Unpacking and Unpicking… Resilience
‘Ordinary magic’, or ‘grit’, or both? What resilience is, how it helps with change, and how to develop more of it.
Resilience is a pretty amazing magic potion that is made from some fairly simple skills. Skills we can all learn and improve. Improving these skills helps us to respond and adapt to change.
What do you mean, ordinary magic?
Ann Masten, a professor of child development, has done extensive work on resilience. Her main focus is on the ways that children and families respond to adversity. Her work looks at why some families come through adverse experiences with positive outcomes.
Ann’s work covers homelessness, poverty, war, migration and natural disasters. These may seem extreme, compared daily stressors in your own life. The ingredients for resilience are less extreme. Ann coined the term ‘ordinary magic’ to show how powerful and yet simple resilience can be. And it’s helpful even with the smaller challenges in life.
“…individuals are capable of astonishing resistance, coping, recovery and success in the face of adversity, equipped only with the usual human adaptational capabilities and resources, functioning normally.”
~ Professor Ann S. Masten
What about ‘Grit’? What’s that?
Grit includes things like setting long term goals, whilst not being distracted by short term gains. It includes commitment, determination, stamina, persistence. Finishing what you start and seeing things through. Some of these elements are shared with resilience. But you can also see that part of the definition I just gave is a list of characteristics. Thinking about characteristics is less helpful than developing skills, so I tend to focus on resilience over grit.
I’m interested in:
Behaviours you can adapt and skills you can learn, rather than traits you are born with, that come naturally to you.
Ordinary skills rather than heroic acts.
Strength through admitting challenges, asking for help and accepting it over sheer determination and persistence to get through something.
How does resilience help with change?
Resilience works at different levels, and the different levels interact. Just like change happens at different levels and in different aspects of our lives, often at the same time.
Individual My own ability to respond and adapt to things changing around me - in myself, in my relationships, in my life and work, in my community.
Family My family’s ability to respond and adapt to change - within each of us, in our relationships, and in or around our lives, work and home.
Community My community’s ability to respond to changes. Most of us are members of more than one community. You can see how this gets quite complex, quite quickly!
Change operates all all these different levels. And resilience helps us at all of these different levels too.
What kinds of changes are we talking about?
The big changes in life - These are the ones that tend to top ‘most stressful life events’ lists.
Such as… Moving house. Moving in with a partner. Changing job, losing your job. Being promoted. Retiring. Starting or ending a relationship. When a family member or friend is injured or ill with something severe or long term. When someone we love dies.
What are some big changes you have experienced in life or at work?
The smaller challenges in life - These still come with a fair amount of stress. They mean that we need to make short-term or medium-term adaptations.
Such as… A particularly difficult project at work or a new colleague. A broken washing machine or boiler. A minor or short term illness or injury. A secondment at work.
What are some smaller changes you’ve experienced?
What about the messy stuff?
There’s lots of messy stuff that happens with change. In other words: feelings.
Resilience can help with feeling:
Out of control.
Stress.
Overwhelm.
Pressure.
Resilience is also fluid and dynamic - it doesn’t stay the same all the time.
Take a look at the examples of changes you found in your own life, from the prompts above. What feelings came along with those? And was your resilience at the same level for each change?
Boosting your own resilience
We can take steps to boost our resilience. Carol Dweck, one of the leading researchers on the psychology of motivation, refers to mindset when facing challenges. Mindset can seem like something one group of people have, and another don’t.
“The ability to face challenges is… about the mind-set you bring to the challenge”
~ Carol Dweck
A lot of what underlies a certain mindset is actually skills. Skills that we can rehearse and practice over time. Here are some of the ‘ordinary skills’ that contribute to resilience:
Managing strong feelings.
Confidence in your strengths and abilities.
Problem solving and communication.
Making realistic plans and carrying them out.
A positive view of yourself.
Small challenges are training grounds for resilience. We can practice resilient skills for the small changes, so that when the big changes come along, we’re ready for them. First, let’s get a sense of our current resilience level.
An ‘ordinary magic’ audit
Let’s get a general sense of your current level of resilience. This isn’t a scientific or psychological assessment, just a rough guide. Give yourself a score out of ten on each of these:
Your communication skills.
How you respond to and navigate your own feelings.
How you respond to and navigate others’ feelings.
Problem solving.
Your ability to make and execute realistic plans.
Your confidence in your strengths and abilities (not just resilience skills - all of your skills).
Having a positive view of yourself.
For each one, write a couple of notes about why you have chosen that score.
Then you might pick one or two that you’d like to work more on. These don’t have to be the ones that you score the least. It could be ones that you have some skills in and want to grow more, or others that you feel you are stronger in and want to consolidate.
Next time
Next time I’ll share some suggestions on how to grow in each of the skill areas.
You might have some of your own ideas, before then! Collect them and share them here or on the next post. You can also revisit Unconditional Positive Regard for a take on developing a positive view of yourself.
