Nobody arrives resilient, at least not with a tiny emotional tool belt and a laminated certificate that says, “Congratulations, you are now ready for suffering.” Wouldn’t that be nice?
We tend to talk about resilience as if it is a personality trait. Some people have it. Some people don’t. Some people are sturdy oak trees with deep roots and excellent emotional hydration, while the rest of us are decorative patio umbrellas in a windstorm, flipping inside out at the first sign of trouble.
Nobody is born resilient.
But I’ve found that resilience is not something you either have or lack, it’s something you do. It’s built over time through repeated choices. I often tell my members, “You want the good news? You have a choice. And the bad news? You have a choice.” And these span all kinds of choices, whether they are small ones, boring ones, sometimes invisible ones or ones that may feel silly or inconsequential. Resilience and choice can look like getting up every morning, even when it’s cold, or raining, or you haven’t slept well to go to the gym. It is the choice to tell the truth when denial would be more comfortable or to ask for help when your pride would prefer to cosplay as competence. One of the common, but difficult choices I see is the choice to rest before your body files a formal complaint, because many of us feel like we have to do it all, all the time. There are the harder choices too, to begin again after the plan falls apart, the relationship ends, the deal dies, the diagnosis comes, the dream changes shape.
Sometimes I think we have this vision of resilience, like it’s something unshakeable. That version of resilience is not only unrealistic, it is deeply unhelpful. Being unshakeable sounds impressive, but it also sounds like a statue. And while statues are lovely in gardens and town squares, they are not exactly known for growth, adaptability, or emotional range.
Real resilience shakes, bends, and sometimes cries in the car (very handy during a divorce, car crying is always timebound, just make sure you have tissues and for those that wear it, invest in waterproof mascara). Resilience is rage walks around the block and texts sent to people we trust that say, “I’m not okay today.” It lets the disappointment be disappointing before trying to alchemize it into a lesson. Real resilience does not bypass the hard thing. I think that’s where there’s confusion about resilience, similar to the confusion about courage.
Resilience is not about performance.
Many of us have confused resilience with endurance. We think being resilient means we can keep taking hit after hit without needing anything, that we don’t need to take a pause, or to take care of ourselves. We mistake it for not needing to process or lean into softness in the moments that we can. We turn resilience into another performance metric, as if the goal is to become so efficient at handling pain that we barely notice it anymore.
No, thank you. Hard pass. Please remove me from this email blast.
Resilience is not the absence of impact. It is the ability to be impacted and still remain in relationship with yourself. It is the ability to say, “This hurt me,” without deciding that hurt gets the final word.
Resilience is quiet and consistent.
In inspirational stories, resilience is rarely the big cinematic moment. It is not always the swelling music, the finish line, the glorious comeback, the slow motion leap over the impossible. More often, resilience is the middle. The part nobody puts on the highlight reel because it looks suspiciously like Tuesday. It’s Andy Dufresne with a spoon in Shawshank Redemption.
It is the writer returning to the page each day, regardless of how they feel, or the leader repairing trust one conversation at a time. Resilience is the spouses who apologize and try again or an athlete doing physical therapy post-injury when no one is cheering. Some of the most beautiful examples of resilience are the people who choose to stay open after life has given them every reason to close.
Resilience lives in the repetition, the getting up over and over again, not in the declaration.
So how do we practice it before life demands it from us?
Building Resilience in Three
1. Get comfortable with discomfort.
First, develop a relationship with difficulty before it arrives.
This sounds wildly inconvenient, I know. Most of us would prefer difficulty to call ahead, make a reservation, and show up during a lighter calendar week. But difficulty is not known for its manners or its timing.
Developing a relationship with difficulty means we stop treating discomfort as a sign that something has gone wrong. Sometimes discomfort is information, other times it is growth. We often encounter difficulty as the edge of a capacity we are building.
This does not mean we go looking for suffering like some sort of personal development raccoon rummaging through the trash for meaning. It means we practice staying present in small moments of discomfort so we are not completely knocked flat by larger ones. What’s difficult for you? Lean into it.
Have the awkward conversation.
Try the thing you are bad at. More than once. Or try a few things you’re bad at.
Let someone give you feedback without immediately building a legal defense.
Sit in uncertainty without sprinting toward control. I call this treading water without land in sight.
All of these suggestions are tiny resilience reps or emotional lunges, if you will. And while they may be wildly annoying, they’re effective in building resilience.
2. Reflect on the Meaning of What You Experience
The second part of resilience is to reflect on those experiences with difficulty and discomfort before you move on. This is the one most high performing people hate because when something hard happens, many of us want to metabolize it at the speed of a HotPocket in a microwave.
Resilience is not built only by surviving hard things, but by making meaning from them. So before you rush to the next goal, the next meeting, the next shiny distraction, pause long enough to ask: What happened here? What did this ask of me? What did I learn about my limits, my needs, my patterns, my people, my courage? What would I do differently next time? What am I proud of, even if the outcome was FTOP (a term my friend and I coined that stands for Flaming Tower of Poop)?
Reflection turns experience into wisdom. Without it, we may repeat the pain without receiving the lesson.
3. Track Your Resilience Curriculum
Third, track your own resilience curriculum. I see a lot of great speakers in my role as a Vistage Chair. One of the most inspirational is Klyn Ellsbury, a woman who is living and thriving with Cystic Fibrosis. She delivers an incredible keynote, and in the workshop in which I saw her, she talks about the Japanese concept of a misogi. Misogi is the practice of choosing one hard, meaningful challenge that strips away the noise, tests your edges, and reminds you what you’re capable of.
Even if you don’t engage in a misogi, you can still track your resilience curriculum as it plays out naturally in your life. I love this idea because it assumes life is not just happening to us but it is also teaching us (not always gently), but teaching us nonetheless.
Your resilience curriculum is the pattern of lessons life keeps handing you.
Maybe your curriculum is learning to ask for help or learning not to abandon yourself to keep the peace. It could be to stop confusing urgency with importance or learning that rest is not a reward for finishing “everything”, because “everything” is a lying little goblin and is never finished.
When you begin to track your own curriculum, you can start to see your growth. You can see where you used to collapse but now bend, where you used to avoid but now engage, where you used to numb but now name, and where you used to quit yourself but now stay.
That is resilience.
Resilience is the practice of returning. It can be returning to your values, your breath, the work, the page, the conversation, or even to yourself.
Remember that nobody arrives resilient but we become resilient choice by choice, practice by practice, repair by repair. We become it in the quiet, unglamorous middle, long before anyone sees the transformation.
I think it’s one of the things that makes resilience so powerful and such a critical piece of an inspirational narrative because it reminds us that we are not finished becoming.