What Resilience Really Looks Like — Four Stories That Will Change How You See Yours
There is a version of resilience that gets a lot of attention.
The highlight reel. The comeback moment. The triumphant return. The standing ovation.
And then there is the version most of us actually live — the quiet, grinding, nobody-is-watching kind. The getting up on a Tuesday morning when you don't feel like it. The showing up to practice when the results aren't coming. The choosing, again and again and again, to keep going when every reasonable part of you wants to stop.
This week on the Cowgirl Up podcast I've been sharing four true stories that stretch what resilience looks like. And I want to bring those stories here too — because I think they carry something the highlight reel never shows you.
RESILIENCE IS A SKILL, NOT A TRAIT
Before we get into the stories, I want to establish something foundational. Resilience is not something you either have or you don't. It is not a personality type or a genetic gift. It is a skill — developed through experience, through mindset, through the repeated practice of choosing a perspective that keeps you moving forward rather than one that keeps you stuck.
The research on high performers is consistent on this point. The athletes, the leaders, the people who bounce back fastest from adversity — they are not the ones who never face hard things. They are the ones who have trained themselves to respond to hard things differently. The mindset underneath the resilience is always the foundation.
ANTHONY ROBLES — UNSTOPPABLE
Anthony Robles was born with one leg. Not as the result of an injury or an accident — he came into the world that way. And from the very beginning, the message from the world around him was clear: your ceiling is lower than everyone else's.
He became an NCAA Division I wrestling national champion. Undefeated. At 125 pounds. With one leg.
When Nike president Phil Knight met Anthony Robles after his championship, he said it was the most incredible athletic achievement he had ever witnessed. The lesson in Anthony's story isn't that he overcame a physical limitation — though he did. It's that he built a mindset that simply had no room for the word can't. That mindset, developed over years of daily decisions, is available to every single one of us.
JOHN O'LEARY — SOUL ON FIRE
John O'Leary was nine years old when a garage fire engulfed him, burning one hundred percent of his body. Doctors gave him a one percent chance to survive.
He survived. He lost all of his fingers. He spent years in recovery, relearning the most basic functions of daily life. And then a visitor came to his hospital bed — legendary Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck — who sat down beside this broken little boy and asked a question that changed everything: are you going to waste it?
John O'Leary went on to become one of the world's most sought-after motivational speakers. The resilience in his story isn't the survival — as extraordinary as that is. It's the decision, made in the middle of unimaginable pain, that his suffering was not going to be wasted.
RUDY RUETTIGER — RUDY
Rudy Ruettiger was too small. Too slow. Not smart enough. Not good enough. Told no — by people who loved him — his entire life.
He spent four years working, saving, getting his grades up, getting rejected by Notre Dame three times before finally being accepted on his fourth application. He walked on to the practice squad. He showed up every single day. He played exactly one play in his entire Notre Dame career.
And his teammates carried him off the field on their shoulders.
What Rudy's story teaches is a particular kind of resilience that I think many of us can relate to. Not the one-percent-survival kind. The slow, grinding, unglamorous kind. The four-years-of-no kind. The showing-up-when-nobody-believes-in-you kind. That is also resilience. And it is also extraordinary.
BETHANY HAMILTON — SOUL SURFER
Bethany Hamilton was thirteen years old when a tiger shark took her left arm. She was back on her surfboard within a month. Within two years she had won her first national surfing title.
What carried Bethany wasn't just athletic determination. It was faith — a deep, unshakeable belief that her life was not an accident, that what had happened to her was not the end of her story, and that her purpose was bigger than what she had lost.
THE RESILIENCE IN YOUR OWN STORY
Here is what I want you to take from these four stories.
You will never face exactly what Anthony, John, Rudy, or Bethany faced. But you will face hard things. You already have. And the question that matters — the one that Jack Buck asked John O'Leary from a hospital bedside — is the same one available to all of us.
Are you going to waste it?
Resilience is not about what happens to you. It is about what you decide to do with it. That decision — made in the quiet, in the unglamorous middle, when nobody is watching — is where champions are built.
And that decision is always available to you. Even now. Even today.
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Ready to go deeper? Listen to the Cowgirl Up podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — new episodes drop Monday through Friday.
Interested in building a complete mental skills toolkit with personalized coaching support? Schedule a free discovery call at mentalgame101.com.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurie Blickenstaff is a Certified Mental Performance Coach, competitive team roper, and founder of Mental Game 101. She hosts the Cowgirl Up daily mindset podcast and works one-on-one with women competitors in western horse sports who are ready to close the gap between their physical preparation and their mental game. Learn more at mentalgame101.com.
Mental performance training is NOT intended as, nor is it a substitute for, mental health care.
