Resilience: What if I'm the Exception?

What If…

What is innately and universally true about resilience? And what if we strengthened that, worked with the natural systems—something akin to the idea in Taleb’s ‘antifragile’ as a friend pointed out when we had this discussion on LinkedIn.

If it’s true that there is a natural ‘regeneration’ of the human spirit then how is it possible to be the exception to resilience?

And if that’s true, then what would it mean for how we regard, and take care of ourselves, and how we support others in our circles at home and at work?

When ‘Bouncing Back’ Feels Too Much Like Hard Work…

On a recent call, we all classified themselves as pretty high on the resilience score, and when I asked, our almost universal response to ‘what does resilience mean to you?’ was the ability to ‘bounce back’.

That phrase is common right? You’ve heard it before, perhaps even used it, and perhaps so much so that it becomes a platitude?

And a platitude is when we say the words but we don’t embody the meaning. I know this because, when we dug deeper in the group, questions started to come up. Questions like these:

What if I’m different to other people, and I need more care and support?

What if circumstances overwhelm me?

What if I don’t realise I’m going deeper and deeper into the lake and next thing I’m drowning?

What if it takes me longer to bounce back this time, that means I must be less resilient?

How can I train myself for resilience?

I get it—we ask a question because that’s the way it looks. But the questions don’t signal that we’re not resilient, they signal that we haven’t yet seen beyond the abstraction of resilience as a concept.

Which is great news when we’re part of a conversation about resilience, because it means there’s plenty to talk about!

If This, Then That…

If resilience is something we have to learn before we can apply, then sure, there’s going to be a learning curve, and you might be towards the bottom of it. Watch out then!

But, if it’s an innate capacity, a directionality, like a beach ball submerged in water that always wants to rise to the surface, then the only way you can be an exception is if you try your very hardest to keep it submerged. You’re not an exception; you’re fighting a rule of nature.

We all know that that feels like—swimming against the tide, going against the grain—something else we have a lot of expressions for, and, ultimately it feels exhausting.

Resilience in Practice

And exhausted was exactly how one of our group shared that he felt—more ‘down’ and less ‘resilient’ as the lockdown went on, unable to ‘keep himself cheerful’.

Hmm, interesting choice of words there.

Makes me think, what if it’s OK not to be OK? What if we trusted that we will float up even when we feel knocked down?

What if the weight of the feeling is really the weight of our own expectations about having to be a certain way, appearing to be cheerful when what he really needs is to ease off and let things be the way that they are.

He also shared that his husband finally told him to slow down and take it easy. I asked about that,

Was that the first time he said it do you think? Or just the first time you heard it?

A shared laugh.

Of course, the signals had been there before, but he’d been so wrapped in trying to meet his expectations it took a while to get through.

Sound Familiar?

A second colleague talked about the metaphor of walking into a lake,

What if I walk so far out into the lake I don’t notice how deep it is?

Oh I get that one too, what if I continue on this timeline and end up… well the imagination can go very dark with that one.

On the one hand, of course, we don’t know what’s ahead, other than knowing we are, moment by moment, becoming and unbecoming, like the water in this wonderful passage.

We also have this amazing quality called awareness. We can’t not see or hear or feel something—again, it’s programmed into the human design.

My first colleague’s husband had called him out and, at some point, he’d heard it.

And me too, I’ve acquired a few covid kilos, but, no sweat, I knew I would at some point get off the sofa and re-start an exercise programme, and so it was.

What if we noticed all the times we returned to harmony rather than staying with the imagined unreality that we won’t?

What if we allow ourselves to be happy, to engage with others, with our work, while we wait to return to harmony? At a pace that feels gentle and right? In a way that feels calm and connected?

So, I’m Not an Exception?

I don’t know you but I do know that I have not yet met the person who has no sense of awareness about anything. And being aware means we create a response in a shorter or longer amount of time.

If there really is a directionality then it must follow that allowing our good feeling to rise of its own accord is the definition of resilience. There is no ‘doing’ here, it’s how we work, and it goes more smoothly, with less friction when we allow the space and time for recovery.

We might put fancy words on it, design training courses around it, but it’s simply human nature, and we sometimes call ourselves resilient.

We ended that call by playing around with the question,

What if resilience always has our back?

I don’t want to convince you of something that doesn’t look true to you, but playing with a ‘what if’ question is a pretty low stakes way of testing an idea.

In the group we reported feeling more encouraged and hopeful, more willing to experiment, with less need to hold tightly to plans that we knew deep down didn’t make sense.

More free.

And who doesn’t want more of that?

With love,

Cathy