Credos of Our Calling – Resilience

The Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM) holds, at its center, a belief that resilience is not only the ability to bear a difficult challenge, rather to turn that challenge into triumph. For it is true that patient endurance attains the greatest rewards. Resilience underpins all aspects of a medical, dental, or pharmacy calling; and LECOM has long understood that resilience is the purifying test of adaptability and consistency through which aptitude becomes ability.

Essential to all, it strengthens the internal fortitude as one travels the path from goals to accomplishment, unyielding to adversity. The founders at LECOM view resilience as a characteristic based upon inner strength, driving will, and unabashed vigor to persevere through all trials and travails.

LECOM educators inspire and encourage this profound characteristic throughout all elements of their training programs, recognizing that the ability to be resilient must become a habit so ingrained within the human state that it is stronger than the desire to rest. Resilience is a crowning quality; for excellence is not a singular act, but a habit through which those who endure find an ever-increasing confidence and peace. As patience bolsters the resilient heart, one discovers that there are few calamities that are not conquered by pliant determination. The scholars at LECOM are well aware that resilience is one of the most difficult disciplines; but it is to the one who learns to bounce back from seeming defeat that the final victory is won.

There is astounding power in possessing a cheerful strength committed to resilience. Steeped in that unswerving fortitude, it is he or she who will do more in the same time, who will do it better, and who will sustain it longer, than will the disconsolate or dour.

The necessity of resilience as an attribute comes as no revelation to those answering the call of the healthcare professions. The advantages resulting from an ever-enduring mind, body, and spirit are a driving force of a purposeful life.

LECOM appreciates and inculcates the unanimity of mind, body, and spirit. From that attribute of resilience, which denies the readiness for agreeable desires, which fortifies the heart with determination, which overcomes the proclivity to offer excuses, which refuses to quit in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges – derives the heart and core of all victory.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill

Resilience is the triumph of one’s soul over adversity and it is an important Credo of our Calling.