6 Habits Of Resilient People
What makes some people persevere
through trying circumstances while others begin flailing at the first sign of
crisis? Understanding the key qualities of resilient people is the first step
to cultivating that bounce-back quality in yourself.
On April Fool’s Day 2011, I was
unexpectedly diagnosed with early-stage invasive breast cancer. As a freelance
writer with a career I love and a family that depends on my income, I spent
most of the year juggling surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation with
assignments, interviews, and youth soccer schedules. Throughout, friends and
colleagues seemed surprised that I remained relatively active and pretty
optimistic.
What else was there to do, I
wondered. Taking to my bed for the better part of a year wasn’t an option for my
personality or my bank account. Why not look at the bright side of early
diagnosis and great prognosis and keep going? During that time, I contributed
to two books, wrote dozens of articles and ended the year with a clean bill of
health.
Since then, I’ve been more curious
than ever about why some people persevere through trying circumstances while
others begin flailing at the first sign of crisis. I wondered if there were
commonalities among resilient people and whether it’s possible to develop those
qualities and strong points. The answers, according to the experts, are yes and
yes. Here’s what those never-say-die folks have in common--and how you can
develop them for yourself.
People who bounce back tend to have
a network of supportive people around them, says Michael Ungar, Ph.D., co-director of the Resilience Research Centre at
Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. For some people, that’s a close-knit
family, but for others it’s a carefully cultivated group of friends,
colleagues, mentors and others who actually care and are willing to help. Ungar
says he’s seen the tendency to seek out support sources in children as young as
five years old: When the family unit isn’t functioning in that way, children
tend to reach out to coaches, teachers or other adults as a support network.
Similarly, resilient adults seek out others who care about them who can offer
emotional, professional or other assistance when times get tough.
Lorenn Walker had just left a hotel
bar one night in 1976 when an unknown assailant nearly murdered her. He fled,
but she was left badly injured, needing surgery on her face. Her recovery took
four months. Through therapy and willfully refusing to be mired in fear and
resentment, she was able to “reframe,” or think about the situation in a
different way. Instead of resenting the scars and the fearful memories, the
Waialua, Hawaii, lawyer and counselor sees the attack as the catalyst that led
her to her work in what she calls restorative justice--counseling prisoners and
victims of violent crime in how to make peace with the past and cultivate
meaning in their lives.
“You have the power to determine how
you’re going to look at a situation, and you don’t give that power to other
people, particularly people who are bad or who hurt you,” she says.
Paul LeBuffe
lectures about resilience as part of his role as director of the Devereux
Center for Resilient Children, a Villanova, Pennsylvania, facility that works
with educators and mental health professionals to develop more resilient
children. It’s not uncommon for his audience to include young people who were
highly successful students, but graduated during the recession and are
devastated at their inability to find jobs.
“They don’t know how to cope with
the fact that they didn’t get the first job they applied for. So we hear a lot
about these young people sitting in their parents’ basements playing video
games,” he says.
If you don’t give yourself the
opportunity to fail sometimes and accept it as a part of life, you’re going to
struggle with bouncing back, LeBuffe says. Successfully emerging from failure
develops the ability to be optimistic that things can be bad now, but they’ll
be okay eventually, he says.
If you get most of your self-worth
from your job and you get fired, you’ve suddenly lost both your source of
income and a big part of your identity, says Ungar. Resilient people often have
a number of areas from which they get their sense of self-worth, says Ungar.
They may have deep friendships or family connections, strong faith, or a
leadership role in the community. They’re better able to bounce back, because
even if one goes away, they still have a sense of connection and being valued
from those other areas, he says.
Whether it’s forgiving yourself for
a failure or forgiving someone else for an injury or injustice, being able to
let go of past hurts and move on is an essential component of resilience,
Walker says. When you find yourself “ruminating about grievances and negative
stories, you have to just stop yourself and remind yourself of what you have to
be grateful for,” she says. If you’re not a naturally forgiving person, this
takes practice, but it is a skill that can be mastered, she adds.
LeBuffe says resilient people have a
sense of purpose that helps them analyze their situations and plot the next
moves. This stems from a set of values that is unique to each individual. When
you know what’s important to you, whether it’s family, faith, money, career, or
something else, you can prioritize what needs your attention most immediately
to help you get back to where you want to be. That goes for organizations, as
well. When everyone knows the ultimate goal, they can make meaningful
contributions. When they don’t, they’re mired in indecision.
“If the people who work in a company
don’t know the values, they’re paralyzed. They have to keep coming back to
senior management to say, ‘What about going after this market?’ or ‘What do you
think about extending credit another 30 days?’ instead of being able to act
adaptively,” he says. “It’s the same for people. You have to know what’s
important to you to be able to take action.”
By Gwen Moran
http://www.fastcompany.com/3024368/6-habits-of-resilient-people?partner=newsletter
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