Is Resilience a Skill or a Quality?

Resilience is a special skill because it is so defined by outlook and response. It is an adaptive mode of thinking which has to be developed gradually, alongside techniques for improving one’s initial response to something bad or unwanted. Negative thoughts can be combated in the short-term using relaxation techniques – such as deep breathing or even exercise – before being dealt with more fully through self-exploration and discussion. As such, it’s critical to have support networks in place where you can disclose anxieties and explore possible solutions. 

Whilst these techniques can help manage the immediate response, long-term resilience happens when you then incorporate the negative information as part of your reaction. One way of doing this involves reworking your internal narrative. So when something bad happens, rather than catastrophizing, it is possible to reframe the experience as a turning point – by imagining yourself telling others, in the future, about what the situation taught you and what strengths you had to draw on in order to recover from it.

Understandably, this will involve a lot of self-talk: it requires you to examine the way you think about yourself and the world around you, your mental habits and instinctive responses. The techniques for building long-term resilience are ones which foster our ability to reinterpret given situations. Humour, for instance, is often a very constructive response to a difficult situation because it applies long-term perspective to a scenario that is painful in the moment. Again, this is a technique of narrative that is central to resilience – taking control of a situation by re-defining the way you talk to yourself and others about it. 

So resilience is not something you’re either born with or not. Rather, it is a developable life skill that all of us can nurture in ourselves. It enables us to deal with the unexpected and unwanted in the short-term, whilst learning and growing stronger as a result of adversity – both inside and outside the workplace.

By Aoife Keane