Resilience

Over the years, I’ve worked with thousands of Ph.D. candidates and dozens of businesses. Although each one, ultimately, got to where they needed to be, their paths and approaches always seemed to fluctuate. Consistently, there have been those clients who seemed to take everything in stride, moving moment-to-moment as if life were a dance that they grew up practicing; I’ve also had at least one or two clients who needed a bit more coaching so as to not trip and fall, mid-song. And it’s not as if those fluidly moving clients were tremendously more talented than the next lot. No, instead this first group simply knew how to handle the added stress of any given moment. In other words, they had a certain perspective on life that allowed them to maintain a resilience that always kept them, more or less, even keel.

Looking into this stark contrast more, the American Psychological Association importantly defines resilience as the ability to adapt well to stress or problems, and they even have ways to cognitively, emotionally and physically build your resilience. Now, in addition to these strategies, I’d like to remind you that you and I are built to be resilient. In fact, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist studying happiness, argues that our brain synthesizes what has happened to literally change our hedonic experience of happiness. In a separate TED talk, Gilbert basically states that 3 months after an initially “bad” event (i.e., the loss of your job, or your girlfriend, or fill-in the blank), the event really does not change one’s levels of happiness at all.

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