Josh Connolly - Resilience
Josh Connolly - Resilience...
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What is Resilience?
So resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. And then the definition in the dictionary uses the word toughness. Now, I always separate the word toughness as being part of your resilience plan, but a slightly separate part. And if you think of a tough material as being something like a hard plastic, the strength in that tough material is that it can stay fixed and strong and exactly as you need it when it faces impact. Yeah, the problem with a tough material is too much impact and it'll snap. So we don't want to just be tough, we want to be much more like elastic. And the strength in that is that it can bend and distort and move out of shape. And the strength flies in the fact that it can return to its original form. So you need toughness. Yeah, but you don't always want to be like that otherwise you are just heading towards that breaking point.
What is resilience in a person?
If we're trying to describe further what resilience means on a personal level, for me it's about having the understanding of ourselves on a deep enough level to make sure we know how to get our needs met so that we can build the resources in our life to be able to move forward when we feel comfortable to do so, and to feel like we have the support systems bedo, our own behaviours or other peoples around us to be able to deal with the day-to-day struggles that we might face in life.
Can anyone be resilient?
Anyone can be resilient. And actually people often ask, or one of the statements that people often say is that children are naturally resilient. I don't believe that to be true. I think we are all natural born survivors with a huge capacity to be resilient. But the way that we become resilient rather than be survivors, is to see our experience in its entirety, learn from it, and build the resources in our life that we need to be able to move forward when we feel ready. So anybody in that sense can be resilient, but it's mostly about becoming aware enough to build the resources.