Resilience gives us all the power to cope by learning, adapting, and growing from life’s experiences. Resilience also helps us to move forward into a new future with improved ways of thinking and feeling that can lead to a more fulfilling life. We all need to be resilient now more than ever. However, resilience is shaped by context, so rather than just admiring people who achieve victory over adversity, we should look at the circumstances that allowed that victory to occur.
Resilience has become a generational buzzword. Its meaning has been tainted and it is been misused and watered down through overuse. It is unfortunate that the words “resilient” and “resilience” are relatively vague terms which are overused and misused at times. Every news bulletin, every documentary about recent events and even sporting commentaries are liberally littered with the words. There are good intentions in encouraging everyone to have resilience and to be resilient, but this shouldn’t be used as being synonymous with hardiness recovery, being tough, and grit and determination. It also involves accepting that at times it’s okay not to be okay. We should acknowledge that life can be tough and learn and grow from this. If we define resilience just as the ability to withstand adversity, it does nothing to address the causes of the adversity in the first place, and there is even poison within its meaning.
Resilience and being resilient can throw a focus on the ability or the responsibility of people to accommodate some form of adversity. This goes along with the capacity and compliance to accept less than favourable circumstances that may include: inadequate resourcing, inequitable conditions and political agendas that work against their long term wellbeing. We need to watch for the poison in resilience when marginalised people, including ethnic minorities, disabled, gender fluid, neurodiverse people, amongst others, are being labelled in this way as this can have other implications.
The focus on resilience and applauding people for being resilient makes it too easy for policymakers to avoid looking for real solutions. Often we fail to recognise the poison of resilience even within our day to day work environment. “Be more resilient” is a phrase that leaders can sometimes use to dismiss concerns about aspects of work that are not working for them. It’s become an easy way to push problems back onto teams rather than to tackle them directly. It can be used by leaders and managers to cover up numerous issues with organisational culture or their inadequacies of performing their role. People can end up feeling as though they’re in the wrong for raising issues that acknowledges problems or management’s dereliction of duty. Real long term issues in the workplace can occur as over time, a culture of fear develops where people feel unable to raise any concerns as they know they will be met with, “You just need to be more resilient“.
We should always celebrate true resilience. The human ability to recover, adapt, and adjust to difficult conditions. Let’s extract the poison or otherwise and look at reserving the use of the words “resilient” and “resilience” within their correct context and so give more resilience to resilience.
