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Resilience

What is resilience?

Resilience is the ability to

• Bounce back
• Take on difficult challenges and still find meaning in life
• Respond positively to difficult situations
• Rise above adversity
• Cope when things look bleak
• Tap into hope
• Transform unfavorable situations into wisdom, insight, and compassion
• Endure

Resilience refers to the ability of an individual, family, organization, or community to cope with adversity and adapt to challenges or change. It is an ongoing process that requires time and effort and engages people in taking a number of steps to enhance their response to adverse circumstances. Resilience implies that after an event, a person or community may be able to not only cope and recover, but also change to reflect different priorities arising from the experience and prepare for the next stressful situation:

• Resilience is the most important defense people have against stress.
• It is important to build and foster resilience to be ready for future challenges.
• Resilience will enable the development of a reservoir of internal resources to draw upon during stressful situations.

Research has shown that resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary, and that people regularly demonstrate this ability:^1,2,3

• Resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have.
• Resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed in anyone.
• Resilience is tremendously influenced by a person's environment.

Resilience changes over time. It fluctuates depending on how much a person nurtures internal resources or coping strategies. Some people are more resilient in work life, while others exhibit more resilience in their personal relationships. People can build resilience and promote the foundations of resilience in any aspect of life they choose.

What is individual or personal resilience?

Individual resilience is a person's ability to positively cope after failures, setbacks, and losses. Developing resilience is a personal journey. Individuals do not react the same way to traumatic or stressful life events. An approach to building resilience that works for one person might not work for another. People use varying strategies to build their resilience. Because resilience can be learned, it can be strengthened. Personal resilience is related to many factors including individual health and wellbeing, factors with and into which a person is born, life history and experience, and social support.

Factors That Influence Individual Health and Wellbeing

Along with the factors listed above, there are several attributes that have been correlated with building and promoting resilience. The American Psychological Association reports that resilience includes the following attributes:²

• The capacity to make and carry out realistic plans
• Communication and problem-solving skills
• A positive or optimistic view of life
• Confidence in personal strengths and abilities
• The capacity to manage strong feelings, emotions, and impulses

What is family resilience?

Family resilience is the coping process in the family as a functional unit. Crisis events and persistent stressors affect the whole family, posing risks not only for individual dysfunction, but also for relational conflict and family breakdown. Family processes mediate the impact of stress for all of its members and relationships, and the protective processes in place foster resilience by buffering stress and facilitating adaptation to current and future events. Following are the three key factors in family resilience:⁴

• Family belief systems foster resilience by making meaning in adversity, creating a sense of coherence, and providing a positive outlook.
• Family organization promotes resilience by facilitating flexibility, capacity to adapt, connectedness and cohesion, emotional and structural bonding, and access to resources.
• Family communication enhances resilience by involving clear communication, open and emotional expressions, trust and collaborative problem-solving, and conflict management.

What is organizational resilience?

Organizational resilience is the ability and capacity of a workplace to withstand potentially significant economic downturns, systemic risk, or systemic disruptions by adapting, recovering, or resisting being affected and resuming core operations or continuing to provide an acceptable level of functioning and structure:

• A resilient workforce and organization is important during major decisions or business changes.
• Companies and organizations, like individuals, need to be able to rebound from potentially disastrous changes.
• challenge for the incorporation of resilience into a workplace is to identify what enhances the ability of an organization to rebound effectively.

Measuring workplace resilience involves identifying and evaluating the following:⁴

• Past and present mitigative mechanisms and practices that increase safety
• Past and present mitigative mechanisms and practices that decrease error
• Necessary redundancy in systems
• Planning and programming that demonstrate collective mindfulness
• Anticipation of potential trouble and solutions to potential problems

What is community resilience?

Community resilience is the individual and collective capacity to respond to adversity and change. A resilient community is one that takes intentional action to enhance the personal and collective capacity of its citizens and institutions to respond to and influence the course of social and economic change. For a community to be resilient, its members must put into practice early and effective actions so that they can respond to change. When responding to stressful events, a resilient community will be able to strengthen community bonds, resources, and the capacity to cope. Systems involved with building and maintaining community resilience must work together.

How does culture influence resilience?

Cultural resilience refers to a culture's capacity to maintain and develop cultural identity and critical cultural knowledge and practices. Along with an entire culture fostering resilience, the interaction of culture and resilience for an individual also is important. An individual's culture will have an impact on how the person communicates feelings and copes with adversity. Cultural parameters are often embedded deep in an individual. A person's cultural background may deeply influence how he or she responds to different stressors. Assimilation could be a factor in cultural resilience, as it could be a positive way for a person to manage his or her environment. However, assimilation could create conflict between generations, so it could be seen as positive or negative depending on the individual and culture. Because of this, coping strategies are going to be different. With growing cultural diversity, the public has greater access to a number of different approaches to building resilience. It is something that can be built using approaches that make sense within each culture and are tailored to each individual.

References

1. Aguirre, B. (2007). Dialectics of vulnerability and resilience. Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, 14(39), 1–18.
2. American Psychological Association. (2006). The road to resilience. Retrieved August 6, 2021, from https://www.apa.org
3. Bonanno, G. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.
4. Wilson, S., & Ferch, S. (2005). Enhancing resilience in the workplace through the practice of caring relationships. Organization Development Journal, 23(4), 45–60.