Resilience In Adversity

I had intended for this newsletter to be all about rewiring our brains to change how we think about change. I’d attended a webinar by a colleague on this topic and it got me thinking about what a drain all the uncertainty we’re all dealing with is on our resilience capacity and how we can use Adaptiv resilience skills to develop more agile mindsets.

Then as it often does, life took some unpredictable turns and hit me with a sudden and devastating personal loss. I wrote about it in a LinkedIn article called “Resilience Is A Choice”.

The message was that no matter how big or painful or threatening the adversity, we can always choose to respond in ways that move us closer to recovery and resilience.

I continued to explore this idea in a second LinkedIn article – “Resilient Thinking Is A Choice”.

Since it's our thinking about whatever’s happening that directly determines how we feel and what we do about it, choosing what/how we think about any situation paves the way to choosing resilience!

In Adaptiv's resilience training classes, we meet our learners where they are, equipping them with skills to steer through common day-to-day issues at work and in their lives at large. With our typical corporate audiences, we don't spend much time talking about using resilience skills to overcome bigger adversities.

And along these lines, I haven't written much about resilience in the face of life's larger challenges. But my recent personal struggle - along with a couple of recent news items - have me rethinking this.

First was a story about a young man named Adul Sam-on. He was 14 years old and one of the 12 members of a Thai football team trapped for 2 weeks along with their 25 year old coach in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand with no food, in total darkness, and with little oxygen.

Adul is now a freshman at Vermont’s Middlebury College. In a network news interview, he reflected on the impact of this adversity on his life five years later.

Although he had developed lots of mental toughness growing up in a poor family in Myanmar, he credits his experience in the cave with equipping him with the resilience that has helped propel him forward and upward in his life. His is an inspiring story which you can read more about here.

Next was the story about one of the survivors on a plane that crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972 with members of the Uruguayan rugby team.

Roberto Canessa, 19 years old at the time of the crash, took the lead in caring for the survivors and ultimately hiked out of the mountain range with a teammate to get help. He later became a pediatric cardiologist, and his experience stayed with him and provided a key lesson. - “About how to overcome difficulties in life and have faith in yourself,” he said.

Canessa’s life-changing experiences are recounted in a new Netflix movie, “Society of the Snow”.

Aside from these big media-driven events shining a light on how extreme adversity leads to post-traumatic growth, I’ve been reflecting on my own experiences teaching resilience skills for the past 25 years.

The fact is that audiences who have suffered adversities in their lives are easier to teach resilience skills. They're better learners because they're more motivated to learn. For instance, new salespeople who haven't yet experienced high levels of rejection, losses, financial uncertainty, etc., are much less engaged during resilience training than those who have suffered through the “valley of death” in their own sales journeys. This makes sense, doesn’t it?

The bottom line is that while most of us use our resilience to steer around and through everyday challenges, it's the big adversities and setbacks that provide a more effective real-life laboratory in which to test, build and sharpen our resilience skills. Why?

• Adversity brings our resilience strengths and deficits into sharper focus.
• Adversity provides a clear lens through which to view and modify our choices of thoughts and feelings in response to the challenge.
• Adversity serves up more obvious options and choices we can make.
• Adversity offers high levels of contrast between feeling bad and feeling good, making it easier to decide which choice(s) to make.
• Adversity increases the need for resilience skills deployment and therefore provides an easier place to use and practice the skills.

I'd love to hear how you have built resilience through your response to adversity - at work or anywhere else in life. Please comment below.

Adaptiv Learning is the world's oldest and largest organization devoted exclusively to the development and delivery of evidence-based resilience assessment, training, and coaching solutions to individuals and companies worldwide. Learn more at https://www.adaptivlearning.com.