Resilience and perseverance are different sides of the same coin. Resilience is your ability to bounce back from failure, disappointment, and troubles. Perseverance is your ability to continue to fight on when others are dropping out.

I was running in a half-marathon one morning and gaining ground on an older gentleman. As I approached him, I noticed a saying on the back of his running shirt: “I may be old, but I’m here.” Passing him, I said I loved his shirt. He smiled and just kept jogging along. That’s perseverance. There is a story I love in the New Testament in the book of Luke. It talks about a man who has unexpected company. A friend came to his home at midnight to borrow three loaves of bread. The man said not to trouble him because it was late and his children were in bed. But it goes on to say that, although the man would not get up because of his friendship, he would do so because of his friend’s persistence.

If you’ve been in sales, you know about rejection and how important it is to overcome. You need to persist to make sales, despite the obstacles that get in your way. If you’re an entrepreneur, people will tell you that your idea can’t be achieved. You need to stay the course, hold to your principles, and believe in your vision. Perseverance is a necessary virtue of any effective leader. In Tribes, Seth Godin said it this way: “Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another… so they follow.”

Good Leaders share three essential qualities that characterize their courage: conviction, drive, and determination. Conviction is the belief in the direction you have set, in your ideas, and in your way of getting things done. Drive is the will to achieve — that fire in your belly that takes you where you want to go. Determination is the perseverance to keep going in the face of pain, hardship, and setbacks.

You need all three traits to lead. You can have a strong belief in something and the drive to get it done, but without determination, you might give up too soon in the face of challenges. You could have incredible drive and perseverance, but without the conviction of your ideas, you might waver and fall short of achieving maximum results.

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