Equipping young women professionals with young families to find fulfillment, contentment and joy as mothers and home makers without losing sight of who they are as women.

Volume 12, Issue 24: Resilience At Work

Not so long ago I wrote about developing resilience. At the time, my focus was on big things in life. But this past weekend my experiences revealed that resilience is just as important in minor life occurrences as it is in major ones. I had just come from hosting a birthday party for my daughter and needed to bake for two other birthdays.

Starting Friday afternoon after work, I embarked on a task of baking and decorating two cakes for my brother's and nephew's upcoming birthdays. Ready to put the second cake in the oven, I found that the large round baking tin I intended to use had a fault. So I used a large square baking tin instead. Getting the cake out of the tin after cooling resulted in part of the cake breaking. That didn't worry me too much as I figured I could plaster it with frosting.

Prior to this, I had passed by a nearby grocery store on my way back home from dropping my son to school in the morning. I wanted to pick the brand of margarine I use for my buttercream. Unfortunately, it wasn't on the shelves, so I picked a brand I had never used before. While the cakes were cooling, I started working on making the first batch of buttercream. It turned out to be a complete flop as the margarine was too light and runny. I ended up using two extra packets of icing sugar in the hope of firming up the buttercream. The buttercream didn't thicken enough nor whiten but I thought I could still use it.

Come early Saturday morning, my mission was to be done with frosting the cakes by the time I needed to drop my son for his basketball training. Shock on me. The buttercream was a mess. It didn't hold either of the cakes, nor successfully patch the broken cake. So I picked another set of icing sugar packets and the right brand of margarine from a different grocery store after dropping my son off for basketball training.

Getting back home I baked another cake to replace the broken one. I scraped off the imperfect buttercream from the other cake and started the process all over again, eating into part of my Sunday afternoon. I realized that throughout the flops: the buttercream backfiring, going back to the store, spending money on products I had already spent money on but lost as a result of the flop, rebaking a cake, preparing buttercream and frosting the cakes a second time, I kept telling myself not to let it discourage me. It was important that I keep my motivation up.

If that's not resilience in its basic form then I don't know what is. I could have thrown in the towel and given up on the cakes. Or, I could have powered through discouraged. But having developed resilience prior to this experience, I knew that I could not only not give up, I also couldn't power through in a discouraged state. So I focused on the positives instead.

I told myself that by repeating the work, I would be getting better at frosting cakes. These were going to be the best cakes I ever presented. More so, I reminded myself that it was an honour to get to bake for my family on their birthdays. That this is one of my opportunities of being a blessing in my community.

What small things have you had to pick yourself up from recently? Don't dismiss your small acts resilience because it is still resilience.

Related Article: Build Resilience

For His Glory,

Lillian Chebosi