Resilience
It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward” said one great psychologist. No, not Freud, Jung or Erikson, but Rocky Balboa, 2006.
However you feel about Stallone as a writer, we think this dialogue quite neatly sums up the importance of resilience to the human condition. Resilience is not only critical to success, but a crucial component of happiness, satisfaction, mental and physical wellbeing. And what’s great about resilience is that it can be developed; Dr Julie Smith, clinical psychologist and best-selling author writes, “when people hit a certain life event that proves more demanding than their current coping strategies can meet, we’re learning new ways of coping, to bolster that resilience”.
It’s incredible. The ability for people to work through trauma and hardship, to live through unimaginable anguish and pain, and come out the other side. “Adversity doesn’t discriminate” says Dr Lucy Hone, resilience expert and Director at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, “if you are alive, you are going to, or have already had to, deal with some tough times”.
And yet, despite the importance of resilience, and the fact that none of us are inherently born ‘resilient’, it doesn’t get much airtime when it comes to developing this incredibly important piece of self. While it might have changed in the 20 years, we don’t remember attending any resilience classes, or being coached on strategies to handle stress in truly effective ways. What we do remember, and this might resonate with some of you, is hearing things such as “it’ll get better”, “be positive”, “you’ll get there in the end” – sentiments coming from lovely, good-hearted people, but not particularly useful in navigating the situation you’re facing at the time.
And we’re not going to talk to you about diet, sleep, and exercise – although important – because we don’t want to be one of those people who tell you to simply “go for a walk” when you’re going through sh**. Resilience is much more complex and nuanced than that. Here are some insights that have truly helped us:
I am not a victim
In times of stress, it’s easy to get caught up in feelings of victimhood. That the universe is specifically working against you and that you can’t catch a break. The danger in this mentality, of course, is that it prevents you from taking positive action (often any action) and you can spiral into a state of depression. Resilient people, Hone says, “know that suffering is part of life… and knowing this stops you feeling discriminated against when the tough times come”.
Tune out the ego
Our egos are sensitive, attention seeking, emotional, irrational, all-encompassing, energy draining and fantastic, all at the same time. The ego is uniquely wrapped up in the concept of ‘self’ – in many ways it’s the conscious part that makes you, you. But, because of this, it’s temperamental, and often prevents you from seeing things clearly and objectively. The ego is aggressively seeking out threats and in doing so is disproportionately feeding us more negative than positive. As Fredrik Imbo, in his Ted talk on ‘How not to take things personally’ says, we have 50,000 thoughts per day and yet only 10,000 are positive, that means “80% of what we think are negative thoughts”. We sometimes need to train ourselves to put our ego back in its box and look at the facts rather than our feelings.
Evaluate what’s helping/harming
It’s important to be honest with yourself and evaluate whether what you’re doing is helping you or harming you. For instance, are you exposing yourself to situations, people or experiences which are particularly triggering or stressful? Exposure to trauma, in my opinion, does not make you resilient. Instead, as Dr Smith explains, resilience is “about making lots of small changes. Reflect on what those might be, try them, keep what works, ditch what doesn’t.”