Welcome to our course on resilience. Many of us believe that executives have special skills and talents, and that is why they are successful. The truth of the matter is that aptitude is not a guarantee of success. It has less to do with success than fortitude. That means to become an executive, you weren't born with innate traits that make you special. It means those who achieve this in their career, earn it.
Your ability to stick to something, to think and practice it deeply. And to persevere in the face of adversity is what we call resilience. We are all going to face obstacles in our lives and our careers. Believe me, I certainly have, but those with executive presence confront those obstacles differently than to the rest of us. They see through the obstacles, they maintain a growth trajectory. They have the positive outlook and belief in themselves that things are going to turn out okay.
When they see someone who has failed, they find the right Words to encourage them to keep going and growing and recognize that failure is just a step on the way to success. Angela Duckworth wrote a best selling book that we love called grit. She says that greatness is doable. greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable. Deborah's created a short quiz to test your level of greediness. You can complete the quiz in your workbook by turning to exercise number eight.
Pause the video now and take the quiz. Your score is a reflection of how do you see yourself right now. This score tends to change throughout your lifetime. The older you are research suggests the higher your grit score tends to get, which dovetails nicely with the development of executive presence. Note that your answers to the odd number of questions in the quiz give you an indication of your passion score. And the words of Duckworth.
Passion for your work is a little bit of discipline. Every followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening and passion has a lot to do with doing what you love and not being so focused on what everyone else thinks you should be doing. Others have identified the role that passion in our careers for the people we work with, and the organization's we work with has on our success, Zoeller in Preston in the book, enhancing your executive edge stated that passion plus intent equals results. We live with passion on a daily basis by believing in ourselves. Passion makes us proactive and intentional in what we do. Returning to the grip quiz one more time.
The even numbered questions indicate your level of perseverance. How long do you stick with something before you give up? Most people score higher in perseverance than they do in passion. Duckworth is found that high grit scores come from working on something you care about so much that you're willing to stay with Not just falling in love with something, but staying in love with it in love with something is a very high barrier to achieve in our careers. Many of us only hope to find a career in which we truly love what we're doing. This alignment to career and passion comes from a strong personal philosophy accorded Duckworth and we're going to talk about this in the course.
We're going to start our first lesson by looking at our mindset and what your mindset has to do with your success. Look forward to seeing you there.