What's resilience anyway?

What is it really? How do you build it? And what's the true benefit?

Resilience. Everyone wants it - for themselves, their teams, their children.

But in my experience, we often have wildly different ideas about what true resilience is, and more importantly, how we build it.

This is something I've thought about a lot over the last few years. When I'm asked to coach senior leaders, building resilience consistently ranks high on the list of what bosses want their teams to develop. I've also found in my own leadership roles that those in charge often complain about a lack of resilience in their teams.

So what is resilience, really? How do you build it? And what's the true benefit?

Defining Resilience

One can define resilience as the ability to adapt positively and recover effectively from stress, setbacks, or adversity. It involves emotional strength, mental flexibility, and the capacity to remain steady and purposeful in the face of challenge.

The benefits are compelling:

Emotional regulation: Staying calm under pressure

Adaptability: Shifting when plans change or challenges arise

Faster recovery: Bouncing back more quickly from setbacks

Stronger relationships: Being able to stay connected and seek support

Greater well-being: Less burnout, more optimism and self-efficacy

The Hidden Barrier to Resilience

So how do we build it? Or perhaps more importantly, what's preventing us from developing resilience in the first place?

The School of Life believes that one of our greatest barriers to building resilience is our human inability to recognise just how hard most things in life actually are.

"It isn't necessarily difficulty that sinks us; it's bad notions about what a noble task should legitimately demand. We operate with dangerously inadequate views of what it takes for anything good to happen."

We fundamentally underestimate just how challenging the things we value in life truly are: having a moderately good relationship, running a viable business, maintaining a circle of friends, staying healthy, building a home, or achieving a balanced mind. So we experience injustice when we're actually encountering entirely reasonable and predictable degrees of pain.

The School of Life observes that we don't raise our young to understand how much suffering life naturally involves. We build strength in ourselves not by focusing solely on all the opportunities the future can bring, but by educating our young through honest preparation about how things tend to go. They sum it up as:

"Wiser people keep on going. Not because they're braver, but because they've learned to be a lot better prepared."

Dr. Becky Kennedy (a personal favourite) often attributes our level of resilience to how comfortable we were with frustration and sitting in the difficult space between not knowing and knowing. I've written before about her notion of the "learning space" where we help kids get used to sitting with frustration. She advises that the longer we can help them sit in the uncomfortable zone of not-knowing, the more they'll be able to master difficult things as they grow up. What's crucial here is the presence of a secure-base figure (a parent, perhaps a teacher) while they're in the learning zone. We need caring company while we weather the emotional storm.

Building Resilience as Adults

But for many of us who perhaps didn't have a childhood where we were regularly kept company while experiencing frustration, or who didn't receive a wise School of Life education, how do we build resilience as adults?

First, I found it useful to look at what resilience isn't. Most of us have suffered at the hands of bosses weaponising resilience at some point - telling us we need to be "just a bit more resilient." Often what they mean is: please just put up with this deeply unhealthy work environment. I've written before about one struggling agency I joined as Managing Director, where the Chairman often criticised the team for not being resilient enough. In reality, it was being used as a stick to get the team to work another weekend, another late night - some good old fashioned team-shaming. Needless to say it didn’t achieve the outcome she desired.

Myths About Resilience

Resilience is not about being unbreakable. One of the most significant truths about resilience at work is that it's not about being invulnerable to stress or setbacks. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Resilience is often built through the conscious process of acknowledging and fully feeling unpleasant emotions, dealing with them constructively, and finding a way forward.

Resilience is not always about how we respond to negative situations. While responding well to challenging circumstances is one aspect of resilience, it's not the only one. Resilience can also express itself as genuine curiosity. Because of the neuropsychological strength they have built, events that others see as setbacks, resilient people may see as intriguing puzzles to be solved.

Resilience isn't solely an individual endeavour. Because resilience requires us to notice when our nervous system's threat response is either activated or likely to be activated soon, we need an environment that supports our noticing, exploring, and adjusting our inner experience. This is hard to do in an indifferent or unsupportive environment. Resilience is significantly influenced by the support and collaboration of colleagues and supervisors. Building a resilient workplace culture involves fostering relationships and creating an environment where employees can openly seek help and share their challenges.

How to Build Resilience

In my experience, here are some conditions that help adults (and can guide kids) build resilience. After all, it's a skill to be learned, not a gift from the gods. Resilience is made - through mindset, environment, and practice.

Ensure You Have a Secure Base

Kids need it and leaders need it. I've written about the importance of this recently. A secure base enables us all to be braver and take more risks because we feel supported. If a ship didn't have a harbour, it couldn't be a ship. If you don’t have it in a boss at work, get yourself a secure-base coach.

Develop Strong Emotional Education

I think De Botton's An Emotional Education could be on the national curriculum. I've lost track of how many people I've recommended it to. It does half the job - the intellectual understanding of how our emotions work. The other half is the emotional understanding - what Dan Siegel would call "neural integration." Fundamentally, this is about feeling your feelings, which then leads to thinking clearly and acting wisely, which wires the brain in a better way for the future. This practice improves emotional regulation, one of the fundamentals for building resilience. It also massively helps with learning how to parent young children. There is little in this world to help you climb a hard metaphorical hill like having a really good cry in the company of someone close to you.

Have a Plan

There's a paradox here. It's often being able to cope with uncertainty that's seen as a marker of resilience. And yet often the basis for building resilience is having a plan. Plans are the foundation for a self-directed life. In my work with clients, we develop plans: short-term plans (90 days), mid-term plans (a year), or longer-term plans (3-5 years)- usually a combination of all three together. The plan is flexible, it can often change, and should be reviewed regularly; by setting an intention we are directing our own course and building actions, big and small, to get us where we want to go.

Reflect Well

The other side of the coin from plan-writing is self reflection. If a plan is about where you want to go, reflection is about where you have been. The four parts to my reflection approach are: what went well (and why), what could have gone better (and why), what have I learned, and what can I apply to my future plans. When I finish a plan, I reflect before I write my new plan. As Peter Drucker, one of the grandfathers of coaching, put it:

"Follow effective actions with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action."

Tend to Your Network

I read a brilliant book earlier this year called Your Invisible Network by Michael Melcher. I highly recommend it. It highlights the importance of weak ties - those we don't connect with all the time, who aren't in our inner circle - and how often they're the key to a thriving and supportive career. He advises that we invest in this during good times (when we're busy and it can be difficult to make the time), but that it will repay dividends if we do, and simply make our lives much richer for it.

Be a Radical Optimist

The wise Nick Cave talks about the importance of a certain type of optimism:

"However, there exists another form of optimism, a kind of radical optimism. This optimism has experienced the suffering of the world, believes in the insubordinate nature of hope and is forever at war with banal pessimism, cynicism and nihilism." The Red Hand Files, Issue 178

Optimism is important for building resilience. We need to believe there's a way forward, a better way, that we can hope for the future. I have increasingly found this to be an important element in staying resilient.

Chose your knowledge sources wisely

I have increasingly moderated my information sources, including my news sources. As De Botton often says, "The news is chiefly interested in problems. The only things we are ever really told to notice are the awful things." He suggests:

"The most urgent priority might be not to know—in order that other more important elements closer to home might gain the prominence they deserve”.

He makes the point that perhaps our own lives, those around us and local communities could do with more attention than a human disaster on the other side of the plan. He suggests:

“Then again, our obsession with news is no coincidence. It can be tempting to throw ourselves into its arms, because it is so hard to lead our own lives. The dilemmas in our relationships, the questions around our careers, the unresolved regrets and hurts in our pasts, all these can be so painful and so daunting to consider that it becomes a compulsive pleasure to obliterate ourselves in the news of a furious hurricane ripping a path through the tropics or a harrowing tale of a murder in a foreign town.

He poignantly concludes:

“News becomes the instrument through which we will forget about a life that feels too difficult to progress."

The Heart of True Resilience

I think the most profound wisdom sits in this nuanced understanding that life is really hard and that we find it difficult to truly acknowledge how hard it is, which then makes it harder still. But within that difficulty, there is an optimism, a hope (that knows the suffering of life well) but that still persists. An optimism that isn't separate from suffering, but is born from acknowledging it. That's where the source of true resilience comes from.

As Nick Cave beautifully puts it (and Dr Becky Kennedy would undoubtedly concur):

"We heal by acknowledging our emotions and test our heart's resilience by lingering within the unbearable,"

I’m Abi, an executive coach working with leaders in the brand & creative industries to think clearly, plan confidently, and lead brilliantly - for the benefit of themselves, their team, and their work. If you’d like to know more about my work, you can reach me at abi@adessa.io