Resilience and what does it mean?

Resilience is widely talked about, but do we necessarily understand it? We invited an expert in to the Stronger conference to talk to us about it. Below are some key takeaways

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‘Resilience’ is a word that has been gaining popularity over the last couple of decades. Certainly, in Christian circles I hear much more talk about ‘resilience’ whether that’s ‘resilience in leadership’, ‘resilient discipleship’, ‘resilient leaders’, resilience has become such an important topic and from my experience are talking much more about it than perhaps even five years ago, but definitely ten years ago.

A quick search on Amazon as I’m researching this article shows me that John Eldridge, a well-known American Christian author, is about to release a booked entitled ‘Resilient’ later on this month (June 2022), the subtitle of the book is ‘restoring your weary soul in these turbulent times’.

The turbulent times that we have all experienced in the last couple of years were the very reason that we wanted to host a session at the Stronger conference earlier this year, entitled ‘Resilient Leadership’ and we couldn’t think of anyone better than Will van der Hart to come and help us grapple with this important topic.

Rev Will Van Der Hart has been an Anglican priest in London for 17 years and is a director of The Mind and Soul Foundation. He is an experienced life coach, an author and an integrative bible teacher. He is a mental health first aider and is passionate about equipping church leaders to look after their own emotional health as well as empowering them to manage the emotional needs of their congregations. You can follow him here and you can find his session on the Stronger website via this link.

I thought some of the things that he mentioned were excellent and wanted to pull out a couple of things for you here as you reflect on the subject of resilience in your own life and context.

1.Resilience is a muscle to be strengthened

Often one of the challenges when it comes to the word ‘resilience’ is that we can have a wrong understanding about it. This is what Will said in his session:

‘Leaders can sort of band these words around and speak about them confidently without necessarily drilling into what they actually mean. I think one of the greatest dangers of the ideas around resilient leadership is that it’s something you've just got. That ‘so and so’ is just ‘resilient’.

If you read some of the definitions given for the word ‘resilience’, it might be easy to draw that conclusion. Collins’ dictionary for example gives this definition of resilience:

‘The power or ability to return to the original form; the ability to recover readily from illness or adversity’.

At face value I might think I’ve either got that ability or I don’t. That you are either born with resilience or you are not. And as Will pointed out for us, this leads to two dangers:

1.It leaves some people thinking they are resilient whatever the weather.
2.It leaves other people thinking they can’t develop resilience.

One of the things that was so helpful from what Will shared was the fact that resilience isn’t just static, that you have it or you don’t, but that when it comes to resilience, he says:

‘These are muscles to be strengthened. These are tools to be enabled. These aren't just things that you either have or don’t have…’

2.Resilience is more complex than you think

When I think of resilience I often default to the image of a person who keeps going no matter what life throws at them. I came across the story of someone who dressed up as Gorilla and completed the London Marathon in 6 days, by crawling. Tom Harrison of the Met Police raised £26k for charity after crawling the marathon as ‘Mr Gorilla’. The 41-year-old Londoner started at 10.34am on the Sunday, the first day of the marathon, but then crossed the finish line at 11.45am the following Saturday.

This is the kind of picture we might have in mind when we think of resilience. That resilience looks like a metaphorical Mr Gorilla crawling the London marathon. This is what Will said in his session:

‘Many leaders think about resilience as the ability to carry on carrying huge loads under huge pressure and keeping on going…and that's a simple way of understanding it. But it's a lot more complex than that, because sometimes we need to be resilient through periods where we're inactive.’

I thought this was a profound insight especially given the last couple of years when people have been furloughed and locked-down, and not as active as they would normally be. Will said this about the pressure people experience through inactivity:

‘…’Oppressed potential’ is the phenomenon where we're unable to fulfil the normal flow of our day or a week, the normal functions of our work, which leads to stress… and so inactivity creates a great challenge to a person’s resilience….’

Will made this point in the context of the definition of mental health given by the World Health Organisation, which states mental health is the ‘state of well-being in which every individual realises his or her own potential…’.

How do we grow in resilience under pressure?

In his session, Will then went on to discuss growing in resilience when under pressure. He said that there are positive changes that we can make under pressure that can really support and strengthen our resilience.

1.Find ways of Re-creation:

This is what Will said:

‘I believe very much that God is the recreator…. He creates and then he recreates on the Sabbath, and celebrates all that is good. And so waiting until that next holiday which might be cancelled because of COVID …. is not a great strategy. What we need is … daily retreats, weekly rests, monthly escapes, and we need annual holidays…’

2.Drop competition

Will said this about competition: 

‘When we're struggling with our resilience, the worst thing we can do is begin to compete with others about how well they're doing, because our negative self talk bias tends to talk make us want to extend ourselves further, when that's the last thing we actually should be doing…’

Try to be aware of your thought patterns and where you are comparing yourself with others and benchmarking yourself with others. It’s never helpful.

3.Lean on others

Will quoted a psychologist who said: ‘adversity turns into trauma when the mind experiences itself as being in isolation’, and the point that Will drew out in his session is that God places us in community because we sometimes need to find a strengthening of our resilience through those around us:

‘…when we struggling with our resilience…it's not just that we are struggling with a lack within us, it's that we're struggling with a lack within the community that supports us. When we're baptised were baptised into the family of faith. We're told that we become the body of the Church, we are one with Christ and with one another. And that means that our resources aren't just our resources. They're the resources of the whole church. And many leaders when their resilience is challenged, see it as a personal mandate to demonstrate their strength…and say ‘I don't need support, I just need the Lord.’ But what if the Lord had provided support for us within the body of the church…in order that you might get the help that you need? And I think that’s exactly what he has done for us’

Summary

Resilience is a muscle to be strengthened, it’s probably more complex than you think, and there are three things we can do to grow our resilience, namely:

-find ways of re-creation
-drop competition and
-lean on others

What of the above stands out to you? Are there things you need to do as a result of what you’ve just read?