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From writers and researchers, I receive a number of questions about resilience these days. It is a topic of ongoing interest to positive psychologists and - in light of economic and other challenges around the world - also a topic of current interest to people in general. What is resilience? How can we assess who has it? How can we cultivate it? Read More
The "Resiliency Trap"
I think you're spot on in your thinking about resiliency. The ability to "bounce back to normal" is a great way of phrasing it, and one that I'll steal and use blatantly.
I do k-12 school consulting mostly around workplace climate and job satisfaction issues for educators. My work often bleeds into resiliency. And frankly, I've grown a bit cynical about the term. It seems that too often resiliency ends up like this: "We'll train you to become more resilient but we won't change any of the conditions that led you to need resiliency in the first place."
From an organizational perspective, it seems clear that we want resilient adults working in thoughtful, resilient systems. We DON'T want resilient adults working in caustic, destructive environments. Hence the potential "trap" of resiliency training.
Yes sir. To continue my
Yes sir. To continue my tennis ball analogy, if you squeeze the daylights out of it for a long period of time, it will be at best a deflated version of the original. I am tempted to respond to questions from the media about the economic crisis from a positive psychology perspective to say "it's the economy, stupid," not the psychological makeup of the people suffering. It's so easy to fall into what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, blaming the person rather than the situation. CP
Resilience is more a social than an individual concept
Greater resilience occurs through cooperative processes - we are social beings. Analysis of trends such as the UK's Transition Culture - set up to deal with the Long Emergency; economic crises and geopolitical instability, is based on rediscovering our social ways of resilience. See http://www.transitiontowns.org/ and http://transitionculture.org/ to understand how resilience is not treated as an individual process in real life.
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