From the course: Resilience Skills to Navigate Disruption and Uncertainty

Learn that resilience is in our DNA as humans

From the course: Resilience Skills to Navigate Disruption and Uncertainty

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Learn that resilience is in our DNA as humans

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- So many people wonder if they're resilient enough, let alone resilient at all. And so the good news is that resilience is the essence of being human. It's part of our DNA. What do I mean about resilience being part of our DNA? I mean that far from becoming resilient, we are actually born resilient. Let me tell you what I mean. Consider this. For those of us that were born into an able body, we all learned to walk. We fell down, we cracked our heads open, we bruised our legs. But did that stop us? Did any of us say, "This walking thing just isn't for me?" Nope, we all learned to walk. We all demonstrated resilience as children in some way, and so remembering that resilience within us as kids is the key as adults. So we're on the same page, let's align on a shared definition of resilience I'd like for us to use in this course. This definition of resilience is based on what I believe resilience to be after interviewing hundreds of people and collecting thousands of pieces of data on how people face their greatest challenges, so here it is. Resilience is facing the inevitable Big 3 C moments. That's challenge, change and complexity, and allowing ourselves, over time, to be enhanced by those experiences, not diminished by them. What you heard in this definition is as important as what you didn't hear. For example, what you didn't hear were the words quickly recover. Oftentimes being able to quickly recover is thought to be associated with resilience, but this is actually not true. In fact, many times the people that come back the fastest, quickly returning to work after a loss, or athletes that come back quickly from an injury, these are the ones that are most likely to have significant physical and mental health complications later on. Later in this course, I'm going to take this one step further and talk about the biggest myth of resilience that most people still believe that keeps us from recognizing how resilient we all truly are. When we recognize that resilience exists within all of us, it's less daunting to develop because when we harness our resilience, it's about uncovering what already exists within us, the resilience that's naturally part of our DNA, rather than developing a completely new skillset.

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