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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 not only be able to 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 (Aguirre, 2007; American Psychological Association, 2006; Bonanno, 2004) has shown that resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary, and that people regularly demonstrate being resilient.
- 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 well-being, individual aspects, life history and experience, and social support.
| Individual Health and Well-Being | Individual Aspects | Life History and Experience | Social Support |
These are factors with which a person is born.
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These are past events and relationships that influence how people approach current stressors.
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These are support systems provided by family, friends, and members of the community, work, or school environments.
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(Adapted from Simon, Murphy, & Smith, 2008) |
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Along with the factors listed above, there are several attributes that have been correlated with building and promoting resilience.
| The American Psychological Association reports the following attributes regarding resilience: |
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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 (Wilson & Ferch, 2005):
- 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 accessibility to resources.
- Family communication enhances resilience by engaging 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 potential significant economic times, 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.
- The 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: |
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(Adapted from Wilson & Ferch, 2005) |
What Is Community Resilience?
Community resilience is the individual and collective capacity to respond to adversity and change. It is a community 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 influence one deeply in how one 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/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 tailored to each individual.
What Factors Promote Resilience?
Resilience involves the modification of a person's response to a potentially risky situation. People who are resilient are able to maintain high self-esteem and self-efficacy in spite of the challenges they face. By fostering resilience, people are building psychological defenses against stress. The more resources and defenses available during a time of struggle, the better able to cope and bounce back from adverse circumstances people will be. A person’s ability to regain a sense of normalcy or define a new normalcy after adverse circumstances will be partially based on the resources available to him/her. Resilience building can begin at any time. Following is information regarding applicable ways to implement resilience practices, as well as situations that could inhibit resilience, situations that enhance resilience, and people who help facilitate the growth of resilience.
Resilience
| Demonstrating Resilience | Vulnerability Factors Inhibiting Resilience | Protective Factors Enhancing Resilience | Facilitators of Resilience |
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| Individual Resilience
The ability for an individual to cope with adversity and change |
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| Organizational Resilience
The ability for a business or industry, including its employees, to cope with adversity and change |
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| Community Resilience
The ability for an individual and the collective community to respond to adversity and change. |
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(Adapted from Kelly, 2007)
How Is Personal Resilience Built?
Developing resilience is a personal journey. People do not react the same way to traumatic events. Some ways to build resilience include the following actions:
- Making connections with others
- Looking for opportunities for self-discovery
- Nurturing a positive view of self
- Accepting that change is a part of living
- Taking decisive actions
- Learning from the past
The ability to be flexible is a great skill to obtain and facilitates resilience growth. Getting help when it is needed is crucial to building resilience. It is important to try to obtain information on resilience from books or other publications, self-help or support groups, and online resources like the ones found in this resource collection.
What Can Be Done to Promote Family Resilience?
Developing family resilience, like individual resilience, is different for every family. The important idea to keep in mind is that an underlying stronghold of family resilience is cohesion, a sense of belonging, and communication. It is important for a family to feel that when their world is unstable they have each other. This sense of bonding and trust is what fuels a family's ability to be resilient. Families that learn how to cope with challenges and meet individual needs are more resilient to stress and crisis. Healthy families solve problems with cooperation, creative brainstorming, openness to others, and emphasis on the role of social support and connectedness (versus isolation) in family resiliency. Resilience is exercised when family members demonstrate behaviors such as confidence, hard work, cooperation, and forgiveness. These are factors that help families withstand stressors throughout the family life cycle.
How Is Community Resilience Fostered?
Fostering community resilience will greatly depend on the community itself and involves the community working as a whole toward preparedness. It is the capacity for the collective to take preemptive action toward preparedness. Community resilience involves the following factors:
- Connection and caring
- Collective resources
- Critical analysis of the community
- Skill building for community members
- Prevention, preparedness, and response to stressful events
Resilience is exercised when community members demonstrate behaviors such as confidence, hard work, cooperation, and resourcefulness, and support of those who have needs during particular events. These are factors that help communities withstand challenging circumstances. There are other tips about how to foster community resilience in this resource collection.
Developing resilience is a personal journey. All people do not react the same to traumatic and stressful life events. An approach to building resilience that works for one person might not work for another. People use varying strategies. Resilience involves maintaining flexibility and balance in life during stressful circumstances and traumatic events. Being resilient does not mean that a person does not experience difficulty or distress. Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered major adversity or trauma in their lives. Stress can be dealt with proactively by building resilience to prepare for stressful circumstances, while learning how to recognize symptoms of stress. Fostering resilience or the ability to bounce back from a stressful situation is a proactive mechanism to managing stress.
References
Aguirre, B. (2007). Dialectics of vulnerability and resilience. Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, 14(39), 1–18.
American Psychological Association. (2006). The road to resilience. Retrieved March 20, 2009, from " target="_blank">http://www.apahelpcenter.org/featuredtopics/feature.php?id=6.
Bonanno, G. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59, 20–28.
Kelly, S. (2007). Personal and community resilience: Building it and sustaining it. Retrieved March 23, 2009, from the University of California Los Angeles Bureau for Behavioral Health and Health Facilities at " target="_blank">http://www.wvdhhr.org/healthprep/common/resiliency.ppt#256.
Simon, J., Murphy, J., & Smith, S. (2008). Building resilience: Appreciate the little things in life. British Journal of Social Work, 38, 218–235.
Wilson, S., & Ferch, S. (2005). Enhancing resilience in the workplace through the practice of caring relationships. Organization Development Journal, 23(4), 45–60.