Taking a Good, Hard Look at Resilience

Resilience.

Apparently it’s the biggest buzzword in the wellbeing, mindfulness and mung beans world at the moment.

It’s also easily misunderstood.

There was a time I thought being resilient meant being tough. Steeling yourself, knuckling down, getting on and – dare I say it – hardening up. Drinking a cup of concrete.

But there’s a few problems with this way of thinking. In fact, if we look at the physical properties of concrete, we can take the analogy a step further. It’s one of the strongest materials in the world when you compress it. Imagine the amount of force needed to crush a concrete slab, or even crack it. However, if you place tension on that same slab – if you pop it in a machine that pulls hard on both ends – it’s actually pretty weak. It’ll shear in two with far less force and no warning, since there’s very little give or flexibility.

In other words, it’s pretty indestructible under a certain kind of pressure – but only that kind of pressure.

The same goes for being ‘hard’ emotionally. It gives you incredible strength, up to a point – but if you hit that point, you’re left in pieces. Same deal if you’re blindsided by something very painful from a direction you never anticipated.

So if resilience isn’t about being hard, what IS it about?

It’s about your ability to cope with uncertainty.

Note that I didn’t say you need to love uncertainty. Far from it. You can dislike uncertainty intensely and still be a resilient person. Coping with uncertainty means just that – COPING. Finding a way to be OK, and building belief in your capacity to know you’ll get there in the end.

Even if it hurts.
Even if it hurts a lot.
Even if all you can do is lie in bed and cry for a bit.
Even if you can’t even imagine how you will move forward, it’s knowing that there is a way and you will find it eventually. Maybe it’s thinking up a different way of doing things. Maybe it’s asking a friend for help. Maybe it’s asking a professional for help.

Maybe it’s just hanging in there, and riding out the storm until it blows over.

When I think of resilience, I think of battens. They’re long, thin strips of fibreglass that go into a boat’s sails, and they bend and flex and withstand all sorts of pressure and wind and salt and heat. You can bend one almost right back on itself and not break it (though it is possible to break them, and they’re expensive, and the owner will not appreciate it … speaking from experience).

But that’s sort of the point. Everyone has a limit, a place where the pressure is all too much. But we can increase our personal resilience – much like stretching makes us more flexible over time.

A good way to start is stretching yourself emotionally. Hate public speaking, for example? Sign up for a course, practice doing it anyway, and learn that you can survive the discomfort. Or if that feels like a bit much, take a moment to write down all the times you managed to overcome things that felt impossible or unbearable at the time. Keep it someplace safe, and refer back to it when you’re feeling overwhelmed. It’s easy to forget our own capabilities, especially when it feels like everything’s going to hell around us.

Alternatively, you can always figure out your own way to grow your capacity for resilience.

Finding a way forward that works for you is kinda the point, after all.