Crises and challenges are a part of all our lives. The current COVID-19 situation is something we could have never anticipated, and even as we still deal with the primary public health and safety implications and concerns, it is obvious that the secondary impact on the economy, businesses, our work, and even our personal lives have been and will continue to be significant as well.

Every day, each of us experiences the effects of this situation. Many of us have been trying (and sometimes failing) to cope with it somehow, going about our days, hoping for a quicker end to the crisis - for a time when things could return to a relative “normal”.

But is there a better way we can approach this? If, instead of just hanging on, we could thrive and rise to the occasion of the challenge? What if we could become RESILIENT?

The Different Ways We Respond to Challenges

To understand what personal resilience really means in practice, we can start by looking at how different people respond to a crisis. This understanding can help us to plot the essential qualities of what resilience means in our lives and reactions to crises.

The author Gail Wagnild in her book True Resilience – Building a Life of Strength, Courage, and Meaning talks about four main ways people respond to adversity.

According to Wagnild, some of us might feel so overwhelmed we simply ‘Give Up’. The second group of people choose to simply carry on with their lives as if nothing had happened. If no change occurs to improve the situation they are in, they too eventually ‘give up’. The third group responds to the crisis by reacting to the change and challenge, adopting and functioning in a ‘get by’ mode to cope with the crisis as it happens. In this mode, the person demonstrates some elements of resilience in dealing with the challenges at hand.

The fourth group of people choose to unfold the full power of resilience by going beyond the first three levels of response to a crisis. They adopt a ‘Learn and Grow’ mindset. With this attitude, they are able to not only deal with the challenges in the moment, but eventually emerge stronger from the adverse experience. Positive Psychology expert Martin Seligman has also referred to this outcome as ‘Post-traumatic Growth’.

Purpose

One quality that is demonstrated by those who ‘learn and grow’ when dealing with adversity is that they approach the crisis by remembering their ‘purpose’ . These individuals are able to adopt a resilient response because they lead their lives with a purpose-driven mindset, and even in the face of challenges, they keep this purpose as their north-star. The purpose-driven approach towards their work and life enables them to find meaning in what they do and the situations they face, allowing them to ‘Learn and Grow’ even in the most difficult of times.

For those of us who might not always default into the fourth response of ‘Learn and Grow’ when faced with adversity, gaining some clarity into our purpose is a good start to building and adopting resilient behaviours. 

One simple way to gain clarity on our purpose is to either design and set goals, or review existing goals that we have. These can be in any area in the many facets of our work and personal lives. We can start by looking at these goals, and anchoring our actions and mindset around these to build purpose. By mindfully acknowledging this, our response to current and future adversity will begin to look more and more like the fourth group of people who ‘Learn and Grow’ even in hard times.

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