Hello, my name is Vinita Israni and I currently live in Sydney, Australia. I’m a user experience manager at Qantas airlines.

At this moment in time, resilience is a topic that’s on top of our mind for a lot of people right now, with a pandemic affecting the world economically, physically, mentally, emotionally. I think the topic of resilience really takes center stage. And so while most of us talk about resilience as a capability or a muscle that we can stretch, it’s actually more of a process. When people are faced with an adverse condition or a situation, their reactions to that situation is what actually kicks off this process. And then the continued choices and actions taken while they’re in that adverse situation is what may predict how that person may react to future challenges.

Resilience is also something that we may all have, but then apply in different ways to different aspects of our lives. For example, in our professional lives, we may be great at taking in feedback and adapting. But in a personal context, we may really struggle to take emotional feedback from our partners. And while being in a difficult situation may lead people to having a better process of resiliency, that isn’t always the case. Intergenerational trauma, post traumatic stress disorder, and burnout are all real examples of situations where developing a process of resilience is so much easier said than done. At times, we may also need the right environmental conditions, the right tools, and even more, to be able to learn how to react and adapt. It usually takes the human mind hearing something seven times for it to really stick and take action. So imagine going through a difficult situation seven times, but you only change your reaction to it on the eighth try.

Resilience is also about bouncing forwards as much as it is about bouncing back. Many of us think about resilience as coping with something and then quickly getting back to what we were doing before. However, the most resilient people I’ve seen, actually figure out what their new world looks like with the challenging event taking into consideration rather than just ignoring it and trying to go back to their lives before the event. They’re able to let go of the old world and use the setback as an inflection point to actually move forward.

I think we also think about resilience from a pathogenic perspective. So that basically means we get sick, and then we get better, we go from this negative to trying to get to positive. I’ve recently been reading about the salutogenic model, where we actually focus on factors that support human health and well being rather than the factors that cause disease. And so with this perspective, resilience actually becomes a lot more cyclical and better framed as a process.

We also look at resilience as something that’s a necessary evil. So negative events happen and we have to deal with them and that builds resilience and grit. So I’ll leave you with this question, which is, don’t you enjoy the happy moments that you have so much more because you’ve been through those challenging moments? Could this be a better way of us thinking about how to build this process of resilience?

Resilience, I agree, is a process. Many people think of resilience as being able to take a punch to the face and get back up. But not everybody is Floyd Mayweather.

It is hard to be hyperbolic when talking about Floyd Mayweather Jr. because he truly is the best. In all 20 years of Floyd Mayweather’s career, he managed a perfect record of 50 wins and zero losses. He is widely known by sports critics and fans alike as being the best fighter in the modern era, and perhaps of all time. Many of these accomplishments can be credited to his resilient nature, to never back down, but more importantly, his ability to learn from his mistakes.

For most people, resilience is a slow and adaptive process in which you must carry the mistakes of your past with you to improve on future opportunities. Mayweather is not even famous for his resilience, at least not in a traditional sense. Mayweather is famous for being the best at avoiding punches, but in a way that is also a form of resilience. He only requires a small sample space of errors to be able to predict his opponent strikes. This ability to recover from limited failures is far more valuable than being able to take more punches than anyone else. And this is not unique to Mayweather boxing either. Many athletes are expected to be able to learn from others mistakes. The best athletes study the mistakes of others, so they are not doomed to repeat them.

To step away from the world of sports, I want to emphasize that we as a society need to stop defining resilience as one’s ability to endure poor work conditions with the promise of a promotion or pay raise. Instead, we need to encourage those who are willing to confront their issues and improve their circumstances, rather than be tolerant of a bad situation, because that is true resilience. And to answer Vinita’s question, I do agree that one struggles help to put accomplishments in perspective. However, I would qualify that statement by saying that one does not necessarily have to fail to feel accomplished. After all, do you have to be punched in the face first, before dodging a punch to know how much it would have hurt.

This episode concludes our series on Resilience. Join us next time for the start of our Communication series, bringing unique insights shared by professionals ranging from the president of IBM, a project manager in Kuala Lumpur to a poet in New York City.