How to Lean Into Resiliency

“Resilient is often something you have to be, not what you want to be.” - Jong Nee

I often listen to the news on my drive to and from work (I still work in an office) and it is hard not to feel like the world is getting to be a little unpredictable, with the economic climate, the political climate, the actual climate and even the negativity and judgement we heap on one another.  It feels a bit like we are coming out of the pandemic a little more broken and beaten down.  I certainly feel that way sometimes.

So I have been thinking about resiliency and what it means to be resilient.  Here are two definitions for resiliency: “(i) the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness; or (ii) the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”  In our culture, I think we all like to believe that resiliency and toughness are a mind set or a matter of will and grit.  With enough grit you can spring back to your old self, your old job, your old weight in high school.  But what I am finding is that, for me, resiliency is what you earn by surviving some very tough situations.  They may be of your making (e.g. you start a new company) or not (e.g. a partner leaves your company).  Either way, you need to find your way through the difficult path to get to the other side.

You earn resiliency by doing the work every day.  It is not about enjoying the process or your circumstances.  It can be as simple as not giving up – which can be a very difficult and frightening choice to make.  It can be following through on commitments when they are the last thing you want to do.  It can be answering difficult questions about your situation or even yourself and your actions.  Any number of actions or inaction can be part of how you develop your own resiliency.  The fact of the matter is, that you make choices every step of the way to slowly, sometimes painfully, help you move beyond this moment.

This process has no timeline and no standards. You earn it, even if you do not want it. We often may feel like we are alone in these struggles. Some of these struggles are deeply personal. Others may be embarrassingly public. Still, I am finding that we all go through these moments when we are tested.

The thing I note in the definition is that resiliency does not mean that you have to advance or move forward – it is about sticking it out in difficult circumstances. Forward progress isn’t always required to be resilient. And even being “elastic” as one definition suggests, does not mean that you come back to the same shape. Sometimes, many times, these moments of challenge change you. And how could they not? To survive them is to become what perhaps you did not know you were before – Resilient. Tough. A person of grit.