What is resilience?
Put simply, resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult life events. But why do some people crumble and others thrive? Resilience is nuanced; it is a way of responding to challenges that span our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Building resilience requires honing a complex set of psychological and behavioural skills.
Can resilience be taught?
According to the authors of ‘Tomorrowmind’[1] 2023, Martin Seligman, psychologist and Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, CPO of BetterUp, resilience (or ‘antifragility’) is a skill that can be taught to others. Seligman and Kellerman found that five key factors are key to building resilience:
1. Emotional regulation
2. Optimism
3. Cognitive agility
4. Self-compassion
5. Self- efficacy.
Emotional regulation
Emotional regulation describes our ability to manage our emotions, particularly negative emotions as they boil up, in order to achieve our goals. Without emotional regulation, negative emotions can overwhelm one's ability to think clearly. Great leaders know how to harness emotions to their advantage; they don't just react to situations.
The most important emotional regulation skills are (i) slowing down and (ii) cognitive reappraisal. A Coach can act as an invaluable partner in helping you take control of your psychology enabling you to achieve your goals. In slowing down and being able to identify your emotions, you can hit the essential “pause button” between trigger and response. By creating space, you can then transition into cognitive reappraisal by stepping back from the urgency of your thoughts, emotions and behaviours to intellectually challenge your emotions. In doing so, you re-evaluate the situation, allowing for more nuanced interpretations avoiding that an initial knee-jerk reaction. Seligman and Kellerman state that within just three months of coaching, people who struggle most with emotional regulation can improve by 92%.
Optimism
Optimism is the tendency to feel hopeful and confident about a positive outcome in the future. This is a key predictor for resilience. Optimists make a difficult situation tolerable out of their belief that they can do something to escape or overcome it; a bias to expect a favourable outcome. Optimism is good for the body as well as the mind. Seligman and Kellerman state that optimists live about eight years longer than pessimists!
Cognitive agility
Cognitive agility is our ability to mentally move back-and-forth among several possible scenarios before acting on the most promising one. We often need to be most agile in moments of crisis, at a time when our brain is hijacked by fear when it is difficult to remain open to possibilities. One of the most common traits of poor resilience is catastrophisation – imagining the worst possible scenario in times of uncertainty. Those who catastrophise are low on optimism, emotional regulation, and cognitive agility. However, with training, catastrophisation can be unlearned by being able to put things into perspective and tackling cognitive distortion by opening ways of seeing a full range of possible outcomes.
According to Seligman and Kellerman, people who start out on the lowest quartile for cognitive agility scores improve by 77% in just three months of coaching.
Self-compassion
We can all be compassionate with others who are suffering, experiencing failure or perceived inadequacy, but we need to learn to apply compassion to ourselves. One way to practise self-compassion is to imagine that what you are dealing with is happening to someone else, and to think about the compassion you would show to others (but not so easily to yourself). In doing this you can counter negative feelings of fear or shame with emotions of care and kindness to yourself.
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is the belief that we can succeed in a particular endeavour. One of the best ways to grow self-efficacy is through mastery. Developing mastery in an area requires small yet steady victories over time. Setting small attainable goals helps avoid the pitfalls of aiming too high and falling short. Small goals help build the confidence that allows us to take on greater challenges over time. Once we master a skill, we have a higher degree of self-belief and confidence.
Summary
Emotional regulation, optimism, cognitive agility, self-compassion, and self-efficacy are the five building blocks for the psychological resilience we need to thrive. With practice, we can build resilience and move ourselves further towards success and well-being in our personal and professional lives.
Coaching can help you learn how to build your personal reserves of resilience, and transfer this to your team and organisation creating transformational outcomes for you and your workplace.
Get in touch if you would like to become more resilient.
[1] Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman, TOMORROWMIND, Nicholas Brearley Publishing 2023.
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