Lessons Learnt from Building 7 Traits of Resilience

In my last week’s article Can you Tell Apart Resilience and Perseverance? I used two stories to clarify the difference between resilience and perseverance. Resilience is nothing but the capacity to bounce back from adversity. This concept is definitely not new and has been around for quite a while. Why then is resilience suddenly in the limelight now? What makes it organizational and societal leaders’ favourite topic these days, and why are social media platforms awash with #resilience? 

We face challenges in our daily lives; nothing new there! These challenges can range from being in a toxic workplace, being in abusive relationships, going through a financial crisis to facing discrimination because of gender, race, etc. Not all of us face all these challenges and definitely not to the same extent! However, 2020 has brought forth a challenge that all of us face. Even if not to the same extent, Covid 19 has affected us all, which makes it a shared adversity for people around the world. There are three aspects of this pandemic that have left us all scrambling for answers:

1. The suddenness of it.
2. It’s ubiquitous impact.
3. The extreme suffering it has brought and the number of lives it has claimed. 

The need for the world to get together to rise from this adversity is what makes resilience a leitmotif in a lot of leadership literature. According to Andrew Shatte and Karen Reivich, who are leading authorities on resilience research, there are 7 traits that set resilient people apart. We at Co.lab^x have been on a month-long journey with 10 organizational leaders exploring and building these traits through rigorous and intensive workshops. Mentioned below are the 7 traits and the lessons we learnt. 

1. Emotion Regulation: Resilient people find a way to stay calm under pressure. In other words, when the world takes them by surprise, these people regulate their emotions, attention, and behaviour, and aren’t prone to knee-jerk reactions. 
2. Impulse Control: This is closely connected to the point above of emotion regulation. Resilient people find a way to resist accepting their first impulsive belief about a situation to be true. They pause and do not react to the first trigger in a situation.
3. Optimism: Resilient people have hope for the future and believe that they control the direction of their lives. This belief directly impacts how we deal with any adversity. However, optimism without a cause can lead one to not appreciate the gravity of a situation and thus not consider the best course of action.
4. Causal Analysis: Resilient individuals are fairly good at accurately identifying  the root cause of their problems. It is worth mentioning Martin Seligman’s work here. Seligman is considered the father of positive psychology, and he proposed a framework that helps understand the three ways in which we explain events to ourselves: Permanent, Pervasive, and Personal. Read more about this here or watch this video . The video brings together the ideas of optimism and causal analysis. 
5. Empathy: Resilient people are good at reading other people’s cues to their psychological states. You’d never find a resilient individual repeating the same old non-resilient pattern of behaviour like bulldozing others’ emotions and opinions. 
6. Self-Efficacy: Is our faith in our ability to succeed and the belief that we can solve any problem that we might experience. Resilient people score high on this strand. 
7. Reaching Out: Whether it’s to ask for help or to create new experiences in life, resilient individuals don’t shy away from reaching out. They acknowledge that no battle can be won alone. 

To say that these are unusual, unprecedented, and uncomfortable times would be an understatement. We’d need resilience to get over this pandemic successfully. At Co.lab^x, three of our biggest takeaways have been:

1) The silver lining is that resilience can be built in children, adults, families, communities, and teams. Think of resilience as a muscle group that can be worked on and strengthened like any other muscle group.

2) You are not starting from scratch, meaning you would already have some of the traits of a resilient person and need to work on the rest.

3) Rome was not built in a day. Similarly, resilience can’t be built in a day by simply telling people to be resilient. Au contraire, you can help people build resilience by listening to them deeply and being curious. 

I am leaving you with some reading recommendations today. These books helped me understand resilience and equipped me with the know-how of building it. I hope you find them enlightening too!

Recommended Readings

1. Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism.
2. Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte’s The Resilience Factor. The book also has a resilience assessment to gauge your own resilience. 

Saahil is a certified executive & leadership coach. He is passionate about maximising human potential. Through his work at Co.lab^x and TheSangha, he works with leaders and teams who want to grow, learn and work together. One of the themes of his work is Resilience. Saahil uses Theory U and Co-Active coaching practices to create breakthroughs. He is also a long-distance running enthusiast. He can be reached at [email protected]

Special Thanks to Visalam for editing this article. Visalam is a freelance writer and editor who loves playing with words and elevating written content. She can be reached at [email protected]