Resilience

During a webinar this week I heard a great quote about resilience. Resilience can be defined as toughness, or the ability to recover quickly from difficulties, a key strategy as we put the pieces of our dreams together. In fact, without resilience, not much of significance is accomplished towards our dreams or in the rest of our lives. But this quote went further, in a way that helped me to understand and apply the concept at a deeper level. 

Resilience is the ability to absorb high levels of disruptive change while displaying low levels of unproductive behaviour.

Now there are a some things that we need to unpack in this quote. First, disruptive change means change that is not your idea.  It is change that does not meet your expectations. We respond to change that is our idea very differently than change that is not our idea. It is encountering an unexpected traffic jam on the way to an important meeting. It is discovering that, after a building inspection and fire code inspection on the rental property that you are looking to purchase, unexpectedly, you still need an electrical code inspection. 

Second, recovering from disruptive change is linked to managing our non-productive behaviour. That should give hope. While we are not responsible for what happens to us, we can be responsible for our reaction to it. We can be mindful about what has happened. Often, our first reactions to disruptive change are out of perspective and lead to bad decisions if we act on them.

Some time ago I read about the history of strategy. What I remember was that the word strategy originated in a military context. Strategy was the approach taken by one side to convince the other side that they would lose anyways and should surrender and avoid the costs of defeat. In effect, strategy was about getting the opposing side to admit defeat without having to engage in a battle. 

Resilience is a strategy to avoid defeating ourselves. It means that we don't allow ourselves, even in the face of the difficulties we experience, to convince ourselves out of continuing to engage seriously in the pursuit of our dream.