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The Art of Resilience

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We’re all faced with challenges, obstacles, pains and injuries. Some small and irritating, some big and catastrophic. 

What determines whether we take these inevitable challenges in our stride, or enter a downward spiral, is something that psychologists call “resilience”. It’s the ability to respond, recover and adapt to whatever the world throws at us.

You can pretty much guarantee that you’ll face many setbacks, so resilience matters. Your health, happiness, growth, relationships and quality of life depend on it.

What is resilience?

Resilience is the ability to cope with a challenge, or multiple challenges, and return to the pre-challenge state quickly. It’s our capacity to respond effectively when faced with a crises, and to grow through the crises.

When we talk of resilience we are interweaving a number of attributes such as strength, flexibility, compassion and perspective that allow us to survive and adapt to the ever-changing world around us. 

Resilience is essential for the health, safety and growth of children, adults and organisations so the earlier in life we learn to develop it, the better.

Why is resilience so important?

Someone who lacks resilience typically:

  • Struggles with challenging circumstances
  • Exaggerates the extent of the challenge/crisis
  • Suffers mentally and emotionally during a crisis
  • Enters a post-crisis dip
  • Takes a long time to return to normal, pre-crisis state
  • Quits often instead of leaning in and growing
  • Hides away from important growth opportunities
  • Turns to destructive means of coping such as drugs or alcohol

A lack of resilience can contribute to greater suffering than is necessary and a lower enjoyment of life. If we’re unable to adapt, recover from and to grow with life’s inevitable challenges, we get stuck in a hole of our own making.

Resilience helps us to:

  • Continue living and growing no matter what life throws at us.
  • Bounce back quickly with the least amount of damage.
  • Achieve great sporting feats such as running a marathon or swimming the English Channel.
  • Finish writing a book, album or screenplay when we have jobs, kids and a million other obstacles in the way.
  • Launch a start up and push through to profitability.
  • Deal with the loss of a job, mounting debt or a global economic crises.
  • Raise resilient children who can navigate the world successfully.
  • Deal with the death of a loved one by accepting the loss, grieving in a healthy way and moving forwards with our lives.

That doesn’t mean that someone who is resilient does not suffer or feel pain, but rather they respond to it well, seek to understand it, flow with it and find a way to transcend it. 

Examples of resilience

There are many great examples of resilience that you can turn to for inspiration. If you find someone who’s story resonates with you, keep it close for comfort and for strength when you need it.

1. Swimming Great Britain – How do you push through fatigue, pain, fear, and negative thoughts? Training and preparation are key but in those moments when you hit the wall, resilience needs to take over. In his impressive 2018 swim, extreme athlete Ross Edgley showed incredible mental and physical toughness in battling the elements to become the first man to swim around Great Britain.

2. Surviving Auschwitz – Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the most moving stories of survival and hope. Under the tyranny of a German concentration camp Frankl observed how he and the other prisoners coped, who survived the longest and who didn’t. This incredible story teaches us how to find significance and meaning in the harshest of conditions.

3. After the Tsunami – Japan has a long history of disasters and exceptional recoveries. Through earthquakes, tsunami’s and two atomic bombs they have demonstrated incredible stoicism, intelligence and resilience. One of the many impressive examples of this is their 400 kilometre tsunami shield.

How to forge resilience

Each of us has the capacity to dig deep and to overcome, but few of us are aware of just how much. We’re so used to comfort and taking the easy route that any kind of setback can knock us for six.

We’re capable of far more than we realise.

Resilience is forged by seeking out the very challenges that help us to grow. We accumulate strength, endurance, flexibility, compassion, perspective, and immunity by training those elements. Our bodies and minds adapting to the progressive demands we place upon them.

Here are some practices you can try:

1. Build your physical fitness. Daily exercise in the form of weight training, cardio, and mobility work not only makes you feel great but toughens you physically and mentally. Your body changes, your mind hardens and your confidence grows. Pick the activities you enjoy the most, plus some you don’t, and set yourself a challenge.

2. Go into the heat and the cold. Wim Hof often states that he never catches a cold because he spends so much time in it. The cold doesn’t come to him, because he goes to it. Heat and cold have been used by various cultures for generations as a training tool and a healing tool, and are shown to have a positive effect on our wellbeing, especially immunity. You can use the sun, sauna, cold showers, and ice baths to build up your tolerance and your love for different temperatures.

3. Sit with it. Whenever you are frustrated, upset or in pain the impulse to react, or to ‘fix it’ immediately, often makes things worse. Sit with the discomfort, meditate on it, observe it. Allow the entire picture to form and replace your narrow view. In this space a better solution can be found, or the problem will lose it’s importance altogether. 

4. Change perspective. There’s more than one way to view a problem and your current approach may not necessarily be the most helpful. Imagine you’re operating a drone and viewing the problem from different angles, different heights and different perspectives. How does that change your feeling about the problem and how you’re going to manage it?

5. Practice compassion for yourself and others. When you are suffering, acknowledge that suffering. Notice where it manifests in your body and soothe that feeling. Wish yourself health and happiness. When you notice others suffering, acknowledge that suffering also. They may act out of character because they cannot cope. Let them express it and wish them health and happiness.

6. Focus forwards. Focussing on the way forwards will move you out of your own head and onto productive action. Practice solving problems, testing ideas and adapting to the feedback you get. Maintain flexibility and forward momentum, never being tethered to any single approach.

7. Balance stress and recovery. Too little stress and we become soft, too much stress and we break. Everyday should be a masterpiece in balancing positive stress with deep recovery. Weight training and cardio balanced with rest and good food. Mental gymnastics balanced with meditation and deep sleep.

Some of us are gifted with innate resilience but for the majority it’s something that needs to be developed through training. Start with any of these steps and see the positive changes it brings when you make it a habit.

Whenever you face any kind of stress, obstacle, difficulty, pain, injury, grief, failure, disappointment, frustration, anger, or uncertainty see it as an opportunity to lean in, to practice, and to grow.

You’ll accumulate a few scars along the way, but that’s ok. You’ll be all the tougher for it.

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