Resilience – What Is It?

Your car breaks down en route to an important meeting. After swearing you jump into action.

You ring the recovery service, and arrange for them to be with you at the car in a few hours time. You check out other travel options on your phone, call a taxi to get you to the station, phone someone close to you to let off steam, and then phone the client to warn them you may be a little late because of a travel delay. You arrive adjusting your presentation to the time now available, focus on what you need to do, forget about the car, and the meeting goes well. Congratulations, you have just displayed resilience.

In contrast on another day something goes wrong: you don’t get the appraisal rating you assumed you would get, or you hear a piece of negative feedback about something you did last week. Suddenly you are thrown off balance, you can think of nothing else but anger or a sense of failure. It transfers into everything you do for days – the thoughts and feelings keep going round in your head. If you are lucky after a while a sense of proportion returns, you realise there is more to be had from having the conversation with your boss about the appraisal rating, rather than avoiding them and projecting malevolence onto their intent. You begin to recognise there was some truth in the feedback, even if you did not like the style of presentation. Your resilience was knocked for a short term but then a self righting mechanism kicked in.

And, sometimes our resilience gets trammelled and the notion of bouncing back is unimaginable. Losing a job, the death of someone close, the ending of a relationship, being bullied at work, events which knock us off balance and disconnect us from our resources.

So what is resilience?

It is the ability in the face of difficulty to retain flexibility in our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. It is the loss of that plasticity which limits us when a difficulty comes our way. When it goes we draw in, we create a shell within which the thoughts and feelings are trapped. Within that shell we cannot see an escape. The notion of cracking it and looking outside for what else we could do is outside our imagination. Neither can we let others in. We don’t want others to know how we are thinking or feeling. We lose our desire or ability to connect with others who could help us adjust our thinking. We may find we don’t phone friends, we don’t want to go out, we stop doing things which ordinarily give us pleasure, or we seek comfort in things which provide a temporary escape.

What can we do?

Resilience is not an either or trait. We may look at people who seem to be able to take whatever life throws at them and bounce back as innately resilient. There is some truth in that, in that studies of people living through the most terrible of circumstances has shown that some will find ways of coming through intact, while most are scarred by the process.

Victor Frankl’s powerful account of his years in a concentration camp (Mans Search for  Meaning), and how he survived by holding a picture in his head of giving a lecture on his experiences when the war was over, is testimony to the ability some people have to retain that flexibility and sense of purpose. However, it is also true that all of us have some degree of resilience. If we did not we could not cope with any disruption to our daily routines. Opening the bread bin to discover that there was no bread for our daily toast would make the rest of the day untenable. Most of the time we make adjustments of thought automatically, but when we find ourselves in situations that are outside of our coping mechanisms there are some tested methods for helping refind our resilience:

• Staying connected to others. People who lose their jobs often retreat from social contact because of a sense of shame, yet it is through staying connected to others that resilience returns more quickly. On a practical level connections often lead to opportunities, but connecting to others also allows us to recognise that people see us much more widely than the person with a problem. Seeing ourselves reflected in others eyes helps to put the difficulty into a different place.

• Doing things that we enjoy. Research has shown that people who carried on doing some leisure activity during a time of difficulty recover more quickly, because the activity both provides enjoyment and provides a respite from their normal thoughts.

• Writing down thoughts. Keeping a journal is a valuable way of getting on paper what is filling up our head, and then being able to look at it with objectivity. The journal also allows for recognising when things are changing, and to see that resilience is not a fixed state, it ebbs and flows. When we are in the middle of a tough time, we often only recognise the ‘bad days’ but it is equally important to acknowledge the better days.

• Noticing and being in the present. When we are feeling unresilient we can spend our time either looking backwards on what could have been, or looking forward and only seeing relentless difficulty. Being in the present means noticing what is OK right now. That isn’t to deny the reality of the situation e.g. it is tough to lose one’s job, or to have one’s hoped for career future taken away, but it is also important to notice what is happening each day that tells you that life is still good. Having more time for one’s children, partner or parent; being able to help out on school trips; not having to wear a suit; noticing you have been able to read a book without falling asleep. Small wins that often pass unnoticed.

Resilience is not a fixed trait. It is a continuum along which we all move. The challenge when our resilience leaves us is to recognise that we can work our way back.