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.

Hello, I’m Chester King, and I’m from London, the United Kingdom. I’m the CEO of the British Esports Association. I’m also a vice president of the Global Esports Federation. And I’m a member of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee Esports and Gaming Liaison Group.

So we’re going to talk about resilience. And I think resilience means a lot of things to different people, and it can be part of your everyday life. It can be part of your personal relationship with your friends and your family. It can be in work, it can be in sports, and it can be in gaming and esports. From my personal experience, I’ve built up resilience for a number of different aspects of my life dealing with stressful situations, and it’s all around learning from your mistakes. My uncle was an Olympian. He was the British record holder. And it was interesting seeing him and how he dealt with his resilience to competition and the stress of competition. And it’s interesting the work that I do for the British esports Association, trying to teach children to be more resilient, and to basically control their nerves and become mentally tougher when they’re experiencing competition. And it’s something that I’ve seen with my children as well. So I think trying to be resilient is a positive thing. It’s not always easy.

It is interesting, what techniques are there? How do you build your own resilience? The practices that I put in place is around repetition so that you don’t have to think about things when you’re playing. So I play a lot of tennis. I’m a member at the All England, which is, you know, where Wimbledon is held. Obviously, I don’t compete in Wimbledon, but I do play there as a member. It’s interesting seeing other members of the club and how they continue to practice and practice and practice. So when they’re playing a match, they’re not thinking about what they need to do, because they’ve practiced at so many times, which allows them to be better.

So, you know, when, for example, one gives speeches, you know, I read an incredible thing about Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would practice his public speaking 50 times by reading it aloud in a mirror the day before, looking at himself, repeating the words and becoming resilient to the stresses of doing public speaking.

So I think everyone has their own techniques. I think practicing it is obviously one thing, but I think you’ve got to try things. And I think if for some people, you know, there is a problem with actually thinking you’re going to fail, but there’s no problem in failure because that’s how you learn things. And you hear all these quotes around, you know, “If you don’t make a mistake, you don’t make anything in life.” But, you know, I think to convince someone, don’t worry about failure as a negative. You know, some people focus on being number one, number one, number one. The problem is if you’re not number one, you’re how does that affect your mental health? So resilience is a key factor.

It’s interesting to see that in most sports, professional athletes now have not only physical coaches, but also mental health coaches. And a key focus of that is to improve the resilience. During a number of sports, you have to deal with criticism, and you have to deal with distraction, which does affect your performance. Yeah, in a number of sports when you’re playing, especially team sports, you know, the opposition is trying to affect you. And I think, you know, the more you can build up resilience to that, the more you can focus to achieve. There’s a huge amount of values of when you play sport that you can transferable over to real life and other situations. So resilience is incredibly important. It’s so good to have, you know, the ability to work with other people and listen to other people don’t feel that you’re on your own about it.

Thank you, Chester. You make some excellent points on resilience within competitive environments. I like how you allude to people being able to build resilience and build it from a young age. As soon as you said this, I compared to it mental toughness and grit in the face of tough situations. Practice just as you said can reduce stress because repetition can make you naturally adapt to a variety of situations. Competitive gamers similarly have to gain resilience and avoid distraction in playing in front of large audiences, whether it would be in a small LAN tournament, in a esports arena, or even on an online streaming service.   

A lot of the amateur and professional gamers that I know and have played against utilize some of those same techniques. In the gaming community, where it was originally from poker, we like it to call it becoming tilt proof where tilting is what happens to players who become frustrated and not think through their plays. I can’t agree with you more on the role of good coaches. I think no matter the sport or genre, the responsibility of good coaches really hasn’t changed as much as the players have. Being able to create an environment where a player doesn’t feel demoralized when his teammate criticizes a decision he made or play he failed to create is the sort of environment that can be pushed in the real world too.

Hi, I am Solyh Ahmad and I am currently based in Singapore as a Program Manager at an international non-profit organisation, Ashoka.

In my line of work, I deal with a lot of people, thus social skills play a critical role and certainly pivotal in dealing with human-to-human relationships. As I get to interact with many social entrepreneurs around the world, doing fantastic work that impact societies positively, one key social trait I observe them having is resiliency, as they often have to navigate their social enterprises radically different than a for-profit business.

Firstly, resilience is driven by persistence, and often the ability to survive any setbacks and come back stronger. It is also known as the ability to restart, reinvent, search, and carve new opportunities through a growth mind-set popularised by Carol Dweck’s work. Often times, it takes courage to remain steadfast to their social mission for these social entrepreneurs as social impact work is usually complex.

Their experience invited myself to introspect and look at how resilience have personally applied to me. I have pursued a non-traditional and non-linear career path that included restarting in a new field, and even a new country. What keeps me driven is that I am addicted to the adrenaline of challenging myself, not letting myself get too comfortable at a certain place so that I can keep growing and learning. Just like these social entrepreneurs, it reminds those around us to endeavour and remain true to my mission of growing and learning to serve the society through betterment.

Furthermore, resilience is key especially in the current climate of uncertainty as our society is witnessing upheavals and change at breakneck speed. Those amongst us who are comfortable with uncertainties and have the ability to adapt quickly will thrive. Hence, the approach I took to develop resiliency is to be a self-starter – for example, many workplaces these days encourage one to be empowered to come up with new ideas and lead new initiatives. Take this as an opportunity to acquire new skills and confidence to conceive an idea into fruition. With each and every success in doing so, it will build on our capacity and capability to face with any challenges and overcome it innovatively as it forces us to be resourceful in overcoming the unfamiliar. This is also a message I would like to invite our listeners to partake and emerge stronger by being resilient with every adversity we overcome.

Thank you Solyh for sharing your insightful thoughts on resilience with us.

I can resonate with what Solyh says about the importance of resilience in the non-profit sector as I was interning in an NGO called Aidha in Singapore over the summer. Aidha aims to empower foreign domestic workers in Singapore that come from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar through financial education. I really enjoyed my experience working in Aidha. However, it was also a challenging time for the team as the world was trying to adjust to the new normal due to Covid-19 outbreak. Aidha provides foreign domestic workers with courses such as money management, opening a bank account in Singapore,  dealing with stress, Zumba, and yoga. That is why I witnessed how the organization had to work hard to adapt the course material to online format in a very short period of time. This task required a lot of resilience. To build on Solyh’s ideas, I can say that resilience is mostly the key element to overcome a difficult situation as my experience also showed. It is the inner strength of someone that allows us to perceive the difficulties not as obstacles but as great opportunities to learn and grow.

In fact, we also have a resilience course in Aidha and I had the opportunity to facilitate the discussion of our students in the breakout rooms. This is when I learned about the students’ creative and interesting ways of staying resilient in the face of tough situations. Their ideas made me realise that simple things we do can helps us build resilience. For instance, one of the students shared how seeing her plants grow gives her hope and motivates her.

So, I think resilience is very much about having a positive mindset as well. Staying optimistic and hopeful is a great way to focus on solving the problems we face and keep moving rather than losing time and energy, being captured by bad emotions. What is your method to remain resilient?

Hey, everyone. My name is JB Makhani. I am an eighth-grade US history teacher and grade level chair at YES Prep public schools. I am here in Houston at Public Charter School network that serves low-income students of color. I graduated from Rice University in 2016, I’m a Teach for America core member. I’m here in Houston. And I was part of Duncan College at Rice. I’m also currently getting a master’s from Columbia, and I am in school leadership.

I wanted to just talk to you briefly today about the education industry and some of the core values that have helped myself as well as my colleagues get through, succeed, and thrive in the education industry.

So when I think of teaching, I think of some key words that have helped me guide my journey. And that’s commitment, motivation, passion, resilience.

I quickly realized that the two-year Teach for America commitment, first of all, was not going to be two years, and that the only way to survive was to have passion and resilience for the job. Now, there aren’t enough hours in the day, and the work is too difficult for teachers that do not have a passion for the work. I’ve seen this with my colleagues, and I’ve seen this with teachers every year who come into the industry, and who turned out to thrive and develop into really strong people because of the difficult work.

I think a great example of developing teachers and creating excellent teachers who are innovative is the current pandemic. Teachers are the first ones who are asked to go back. We’ve learned more and more how much we need teachers. If you know, parents who have tried to homeschool their kids right now, their first thought was that they want teachers to be back with our kids. We want to provide for our students because they deserve that, so let’s try and find a way.  We could easily just post videos and have students watch the videos, not really engage, do random assignments to check off boxes. But what I’ve seen, not just with the YES prep, but also across the nation, is going further, is innovating these uncharted territories using technology, for going one step ahead. We’re finding current events for engaging students in their homes. We’re trying to relate to them. We’re coming up with interactive tools to help them.

And all these different ways that are going beyond the status quo, I think, is just a microcosm of the education industry. Teachers go above and beyond every day. It’s not a nine to five job. And you can see this passion and this motivation that these teachers have that is contagious. It’s part of why I’ve stayed, and it’s part of why I joined the teaching industry.

Because one 13 year old kid is sitting there at their desk or across their laptop, which, unfortunately, I have to do now, and they’re wanting to learn, and they’re asking you questions about this and that and this and that. You have to have the answers. And those people push you to stay at school a little bit later to finish that lesson plan and they also encourage you at home during a pandemic to go that extra mile to engage them to find something that will be creative.

And maybe 10 years from now, when that student looks back on their schooling, they remember you and they remember that one lesson that you went above and beyond with their resonated with them. That’s the power that teachers have, that’s why innovation and a commitment to excellence is required. It is definitely a key pillar in the education industry. Thank you.

I think JB gave us an excellent insight on the position teachers are in during this pandemic. It has clearly brought out the innovative side of teaching because of the need to provide an interactive learning environment for the students. The same core values that he mentions seems to apply to both sides. Commitment, motivation and passion have become essential for students as well in facing the challenges of staying engaged with online classes, and building their resiliency along the way.

Hi there. My name is Lucas Sanchez and I live in Miami, Florida.

I have a lot of jobs as a musician. I am currently the principal timpanist of the Palm Beach Symphony, the Florida Grand Opera, and the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra. I also play percussion for the new deco ensemble, which is a smaller orchestra that performs more modern pop works and arrangements in the Miami area as well. As principal timpanist of the symphony, my job is primarily to play the timpani, the large kettle drums in the back of the orchestra, which is a lot of fun because they’re present in so many different kinds of music all the way back to Mozart and Bach. So oftentimes, I’m the only percussionist, the only drummer in the orchestra. I also teach a lot. I teach the percussionist of the greater Miami Symphony. I maintain a private home studio, both online and in person lessons at this point, and I also teach at different middle schools and high schools around the Miami area.

In mid-March, all of our concerts were canceled.  I’ve had a few projects here and there with music, but it’s been largely shifted over into music education for this summer, and so I define resilience as the ability to bounce back quickly, and the ability to be flexible. I think it’s important, especially for musicians, to understand that having good resilience doesn’t just necessarily mean that you keep going in your field and you keep doing the same thing over and over, but adapting to new ways of thinking. For instance, you’re hearing me on my new setup with a microphone, an audio interface, and a new PC that I built for myself. And I think that’s one of the ways that I’ve really shown resilience is by adapting to teaching online and getting the tools that I need to be successful in that capacity.

A daily practice that I have to show my resilience as a musician is to always do something music related every single day. I currently tutor in mathematics as well as my other job in order to make up the lost income that I have. But I always try and make an effort every day to sit down at the piano keyboard, to go behind my timpani to just pad on a drum pad for a little bit. Because it’s important as my identity as a musician that I be making music every single day. So I would say that’s my daily practice and how I show resilience is to do a little bit of music every day, even when it’s full of eight hours of teaching math.

I think one of the most important things we can do to help other people build their own internal resilience is just offer a listening ear when they need it. Especially nowadays, I find myself, whenever I talk to other people, I tend to talk a little bit too much, and being a natural introvert, that’s strange for me. I think it’s because we’ve been so socially isolated from people and I’m excited to see other people, but I think it’s also important to listen to what other people are saying and what their troubles are and coming up with solutions together. Even if you just listen to someone and don’t offer any feedback, just the fact of getting someone to speak, you know, to speak their mind can often lead them to the solution themselves, which I find in my own teaching both in math and music. Often a student will come to a good way to build resilience when they realize that they have the answers themselves. All it takes sometimes is a kind listener. Like me with a problem, saying “Hey, these strokes don’t sound quite even, I’m not exactly sure.” And then they realize, “Oh, it’s because my right hand is higher than my left hand.” Or in mathematics, someone will come to me, “I’m not exactly sure how to solve this algebra equation.” And then all of a sudden it clicks for them. “Oh right, I need to add the same thing to both sides to cancel out.” So I think just offering a listening ear is really useful.

Lucas makes a good distinction on how resilience is not just being present, but adapting. In the pursuit of one’s goal, there is a good chance they will hit a plateau at some point. Repetition is rarely good enough to overcome said plateau, so the incorporation of new ideas through adaptation is a key factor to true resilience. Lucas also brings up a good method for building resilience. Typically, resilience is built through prolonged struggle. On the other hand, constantly receiving help can build complacency. Sometimes we may catch ourselves deeming our own thought to not be worth exploring; but simply having someone there to listen can better help us think, as we are forced to make coherent thoughts to communicate with them.

Hello, my name is Fatmanur Erdogan. Currently I am the managing partner for a strategic communications firm called IPPA communications. We develop strategies to change corporate cultures, raise reputation scores, prepare organizations for the digital world and design communications programs that align with the corporate goals.

I am and always have been an entrepreneurial executive. It means that routine is not my forte. I am originally from Istanbul but lived most of my adult life abroad working in countries such as Norway, Singapore and California. In my work, I held jobs where I would manage international markets, which meant that I would always be on the go. This kind of life is truly wonderful for me because I feel happiest when I’m on my way to the airport to explore new cultures, new landscapes, new people, and new knowledge. The discovery process is and has always been fascinating for me. So when you have a creative and curious personality like mine, you tend to be resourceful. At least when you run out of resources, one way or another, you figure out a way to get new ones. So at times of difficulty, it is somewhat in your nature to tap into one of these resources and find a way out of your current situation. Yet, just like every other human being, going through these tough times is excruciating. But over time, you learn that the ability to push through pain points in life, whether it’s personal, social, or professional, is key to a resilient life.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that a resilient life is a rich life in which you have good relationships with your friends and family, and enticing intellectual life and hobbies that are dear to you. If your focus in life is only on one of these dimensions, it becomes somewhat harder for you to bounce back when you fall and easier to go into depressive states. The ability to push through pain points in life means you need to grant permission to yourself. Life is about ups and downs for pretty much all of us. Just like you grant permission to yourself to be happy and joyful, you need to grant permission to be stressed, miserable, agitated or sad. What makes us least resilient in life is when we start to think a certain way and are unable to entertain other perspectives. But thoughts happen spontaneously, right? You can’t really control your thoughts all the time. That’s a fact. But thoughts can be deliberate too. For your thoughts to change, you need to first change your behavior. That means whatever it is that you need to get done, you need to have a particular end goal in mind. And that end goal will give you a sense of urgency and energy, which will help you move forward and overcome your inertia. Because when you get too stressed, you may feel numb, can’t move or think clearly. If you ever get in such a state, there are some new neuroscientific research on breathing techniques such as breathing in twice from your nose and breathing out from your mouth. Do that for about 10 or 15 times. This will help you get your energy and focus back. Now that you have set a new goal to overcome your situation, you must now install self-rewards. The more often that you can self-reward some aspect of the process, the more energy and focus you will have. So in a nutshell, action, not inaction, is the best solution to a resilient life.

Thank you, Miss Erdogan, for such thoughtful reflections on your career and personal life. When I first heard this interview, what stood out to me was the importance of deliberateness. From the thoughts we think, to purposefully selecting a fulfilling career path, choosing the life you want to live and the mindset you want to have is an important value impressed on me from this interview.

As a college student, I think it is far too easy to just live day-to-day, not planning ahead, and not being deliberate in our involvements and connections. It’s particularly hard to do this, when it’s almost impossible to know the difference between finding a job and selecting a career. What I took away from this reflection is that resilience starts from the small moments, the way we think, the way we breathe. It’s also about designing a life based around encouragement, like the self-rewards that incentivize action. As college students, I think that can be as simple as study breaks or a night out, but to those of us just learning the importance of resilience and deliberateness that can truly make all the difference.

My name is Jason Harris and I’m the founder of ITOpenly.

I want to talk briefly about resiliency: what it is to us personally, and what it is to others, and how we can quantify it in the workplace.

Resiliency to many of us is the same thing… we can feel it clearly on the inside. We know that it’s the ability to keep doing what we do in spite of adversity or failure. I generally believe it’s knowing that inside ourselves, we have what it takes to achieve something.

Now that being said, how we feel and knowing what’s inside of us does not translate to our business relationships. Our customers can’t look at us and know we have what it takes to stick with it and succeed. We have to provide that information to them in a format that’s meaningful.

In our professional lives the idea of “What does resiliency mean to others” isn’t a common theme, but it is very important professionally because one of the issues that we all run into is, “How do we convey our resiliency to a customer, employer or peer?“

My answer to that is: in order to convey this, we have to quantify it. Quantifying it is the fastest way to create the understanding in others that we are involved and interested in the outcome of their goals.

So how do we do this? How do we quantify? There are lots of answers, and the answer can vary from project to project but here are three basics that can give you a specific measure for your resiliency in the workplace.

First is: Versioning – Any document or process that you are revising for yourself or a client should have versioning in it. This gives a linear and quantitative number to our efforts on any particular project, capturing how many times we have worked on a single thing and generated new iterations is critical to showcasing our value and longevity. You can do this manually, and often times, many project tools have this function built. Use it. It is good best practice and can benefit you professionally when it comes time for promotions and annual reviews.

Next is: Standard metrics Or KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) – Most companies have standard metrics for any process or procedure, or anything that requires a quantifiable result. An example would be if you’re in a call center, they have average handle time, which is the time to complete a phone call with a customer from beginning to end, and that’s how they gauge individual and departmental success. Capture those metrics for your own use. They’ll provide you with hard data on a primary job function that shows your progress. It shows your resiliency. It is literally the road you have been down, in hard numbers.

Last would be: Quality or satisfaction surveys – This one I feel is important because it can capture and quantify what’s called “intangibles.”  Your likability, your soft skills, and the things we don’t normally attribute numbers to. These things can be quantified through customer surveys. They can be scored.  Whether you define or build your own on a site like Survey Monkey, or if you employer already has survey in place, be sure to capture that data. It too is hard data and tells your story where you are and where you were, and then also showcasing where you are going. 

You might say, “This is all fine, but what does this have to do with being resilient?” My answer to that is, if you cannot quantify what you have done, you cannot demonstrate what you’re going to do. 

Providing data and context allows your “customer,” whether it’s your boss, a peer, or an actual client, the ability to see and visualize your efforts and that is what translates to resilience. Providing them the impression of who you are and what you are capable of in numbers.

If you do not quantify your efforts, you can’t quantify your resiliency. It’s all just hearsay.

My name is Becky Wade. I am a professional runner and author, and I live in Boulder, Colorado.

To me, resilience is having the patience, the self-confidence and the fortitude to weather difficult moments in order to get a little bit closer to your ultimate end goal. And for me, as a professional marathoner, that’s just to maximize my potential as a long distance runner. And resilience is so relevant to what I do because first of all, female marathoners aren’t at their best until their late 30s or early 40s. And so, if I were to get so down and defeated after every defeat, or every bad workout, that I would give up, I would never even get close to reaching my potential because I just wouldn’t be in the sport long enough.

And the way that I practice and grow my own resilience is really just day to day keeping my eyes on a long-term goal so that you know the little highs and the lows that come every workout, every day. They don’t ruffle me too much. And I just know that that’s all part of the process. And so by having a long term goal by trying to embody grittiness in every workout and every race and just knowing that even on the tough days I’m gaining something out of it. That’s really how I channel resilience in my day to day practice of being a runner.

Becky’s experience as a runner had me really thinking about the incredible similarities runners have to musicians. Although the athletes in college might not be hanging out with the classical music nerds too much, although I did have a track from Rice, athletes and musicians actually deal with resilience in really similar ways. We both have to execute a very specific task. And that task needs attention over a long period of time. In fact, over our entire life, and Becky offers helpful ways to work with us day to day. I really like when she said that resilience is having the patience, the self-confidence and the fortitude to weather difficult moments. As a music student, I definitely had bad days where my confidence was low, couldn’t execute specific passage, or simply thought that I had a bad performance. But it’s weathering these bad days that will allow us to inch closer to our goal in the long run, no pun intended.

Becky’s goal as a runner are just as much physical as we musicians goals are physical too. Both can be incredibly personal when we have a bad day because that means our bodies having a bad day. But I think Becky’s embodiment of grit in our everyday life can help anyone with their long-term goals.