How my concept of resilience has changed over the years

I’ve just completed a course in coaching for psychological resilience that led me to think a lot about how my own concept of resilience has changed in the last decade. If you’d asked me in my younger days I’d have told you I was extremely resilient in the face of challenge. And I was – in the traditional brittle, head down, keep going way. Concrete wall? Just power on through. Square your shoulders, pull yourself together, pick up the pieces and move on. Just think of the innate mental and physical tension that picture evokes!

And every time I thought: I’ll work harder, longer, I’ll be more helpful to friends, I’ll do and give more and more and more…it’ll be worth it in the end…eventually those giant scales of fairness in the sky will reward my heroic efforts…..

That didn’t work out too well….

People often talk about resilience as bouncing back. But when you bounce a tennis ball off a concrete wall time and time again it doesn’t come away unscathed. Gradually it will fray and wear down. The colour dims. The height of the bounce lessens and eventually you bounce it one last time and it splits and falls to the floor.

In the years since burnout I’ve looked into a lot of concepts around resilience and my whole understanding of what it means has changed. Grit certainly is one important element, but within resilience there is also hope, optimism, growth mindset, perspective taking, compassion (for self and others) and most crucially (in my view) adaptability. Moving with the challenges that face us rather than battering into them. Staying flexible instead of digging deeper into trench warfare.

Think of it like a tree in a storm. A tree that stands too rigidly in high winds may be ripped up at the roots or snapped in two. A tree that can move with the wind may suffer some damage and lose a few branches but when the storm passes it can once again stand tall, reach up towards the sun, stretch in many directions and continue to thrive. And sometimes in the places where the branches were lost, new green shoots form that can lead the tree to reach out to the world from a new and slightly different angle. Now that’s a resilience worth having!