Resilience is More than Bouncing Back

- and More Important than Ever 

We all know people who come out the other side of a traumatic experience - whether a layoff, divorce, project failure, hurricane or house fire - wiser and more certain. We’ve also seen those who never recover their emotional footing, seeming unmoored as they struggle to adapt to new circumstances.

Resilience is the key differentiator.

But what is it, really? Talk of resilience often defaults to analogies of rubber bands and bouncing balls. Stretched beyond its resting state, a rubber band snaps back. Dropped on the floor or hurled at a wall, a ball bounces.

Beyond Rubber Bands and Bouncing Balls

As metaphors, both offer a good starting but fail to capture an important aspect of resilience. Stretched over and over, a rubber band loses its shape. Stretched too far, it snaps outright. A ball usually returns in the direction it came from unless the force included some healthy spin.

People with resilience do more than bounce back. They emerge from tough spots with renewed focus and understanding of life’s capacity to cause pain as well as joy. Unpleasant or even awful episodes become experiences to learn from, catalysts for growth.

Resilient people don’t seek out bad stuff, nor do they pretend nothing is wrong when it is. Optimistic at the core, their outlook is grounded in reality, not a fantastical world of rainbows and unicorns.

Maintaining Perspective and Focus

Far from unfeeling, those with resilience experience empathy, disappointment, frustration and pain but they know emotions are fleeting.

They see difficulty as a challenge, not a showstopper. They don’t make crises bigger than they are but see them in perspective. They worry less about events (and people) they can’t control and instead focus on ways to add meaning to their professional and personal lives. Having solid goals to work toward is a big part of it.

At the core, people with such an outlook know setbacks are part of life as well as temporary. Faced with obstacles, they embrace improvisation. Each turn and twist unfolds on a larger canvas where meaning and lessons may not be immediately obvious.

Success and Resilience

The list of household names who rebounded after failure or rejection is as long as it is impressive: Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, Thomas Edison, Vera Wang, Sidney Poitier, Fred Astaire, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Henry Ford just scratch the surface.

Of course people without fame or fortune make remarkable comebacks every day as well. Still, just as events and circumstances can wear down even the most resilient people, a crisis can uncover latent strength in others.

Why some people have resilience, why others do not, and how to build (or rebuild) it aren’t new questions but do take on greater urgency. As the pace of change accelerates, transforming both our professional and personal lives with dizzying speed, resilience is all but a required skill for these times.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.”

That was from one CEO quoted in “How Resilience Works” an influential article by Diane Coutu in the Harvard Business Review. In May 2002, 13 years ago.

Related Post: 10 Ways to Build Resilience

Sameer Bhargava has led and turned around IT organizations in multi-billion dollar companies and created world-class R&D teams at startups. He is CIO of Onlife Health and founder of Callibrain, a cloud-based software platform that drives higher performance by strengthening alignment, communication, collaboration and employee engagement across an organization. The views, opinions and positions expressed are the author’s alone and should not be attributed to Onlife Health or anyone within the organization.