If you listen to enough podcasts or spend time on social media, you might assume that progress, development, and growth are linear. Do the right protocol, follow the perfect program, and an upward trajectory is sure to follow.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Whether in sport, business, or life; whether individually, locally, or globally; every path of progress includes failures and downturns, even periods of hopelessness. Life is messy. In the immediate aftermath of disappointment and disorder, it is understandable to freeze or shut down. But eventually, we’ve got to rise up and keep moving—if for no other reason than the alternative is worse.
It’s what resilience is all about: forward motion in the face of obstacles, challenges, and adversity.
Resilience doesn’t mean that we should leave everything that is broken up to individuals to fix. (We shouldn’t.) Resilience also doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to prevent hardship and misfortune. (We should.) Resilience simply means that we should expect the road to include all manner of bumps, including some that will be more severe than others, and develop a toolkit to continue onward nonetheless.
If we don’t expect hardship, if we expect smooth sailing always, then we’ll be even more thrown off when hardship inevitably occurs. We can expect hardship without fixating on it or dooming about it. To live fully and to give the important people and activities in our lives our all is wonderful; it’s the stuff that makes life worth living! But to live is also to lose. Both these can be true at once. Here’s the truth: we all could use some resilience right now. But the real kind that aims to navigate the messiness, not the superficial varieties that tell us to suck it up and tough it out on the one hand, or that everything is insurmountable trauma on the other.
So let’s take a look at what actually works:
1. Support and Cooperate
The idea that resilience is a solo endeavor or that it’s about self help is a myth. We are tougher when we are together. Studies show that asking for and receiving help is associated with a diminished stress response and bouncing back from adversity more quickly. A 2014 study examining entrepreneurial resilience found that resourcefulness was the key factor.
Our species competitive advantage has always been the ability to cooperate. It’s especially important when things aren’t going well. For our ancient ancestors, this meant I could get food from you when your hunt was successful but mine was not. In modern times, we share not only material resources but also psychological ones.
We help each other up when we fall. It’s really as simple as that. What comes around goes around. At some point or another, all of us will be helper and the helped. It’s yet another reason we must be wary of the modern day trap of always prioritizing productivity over people.
2. Maintain a Sense of Control
Another important component of resilience is taking productive action. If we can exert agency, even if only in small ways, it gives us a chance at making the situation better, and it helps us to maintain hope. Recognizing that we maintain agency fuels hope, and maintaining hope reminds us that we have agency. Small routines that lend a sense of predictability to our days and encourage us to activate help too.
When control and choice are taken away, we lose the ability to try. Lack of control extinguishes the flame of even the most motivated. When we lack control, when we feel like no matter what we do, it doesn’t make any difference, your brain is getting the message, “What’s the point?” It doesn’t take big heroic efforts to train hope. Small signals that you have at least some control, that you can have at least some impact, are enough to turn your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that plans for the future and acts on those plans, back on.
3. Accept Your Inner Doubts, And Then Deal With Them
The old model of toughness tells us that tough people don’t let negativity enter their minds. But that doesn’t jive with reality. Everyone has inner demons, fears, and doubts. By acknowledging what actually goes on inside our heads as we face a challenge—a tug of war between hope and despair, between negativity and optimism, between threat and challenge—we can prepare to handle whatever arises.
What does winning the inner debate mean? Sometimes it means listening to the angel on your shoulder instead of the devil. Other times it means letting the negative voice float on by as if it’s an upset friend or crazy uncle going on a Facebook rant. Remember that thoughts aren’t reality, and they aren’t always productive. We don’t have to engage in, let alone believe, everything that we think. Sometimes it makes sense to engage, other times it makes sense to acknowledge and accept doubts, and then let them pass on by.
4. Be Proactive Instead of Reactive
Instead of waiting to see what happens and then reacting to it, resilient individuals are proactive. They work to increase their resources or capacities to handle stress beforehand, and look for challenges or opportunities even while going through tough times. A team of researchers who examined proactive versus preventative coping in the workplace summed it up quite succinctly: “Be proactive if you want good outcomes.”
5. Find the Balance Between Hope and Realism
Resilience also emerges from some key mindset shifts, which we wrote about recently for The New York Times:
Tragic optimism is about finding meaning and maintaining hope despite inevitable pain, loss and suffering. It’s a crucial life skill. Tragic optimism emerged out of what Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist, and psychologist, observed to be the three tragedies that everyone faces. (And not only those of us who have seen the worst of the world, as he had).
The first tragedy is pain, because we are made of flesh and bone. The second is guilt, because we have the freedom to make choices and thus feel responsible when things don’t go our way. The third is loss, because we must face the reality that everything we cherish is impermanent, including our own lives.
Tragic optimism means acknowledging, accepting and even expecting that life will contain hardship and hurt, then doing everything we can to move forward with a positive attitude anyway. It recognizes that one cannot be happy by trying to be happy all the time, or worse yet, assuming we ought to be. Rather, tragic optimism holds space for the full range of human experience and emotion, giving us permission to feel happiness and sadness, hope and fear, loss and possibility—sometimes in the same day, and even in the same hour.
Research shows that this sort of emotional flexibility is associated with resilience. For example, a study of U.S. college students after Sept. 11 found that those who could hold on to hope at the same time as loss demonstrated greater resilience and fewer depressive symptoms in the tragedy’s aftermath. This finding is not about denial or delusion. Most of the study participants experienced negative emotions such as anger, fear and sadness. It’s just that the more resilient ones were able to hold on to positive emotions, too.
Tragic optimism does not encourage actively seeking out or romanticizing suffering. Not everything has to be meaningful; sometimes things just suck. Rather, tragic optimism realizes the inevitability of suffering but also that we generally have at least some say in how we face it.
6. Practice Wise Hope and Wise Action
Difficult moments, both personal and collective, often lead to extreme behaviors: what’s now known as toxic positivity on the one hand—burying our heads in the sand and deluding ourselves that everything is great—or excessive pessimism and despair on the other. While at first blush these attitudes seem like complete opposites, they share one crucial feature in common: Both absolve us of actually doing anything about the situation.
Excessive optimism and delusion, at root, deny that anything is wrong; and if nothing is wrong, there is nothing to worry about and nothing to change. Extreme pessimism and despair are so grim they essentially say that any action would be pointless. But between these two poles exists a third way: committing to wise hope and wise action.
Wise hope and wise action ask us to accept a situation and see it clearly for what it is, and then muster the strength, courage and resolve to focus on what we can control. We remind ourselves that we have faced challenges before. We continue because to stand still is not an option.
At the end of the day, resilience comes down to a few core factors: leaning into community, being kind to yourself, finding small routines to support your mental health, allowing yourself to feel sadness and loss and yet maintain hope at the same time, and a commitment to showing up again and again as you trudge through the mess.
Remember that resilience is not only something to be concerned with when you are acutely in crisis, failure, or loss. The above factors of resilience are mindsets, habits, and skills to develop year-round; this way, when you need resilience, you can call upon it and hopefully enough will be there to get you through.
