Growing Resilience

4 mins

              Resilience is a popular word these days. It’s a quality that seems necessary to succeed in life. During these past couple of years we have come face to face with some difficult realities: #1 that we are not in control, and #2 that we cannot predict what happens from one moment to the next. 

In the dictionary resilience means “to have the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”  it is also “the ability…. to spring back into shape; elasticity.”

A resilient structure/system/community is “expected to be able to resist an extreme event with minimal damages and functionality disruptions during the event; after the event, it should be able to rapidly recovery its functionality similar to or even better than the pre-event level.”

Sounds great. But how? How do we come away from serious hardships in life, and not only spring back, but become better versions of ourselves?

I believe the first step is to change our mindset about the struggle.

When facing a challenging, unfair, or troublesome circumstance, it’s easy for us to have the mindset of “I don’t WANT this!” of course we don’t want it, it feels terrible! We can get very upset and angry. While searching for a solution we can begin looking for someone or something to blame. Will any of that actually help us to move forward? It usually makes it worse, and makes us a challenge for others to be around.

It may be that the first step toward resiliency is to accept the circumstance as it is rather than wishing it away or trying to fight against it.

I was sitting on a beach one day, watching people tiptoe towards the water. The waves had been unusually rough (my first-hand experience of the brutal waves were the reason I was now a spectator who was coughing up sand instead of swimming!) A series of storms had struck the week before, making the shore very steep as it dropped toward the waterline. This created a perfect impact zone for the waves to aggressively smack an unsuspecting victim against the sand. People who were unaware of the ‘impact zone’ would gingerly step into the water giving themselves time to get used to the temperature, and suddenly be rolling awkwardly in the frothy aftermath of the wave, sputtering salt water. Some where hardly able to stand up before another wave came and knocked them off their feet. I watched one particularly perseverant middle-aged woman go down four times in a row! She was avoiding the deeper water, but facing a fiercer fight because of it.

There we other swimmers there who knew the power of those waves and recognized an impact zone that they didn’t want to mess around with. I watched them with interest as well. They stayed aware, saw the wave coming, chose not to fight it and simply dove into the wave before it slammed into them. They successfully swam underneath it, skipped the chaotic rolling & scraping across the bottom (inhaling sand and sea shell particles) and they came out the other side quite happily.

I think sometimes we try to fight the waves of hardship and pain. We stand in the impact zone and complain about how unfair & miserable it is. Or maybe some of us think that if we are determined enough, the next wave won’t knock us over. We want to beat the wave, show it who’s boss. But often we need to simply accept that the waves are there, lean in, humble ourselves and then come out the other side. Accepting the situation allows us to look for the way through it rather than just stress over the fact that we are in it.

In an article by Thomas Wall on Inc.com* the topic of resiliency is put into 10 helpful steps. One of these is to “Reframe” your stressful thought.

If your like me, it doesn’t always occur to you that these stressful thoughts CAN be reframed. We play the ‘what-if?” game well, but only in the negative. What if it’s all gonna be okay? What if it turns out well? These aren’t the kinds of questions we normally think to ask ourselves, but we should! We need to make a habit of speaking hope & truth into the what-if storms.

“ I am growing stronger because of this”

“I believe that God is so powerfully miraculous that He can even use all of this, and even my own mistakes, for good.”

That one took a long time for me to wrap my brain around, but technically, it is true- and I am beginning to see it!

A recent post i saw online puts it in these terms;

“Repetitive complaining will attract things to complain about. Repeated gratitude will attract things to be thankful for.”

When I face the hardships and only believe I am a victim who is being mistreated, what is there to gain? How can I grow in resilience unless I choose to see that this challenge doesn’t have to defeat me. Instead, it can teach me. We need to dive in & look for the ways these ‘waves’ are causing us to grow & ‘up-skill’.

Begin to tell yourself that you are only going to grow and gain strength & wisdom from the trials you face, then you may be more ready to dive into the challenge instead of fighting against it. Resilience will look good on you.

* click the link for more helpful info on the subject of resilience www.inc.com/thompson-wall/the-10-step-prescription-for-building-resilience-to-stress

Naphtali Morden, Ministry Director