Case studies in resilience

When I ask clients what resilience means, we're asked, could you address resilience? We need to boost resilience. What is resilience? Just to see what it is that they're actually asking for, I actually have learned from my clients that they see resilience in very different ways. There are three core concepts to understand resilience before we jump into this, to make sure that we're looking at the same thing. If you'd look in the dictionary, you will see that resilience is the ability of a substance to spring back, to regain shape, to return to its natural form. That's resilience, this idea of bouncing back. But many people when they talk about resilience, they are worried about this ability to persevere, to endure, to put their shoulder to the wheel and drive through something that's difficult. It's some degree of endurance and toughness, that has to do with resilience. But lastly, and very importantly, a lot of people when they talk about resilience, they are implying this ability to transform. If you have endured something really challenging and you put your shoulder to the wheel and you've driven through it, well, you come through that experience, you've changed in some way. You never regained form exactly, you always come back as something different and in many cases even better and stronger. This idea of the phoenix emerging from the ashes, that is partly what we're talking about as resilience. There's returning to form, there's enduring the tough trials, and there's the transformation that comes from this experience. When we talk about resilience, we're talking about something that touches all three of these bases.