The Project Book

CHAPTER 14 BOUNCEBACKABILITY

As a kid I didn’t much care for playing football in the freezing cold, and Liverpool could get very cold in the winter. Worst of all was when the ball hit you full on the thigh, as it would sting like only a leather missile striking cold flesh can. You would wince in agony, at which point you’d be harangued from the touchline: ‘Don’t stop, keep running, keep running! It’ll feel better in a minute’. The last thing you want to do when your leg is screaming in agony is keep running, yet you know there’s truth in those words, and sure enough a minute or so later there’s only a perfect imprint of the ball on your leg to remind you of the blow.

As a child these were the adversities I learned to bounce back (or forward) from. Whether it was catching a well-struck football on the leg, falling off my bike, getting bitten by a dog when delivering newspapers or failing my final-year school exams, I learned to get over it fast, find some kind of positive in it (the dog bite was a hard one!) and move on.

Today we call it resilience. Back then, my dad called it ‘the bulldog spirit’.

The bulldog spirit actually had nothing to do with dogs; rather, it referred to the courage and resoluteness shown by the British people whose homes and livelihoods had been destroyed during Second World War bombing.

In his book The Resilience Breakthrough, Christian Moore writes, ‘Becoming resilient starts with the realisation that the adversity you experience — any pain, discrimination ...