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5 Myths About Resilience

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Resilience is having a moment. As more parents, organizations, and professionals learn that resilience can be taught and improved, people are signing up to learn more about its benefits. One of the most confusing aspects about working in and teaching this concept is the multitude of ways people talk about resilience. Unfortunately, the buzzword appeal of the word often leads resilience to be confused with other concepts like grit, post-traumatic growth, or thriving.

At its core, resilience is about some combination of (1) being durable under stress and pressure; and (2) bouncing back after succumbing to an adversity. When a concept is both popular and broadly defined, it gets applied to lots of things. Recent news articles have referenced various different types of resilience, such as climate resilience, cyber resilience, organizational resilience, physical resilience (in connection with health or exercise), emotional resilience, and community resilience (many cities are even hiring chief resilience officers).

The type of resilience I teach helps prevent and reduce stress-related problems like anxiety and burnout and emphasizes skills to increase well-being, engagement and performance. This version of resilience is often called psychological resilience or stress resilience. Throughout the course of my work in this area, I have noticed that these five myths about resilience tend to resurface and need to be busted.

Resilience is built in only one way. Resilience is actually a complex, multi-dimensional trait that is built in multiple ways. The main pathways to growing your own resilience are as follows: Flexible and accurate thinking, self-efficacy (having the belief that you can overcome and accomplish your goals), having a connection to meaning, increasing your diet of positive emotions, being connected to other people, and self-care. While it’s great that you can improve your resilience via multiple pathways, it makes resilience hard to measure.

Resilient people go it alone. There is a reason why “connect more” is a central resilience-building pillar – it’s because every theory of well-being and flourishing that has been developed includes “high-quality relationships”. People who have positive relationships have greater cognitive functioning, are more creative, are more engaged at work, and are more resilient. While I know it’s hard for many of you to ask for help (and I include myself in that group), it’s imperative in order to maintain your resilience.

The focus of resilience is managing negative emotions. Human beings are hard wired to notice, seek out, and remember bad events and negative information. From an evolutionary standpoint, that negativity bias has served us well but in 2016, humans don’t have to fear that what is lurking around the corner could eat them. While it’s important to understand how your negative emotions influence and undercut your behavior, there is more to the resilience story than just managing negative emotions. Resilient people have positive emotional balance; meaning, they recognize the importance of both managing negative emotions and cultivating positive emotions. Resilient people use positive emotions to rebound from, and find positive meaning in, stressful events and challenges.

Resilient people power through stress and illness. A few years ago, I wrote an article detailing my struggles to slow down, and how much I valued the ability to power through any illness or injury. While my capacity to “suck it up and drive on” was praised by my colleagues, it was a factor that fueled my burnout. Having an adequate chance to “recover” is critical to preventing burnout and staying resilient, yet massively under-supported in today’s workplace, which still thinks of employees as machines.

You either have resilience or you don’t. When psychologists and psychiatrists first started studying resilience in the 1970’s, their research focused on investigating children who had experienced traumatic events. Early messages implied that there was something “invincible” or “invulnerable” about the kids who went on to experience normal development despite the trauma. Over the decades, the message switched and later studies showed that resilience was not reserved for a special few, but rather, is something that is much more ordinary. Resilience can be learned, practiced, and improved by all.

Stress and adversity aren’t going away in our addicted to busy culture. Luckily, there are research-based skills to help you mitigate the impact of stress and challenge so that you can be happier and healthier.

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For strategies, tips, and stories about how to build your stress resilience, download my e-book, Addicted to Busy, and connect with me here.

A special thank you to Dr. Karen Reivich at the University of Pennsylvania who trained me and first talked about some of these myths.