We all know resilient people. They appear to be able to deal with all of life’s ups and downs in a positive manner. Even significant set-backs do not send the resilient person off-track. There is a confident, positive and optimistic side to resilient people and they do not allow setbacks to hold them up. They also have the capacity to maintain performance over a sustained period of time.
Cognitive Resilience – resilient thinking
The way we think about situations controls the way we behave in situations. If we think negatively about a situation we will behave negatively in the situation. And our behaviour is cumulative, we become accustomed to behaving negatively until eventually people come to see us as cynical people and difficult to get along with.
As well as the literature on learned optimism from Martin Seligman (1) there is other important research material to support the importance of resilient thinking in building personal resilience. Albert Bandura (2) described at length the concept of self-efficacy, a characteristic of resilient people.
People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities. They set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them. They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks.
The future is bright
Compared to pessimists, optimistic resilient people are physically healthier, are less likely to suffer from depression, do better in school, are more productive at work, and win more at sports (1). People who are optimistic and resilient see their futures as bright and believe that they have the ability to handle life’s adversities. It motivates them to problem solve for a successful outcome.
Explaining why good and bad things happen to us
Resilient people have a different way of explaining why things happen to them, good and bad. When they succeed they generally interpret the success as down to their own skill and/or hard work. They say that they worked hard to overcome difficulties and barriers along the way. They attribute their success to an internal set of attributes that they possess.
When they meet failure they generally attribute this to a difficulty or barrier which was outside of their control, something they worked hard to deal with but the barrier was just too big to overcome. They attribute failure to external barriers and environmental influences. There is hope in their explanatory style.
People who are low on resilience and/or are pessimists see things somewhat differently. When they encounter success they attribute this to some piece of luck that came their way, unlikely to last, and not much in their control. It was a fluke. When they meet failure they explain this as typical, it happens all the time and it happens across many aspects of their lives. There is a hopelessness about their explanatory style.
For Martin Seligman:
When bad things happen we can blame ourselves (internalise) or we can blame circumstances (externalise). People who blame themselves have low self esteem as a consequence. They think they are talentless. (p49)
Resilient Behaviours
Resilience is constantly being eroded by other people who make demands on us, or who tell us that what we want to do cannot be done. One of the key attributes of perseverance is managing the reactions of others to what we want to do. Positive, strategic influencing is the key to this success.
Positive influencing is closely connected with assertive behaviour, maintaining ones rights and asserting ones needs in finding a positive outcome. The close association between influencing and assertive behaviour is established by finding out what the needs and aspirations are of the other party, what they want to gain, and looking for ways to integrate this into what we want to do. This way, we can seek to satisfy their needs and rights in a way that will not compromise our own, and manage their reactions if we have to say no!
Strategic influencing is based on the following:
- The right to ask for what we want (knowing that the other person has the right to say no)
- The right to express our feelings, opinions and beliefs
- The right to make our own decisions and to cope with the consequences
- The right to say yes and no
- The right to change our mind or modify our position in the light of new information
Resilient Lifestyle
Lifestyle also plays a part of being resilient. What lifestyle choices we make can seriously impact on our work performance. Lifestyle choices not only include how much exercise we take, whether we smoke and drink and how much sleep we get, it also includes the hours we choose to work, whether we take work home in the evening and weekends, and whether we cut short our holidays through pressure of work.
Physical activity acts as a buffering effect and a coping strategy for psychosocial stress (3). Moderate intensity physical activity can reduce the short-term physiological reactions to brief psychosocial stressors – as demonstrated by systolic and diastolic blood pressure, galvanic skin response (measure of emotional stress using resistance of the skin to an electric current), and muscle tension. Exercise can also help people to recover from stress.
(1) Martin Seligman. (1998) Learned Optimism. Free Press New York
(2) Albert Bandura. (1994). Self Efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71-81). New York: Academic Press.
(3) Taylor, AH. Physical activity, anxiety and stress: A Review. In: Biddle SJH, Fox KR, Boutcher, SH. Editors. Physical Activity and psychological wellbeing. London, Routledge, 2000: 63-87
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