Welcome to the Self-Realized Podcast with Linton Bergsen, where you will shatter your limits. I am not much into the self-help industry as much as I'm into the self-realized individual, which is you, what matters most to you, how you get there and the obstacles that may be in your way. If you would like to be part of this podcast and part of that discussion, I welcome you here with an open heart, open mind and open arms. So, without further ado, let's get on with the podcast. I appreciate you taking the most valuable assets that you have your time and your energy to join me on today's episode number 96 of the Self-Realized, Shatter Your Limits Podcast.

Linton Bergsen:

Discover the Power of Resilience. A lot of times we don't think about resilience as a power, and is there in fact anything to be discovered about this great power of resilience? I would strongly suggest to you that there is, and one of the most important things to discover is how do you build resilience, to know how to use it and its power in the first place and that is what I'm going to share with you within this episode it's not only the power of resilience, but how you build resilience. Resilience is built with its counterpart. I call them the two R's Resilience has to have resistance. Contemplate on this for a moment. Do you indeed think it is possible to have resilience without resistance? Now, that is an important question to ponder, because if you agree with me and you want to discover the power of resilience, you're going to have to have a certain amount of resistance that you've built up in your life to be resilient against whatever it is that you're trying to overcome in any type of adversity or setbacks in life. The beauty about building resilience and working with resistance to do so is that you can build resilience as fast or as slow as you like. Let me give an example of how you control how you build resilience.

Linton Bergsen:

Let's say that you decide you want to get healthier, you want to get fitter, you want to get stronger and you're going to work with a trainer. You walk into the gym together. You want to build some arm strength, you want to build some muscle mass, and the trainer hands you some weights. And it's called resistance training, because in order for you to build strength and muscle mass, you have to have resistance. Resistance is going to be beneficial for you to build strength and muscle mass. The trainer hands you a certain weight. You decide, starting out, that weight is to heavy and you would like to try something lighter. So the trainer hands you a lighter weight. Now you feel comfortable with that weight. It has enough resistance to start out with that you can begin to build upon. So you control the resistance that you would like to have to build the strength that you're moving towards. But you have to have some resistance to build the strength.

Linton Bergsen:

Now, once you begin to build the strength through the resistance in the gym, it has certain benefits. You are more resilient when you go out in the world. If you were to fall over, you would have greater body strength to help, number one, prevent the fall and, number two, recover more quickly because you were in better shape. So you were more resilient by doing the resistance training to what could happen to you in everyday life. The same resilience is mental as well as it is physical, because the resistance training you did in the gym required a certain mental toughness for you to go through that and hopefully keep it ongoing to build the muscle mass and the body and get to the fitness level that you would like. The main thing to consider here when you're looking at building the resistance, moving towards creating greater resilience in your life is that you control how much resistance is comfortable for you, just as you would in the gym with a trainer. It depends on how far you want to go.

Linton Bergsen:

Some people don't like any resistance at all, so they have no resilience. On an everyday basis, they go out into the world and they are a lot more vulnerable than someone who is working out in the gym to everyday functioning injuries and mishaps. It's just the way life works. If you're not taking care of yourself and you reach out for something that's a little too heavy, you may injure yourself. But if you are in better shape, you may not Contemplate on this for a moment. Some people don't even like other people resisting what it is they would lik e to do . They don't like other people resisting their opinions. They want everything to go their way, have everyone go along with them, and when people question them or don't like what they have to say, they have no resilience to counter that and stand up and have a meaningful conversation about what it is they're trying to either get across, or why they would like to do what they are going to do, or the reasons that there may be some misunderstanding. They are not used to dealing with resistance in any form, especially if it were to come in the form of a personal struggle or adversity, because when you get involved in struggles and adversity, you are not going to be able to resist them to the degree that they don't occur. You're going to have to accept them, not resist them, and the lessons they bring to your life.

Linton Bergsen:

Resilience requires you not to resist situations and circumstances that come into your life to help you to become a stronger person. You accept it, you receive it and you embrace it. You begin to welcome resistance as a powerhouse in your life of you getting where you need to go. Because if you're going to accomplish anything in life and you're going to be your own person, you're going to meet a lot of resistance. And when you embrace it and can deal with more resistance than you even expect, you get stronger and stronger and your resilience to life becomes better and better, because you know that the more resistance you meet, the stronger you become, because you're embracing it and not running away from it.

Linton Bergsen:

As suggested earlier. Going to the gym, you start small. There may be some resistance to what you're doing. The bigger you go in life. The bigger your goals, the more you're stepping out of the box and becoming your own person, the more resistance that you're going to get. You are going to become more resilient because struggle and resistance are your friend, because they build muscle mass, they build strength, they give you a great foundation to stand upon and the stronger you are, the more resilient you are. The more resistant you are to people's opinions, feelings about you, the more successful you can become and the more of your own person you can be, and that allows you to live a happier life. Discovering the power of resilience is actually increasing your resistance to what is going on on an everyday level in your life, so you can become more resilient.

Linton Bergsen:

The power of resilience is that you can withstand the storms that life throws at you like a concrete wall. They're very resilient. In cities where flooding can be a problem, they put up concrete walls. Sand is a temporary barrier because it's not as resilient as concrete. You don't want to establish your life on a foundation of sand. You want something a little bit more substantial than that. The question you have to ask yourself is this what type of barriers and protections do you want to have in your life when life throws the inevitable changes and adversity in your life. How resilient are you going to be? Let me give you some real world examples of resistance and resilience working together so you can really begin to see how you combine these two to get results in your life that you want, because, ultimately, anything that you do is going towards getting a result that you would like.

Linton Bergsen:

Let's talk about three areas that are important to all of us, that require a certain amount of resistance from you in order for you to establish what it is that you want out of your life. Let's look at career relationships, spiritual or religious beliefs. If you want to embark upon a career that means something to you, you may actually have resistance from people around you about the pathway that you have chosen. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you may meet resistance from people telling you that that is impossible, but that is your business choice, that is your career choice. And people telling you whether it's family or friends, what you can and cannot do. You're going to have to resist that and that's going to take some courage and strength to follow the path that you feel is right for you and resist other people's opinions. It would be the same in any relationship that you're going into. Some people may approve, some people may not. And again, you're going to have to resist the tendency to please other people and explain to them why you are in a certain relationship and living up to other people's expectations of what they think is appropriate for you. In order for you to truly be happy, you're going to have to know your own values and resist other people and their opinions.

Linton Bergsen:

Thirdly, spiritual and religious beliefs. You may have different spiritual or religious beliefs than your friends or family. The pathway you're going down, that is personal, that belongs to you. It has nothing to do with anyone else. It is so personal that really no one can tell you what you should believe or shouldn't believe, because then you become a puppet to everybody else's belief systems and there's no surer way for unhappiness to become someone that everyone else wants you to be. You're going to have to resist these different areas in your life. They're all important. All three are very important, and that resistance to people telling you who and what you should be is the foundation of your uniqueness and ability to express yourself completely in this life.

Linton Bergsen:

Now, that's the first step. Is the resistance. How long you can resist is the resilience. Because when you start out on a path let's say it's a relationship and you want to be in this relationship and people keep telling you what is not right for you, but you know it is you want this relationship again,. it could be career as well, or your spiritual or religious beliefs.

Linton Bergsen:

The resistance to the input from other people might have to be over an extended period of time. If you're in a relationship, you may hear for a while about how this relationship isn't for you, how inappropriate it is. So you resist these ongoing comments because you know that it's right for you. Now, if this continues on for six months to a year, it could be easier to not go down the path. In your career choice, relationship, spiritual or religious beliefs, give in and not resist anymore.

Linton Bergsen:

That comes back to the analogy of the gym. If you want to increase muscle mass, if you want to have a better body, you have to go through the pain in order to get the gain. It's the same with your life. You have to resist and persist for an extended period of time and keep going forward on your chosen road and pathway that you know is right for you. Discovering the real power of resilience is understanding that as you go along this road in life. Resistance is step one, the resilience to put up with the constant backlash of that is step two, and if you can have enough resilience to persist with your resistance, you will get the final R that you can add to the initial two that I gave you at the beginning of this podcast episode, which is the results that you're looking for. If you look throughout history, in civil rights movements, for example, there was resistance, there was resilience and then there was results. It's a formula. So when you discover the power of resilience, it really is an underestimated powerhouse for you to begin to lock into, to say that, no matter what, I have the resilience to resist what is not best for me to get the results that I know will work for me on my journey to self-realization. Simply meaning, as a self-realized individual, you know internally, intuitively, what is best for you. Resist with resilience to get the results that you want and live the life that you have chosen for yourself and not the life that other people would like to choose for you.

Linton Bergsen:

I sincerely appreciate you listening to the podcast. Please subscribe so you do not miss any upcoming episodes. Whatever platform you're on, please leave a rating and review. I would greatly appreciate it. Any additional information on me, Linton Bergsen and my five-star reviewed book Purposeful Vision is available at selfrealized. com which is all one word. You can also leave any comments or suggestions on the website. I look forward to connecting with you very soon and take good care of yourself.