Resilience is first and foremost concerned with our capacity to overcome adversity. Central to this idea is that the adversity has a personal meaning to us, that we personally appraisal the situation as an adversity, that we see it as a challenge to be overcome.
Many ideas about the appraisal process that are relevant in understanding stress are also relevant in understanding resilience. Just as stress, (or to be more specific, stressors - the idea that there is something that is harmful or threatening to our sense of wellbeing) is in the eye of the beholder, so too is resilience, (the adversity or challenge that must be overcome).
Adversity and resilience
Richard Lazarus, American psychologist, talks about the relationship between stress and coping, but he might just as well have been talking about adversity and resilience. The importance of personal meaning in the way we appraise a situation is critical. Coping is, by its very nature, a mechanism for altering our circumstances, or how we interpret our circumstances. One person may interpret a situation as highly threatening to their sense of well being; another person may interpret the same situation as a challenge, a difficult demand that they feel confident about over coming.
Lazarus (1) describes the challenge appraisal as exhilarating and associated with expansive and often outstanding performance, thus making the natural link that we have often seen in practice between resilience and high levels of work performance.
He described two main classes of coping:
- Problem-focused coping refers to anything which is done to change something for the better.
- Emotion-focused coping is changing the way we attend to (e.g. ignore or heighten our attention) or interpret what is happening.
Coping depends on the appraisal of whether anything can be done to change the situation. If appraisal says something can be done problem focused coping predominates (proactive steps to change the situation). If appraisal says nothing can be done, emotion-focused coping predominates (proactive steps to manage emotions).
(1) Lazarus, R.S. (1993) From Psychological Stress to the Emotions. Annual Review of Psychology. Vol 44, 1-21
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