Resilience is an individual and collective skill. It’s an apprenticeship, a training. We can develop it strategically. The ingredients are different for each person, since you have to go deep into yourself to draw your own latent resources and bring them into your life despite difficulties and sometimes thanks to them.
Etymologically, the word “Resilience” comes from the Latin resilire which means to bounce, to reflect. In physics,resilience is the ability of a material to withstand shocks or return to its original form after being deformed. We also talk about resistance, flexibility and adaptability.
In psychology,it is very similar, it is to have a state of being and a behavior that rebounds despite a shock in life, an upheaval of the context of his daily life, or a distortion of his personal trajectories.
A crisis, an accident, a nasty surprise, a sudden stop of things as we know them, it can cause the loss of one’s means, of course; so, resilience means findingone’smeans, and often it goes through a transformation.
We rarely go back, where it was familiar, but we continue, we advance with forces that are taking up, or new forces, on a path that will be confirmed or adapted.
In the social and medical sciences,clinical studies onresilience have been conducted since the end of The Second World War; in fact, since empirical research on the psychological resistance of individuals and communities to the horrors of war.
Psychologists will also look for the factors of resilience safeguarded during childhood, or even early childhood, to explain the ability to bounce back in adults.
Political and economics also studies the resilience of markets, countries, currencies, technologies – in the face of cyclical and countercyclical events, globalization, and regional developments.
Sport is an area of inspiration for resilience, because you have to have endurance to finish this triathlon, you need self-confidence to perfect this 10m high-flying dive, you need determination when you are a judoka but you have broken your vertebrae and you want to return to the tournament mat.
Nature is another source of inspiration. How trees grow back, even after concrete, flood or fire.
Now how to develop this resilience, inside oneself, in the face of the upheavals and constraints of life?
A practical approachis to considerResilience as a skill. And like any skill, it is made of knowledge, know-how and know-how.
Intellectual, emotional, pragmatic and social abilities. But there are no recipes. Everyone will do as they think best.
We can suggest some ingredients but they are interchangeable, and absolutely individual.
One ingredient, for example, is perseverance. To reach a goal, or to get out of a difficulty, you need persistence. A continuity of attention to follow the path that we have mapped out.
If a wall is in front of us on the way, then resilience is bypassing the wall, or building a ladder to cross it, or digging a tunnel and passing under it, or dismantling the wall stone by stone, or negotiating with the mason, or even sometimes, waiting and preparing for the next step, when the phase of the wall has passed.
A second ingredient of resilience, for example, is pragmatic acceptance of things as they are. When something serious has happened, we do not pretend that nothing has happened. When a danger arrives, optimism is all very well, but it may not be enough. We need a pragmatic response, a plan.
Other components of resilience are social in nature: for example, asking for help. Provide support. Demonstrate that together, we are more resilient than alone.
Among the many components of resilience, I would finally like to name learning. Ask yourself during the test and after the test: what am I learning? What did I learn about the causes and course of the difficulties?
How will I, my family, my work, my society, the world, be more resilient, more united, and better equipped next time?
At EUROBOGEN,we provide Resilience training and services to deploy strategies and methods that develop resilience as well as skills at the personal and collective levels.
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