Alongside the positive outcomes of strength, learning, and the motivation to help others that we explored in Part One, another key to building resilience is the love of achievement.
When you have a love of achievement and you start to become resilient, all of a sudden you realise that you can succeed. At this point, resilience becomes about application. You have learned something that you can use to get you to where you want to go.
We assume that resilience happens naturally, but I believe that the way in which resilience can be applied is at the heart of why and how it can be taught. This belief is supported by the work of Higgins, who concluded that resilience can be taught, cultivated and encouraged [1]. In my view, it’s all about being outcome driven, and it’s exactly the same as the way a child learns to walk.
Watching my daughter grow up is phenomenal. Over the last couple of weeks she has been pulling herself up to standing. A few days ago, once she had pulled herself up to standing, she started letting go. She has built the strength and confidence to stand and support herself, and now she is ready to see where it can take her.
The interesting thing about watching my children is the different approaches that they take to achieve the same results. My son would launch himself across the room and crash into things – I lost count of the number of times he hit his head.
My daughter has already taken a couple of tumbles from letting go before she has found her centre of balance, and I can see her rethinking her approach, building more strength and ensuring she’s steady before she lets go.
They will both achieve the same results, but they have taken different approaches. The same is true of resilience. However we build it, we can still achieve the results that mean we can apply what we have learned.
I believe that we are organically built to become resilient. I also think that we are often denied the opportunity to develop our resilience. This is largely because there is a huge misconception about what resilience is.
It is seen as being about living through suffering, when in fact it is far more about our traits and behaviours. Resilience isn’t so much about the situations we face, as the way we respond to them.
Once you understand that building resilience is about positively affecting outcomes, you can truly begin to develop new traits and behaviours.
Although it will always remain true that adversity creates agitation, your understanding of what you want to achieve will allow you to begin splitting emotion from reality.
You can then go into the process of repair, instead of anger. It doesn’t mean that the emotions are no longer there, but it means that you can react with love, instead of fear and pain.
By regulating your emotional responses you are able to recognise that the things you experience in life are not exclusively about you. This is explored by Gross, who examines the way in which people select and modify situations, then change cognition and modify their responses [2].
Once you take yourself out of the centre of your experiences, then you can see how you relate to the situation. This gives you the power to see how the decisions you make will impact your destination.
Basically, you will have gained the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
By distinguishing these crucial differences, you can become humble and aware of your blessings. Which completes the beautiful circle, leading you directly back to an appreciation of what you have available to help you continue building on your resilience.
Kristian Livolsi
References:
- Higgins, G. O’C. (1994). Resilient adults: Overcoming a cruel past. Jossey-Bass.
- Gross, James J. (1998) The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology
