We Hear a Lot About Resilience. But How Does It Work in Practice?

At work a couple of weeks ago, I attended a half-day mandatory training session on developing workplace resilience.

The speaker's slide deck defined workplace resilience as "the ability to cope and bounce back from the ups and downs and challenges that we encounter at work. It includes the skill to manage anything from a tough workload to difficult customers or frustrating colleagues."

At first, I struggled to engage with the presentation. Over the last decade or so, "resilience" has begun to sound like a buzzword. I've often found it treated like a code for "handle your own shit yourself, so the rest of us won't have to."

Again, vulnerability, in that way it has of exposing social and individual illusions, makes people deeply uncomfortable. Thus it might be easy for them to fall back on a form of gaslighting that insists your difficulty bouncing back is a "you problem," a character flaw rather than a rational response to systemic imbalances.

The training was mandatory, though, so as we do, I stuck it out, writing down my values from a list the presenter gave us. As my group talked through values like "fairness," "hard work," "excellence," "perseverance," my train of cynicism kept rolling.

I thought about how those values can often be used as the metrics by which we judge others and are judged:

• What feels like hard work to my ADHD brain might look lackadaisical to others; someone else's definition of perseverance might outright exhaust me.
• "Fairness" can indicate an attachment to outcome; the pursuit of "excellence" can mask a degree of perfectionism that keeps us small.
• We might even find we have double standards, putting our own values aside "just to get things done" or telling ourselves we can put our petty individual values aside "for the good of the organization" just until the project is done.

(My values, perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, were inclusion, trust, and accountability. From a different list in a different exercise, I chose values of connectedness, autonomy, fulfillment, and peace. I'm not sure why lists of values should be non-standardized.)

Then, we talked about how resilience helps us "to address the mistaken concept that we have no choice or ability in the stress we experience at work."

It was at this point that I started to check out. "But abuse hijacks our ability to choose," I wrote in the margin of my handout. Abuse by a partner, a supervisor or coworker, and/or customers can wear us down over time, affecting our sense of self worth and power. If we grew up in abuse, powerlessness is often just normal, warping our ability to show up even in everyday situations. We live our lives trapped in survival mode.

Indeed, the presentation described three forms of resilience development that were highly individualized: thinking and coping strategies, lifestyle factors, and a strong support network. The first becomes warped by abuse. The second and third are much harder to change or access when you're in abuse.

Workplaces like to say they aren't the place to heal these things. I disagree, and so do others. We spend at least one-third of our waking hours at work over the course of our lifetimes. We build friendships and partnerships at work. Our work may not always give us a sense of purpose, but it does help to define who we are as people.

Perhaps that's in part why 19 percent of organizational respondents to a 2013 Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey indicated they had experienced at least one domestic violence incident in the previous year. Workplaces are "soft" targets for abusers, yes. But they also represent lives the abusers' targets are trying to build: better, more independent and, yes, resilient.

Building resilience (or not) is a group effort

Then the presentation did something I didn't expect: rather than lecture us on the bog-standard methods of managing our own mental health and wellbeing, our presenter engaged us on what works for us individually. Subtle team-building aside, I realized I was already familiar with the "anchors" she spoke about:

• Maintenance anchors, or habits, that help a person maintain a positive attitude. Even in survival mode, mine include copious cups of tea, a daily reflective practice journal, caring for various aspects of my home, and prayer.
• Repair anchors that help a person to bounce back from "bad mood." This one is a little more difficult because my social contacts are (still) limited and my trust issues (still) difficult to sort through. I often end up falling back on my maintenance anchors for repair, too.

With those realizations, I found myself able to re-engage with the presenter and her content. As we moved into team dynamics and how individual resilience (or lack thereof) affects teams, I made notes to myself on unconscious influences leading to undercurrents in how teams function.

For example, over the past ten years, I've personally discovered I had ADHD as well as an autoimmune condition. Even though it was helpful to know that my neurodivergent traits weren't just character flaws after all, I learned that by some estimates, by the time they're 10, ADHD'ers have heard negative messages 20,000 more times than their peers.

"Constantly being corrected or told no can impact a child's self-esteem, confidence, creativity, and willingness to try new things," wrote one coach. Over time, as I aged from a self-critical kid to a self-critical adult, my body had learned to literally attack itself.

Others might not turn so inward. Neurodivergent or not, people's insecurities and projections can manifest as control issues in some, fawning in others, or unhealthy levels of competition. These imbalances, I realized, were behind the "work silos" our presenter described.

As she outlined the inefficiency, limited communication, and power struggles among other impacts of silos, it was easy to see these dynamics in play in various levels of our own organization. But I couldn't help also thinking about how they might apply to emergency management, too.

Communities cannot be resilient without resilient individuals

I've recently started to see more references to "building resilient communities":

• Community "resilience hubs" are popping up around the country, serving as central "facilities that are enhanced to support residents or critical infrastructure and coordinate resource distribution and services before, during, and after disruptions like wildfires and floods, heat waves, and even pandemics." (Center for Climate and Energy Solutions)
• The Strong Towns movement is working to empower citizens to reimagine urban and suburban development by organizing at the local level.
• And the group Organizing Resilience, led by survivors of Hurricanes Katrina (New Orleans), Sandy (New York), Harvey (Houston), and Maria (Puerto Rico), is working to reshape post-disaster communities.

These efforts, though, require resilient individuals who can communicate effectively, even while navigating the often rapid changes and uncertainties inherent in modern life. Slowing down enough to accommodate individuals who are still learning resilience for themselves might seem like an undue burden on the mission. To me, though, that's only an indicator of how important such accommodations are.

In an article for Fast Company, neuroscientist Maya Shankar offered five in-depth insights into managing uncertainty. Rather than present only one acceptable approach, the article makes room for different individual approaches to crisis. Distraction, confronting negative emotions, and even denial all have their own benefits.

This kind of flexibility is, in my experience, the kind of inclusion that can knit community members together and lead to better problem-solving in the long run. By allowing people the time and space to come to terms with challenges they face, accepting that everyone has a different timeline and a different process to move through before they're ready to move forward, we create the kinds of communities – families, workplaces, and volunteer groups – we keep saying we want.