Resilience: key ideas and principles

Resilience arises from a complex set of individual and social factors.

So what have we learnt so far?

• Resilience is a process we work towards, not a defined permanent state.
• We need to work with others and nurture our networks to become more resilient.
• Resilience is about being able to ‘bounce back’ after difficult times.
• Resilience is also about generating creative solutions to everyday problems during times of stability.
• We can learn to respond in more or less resilient ways.
• Isolated, individual strategies don’t work.
• Resilience requires a systematic or ecological approach.

We’ve already started to explore some of the skills and strategies that we need to learn to become more resilient, both personally and professionally.

One of the key takeaways from this week is that resilience in an ongoing process that occurs not just individually, but within a network of supportive communities or ‘ecologies’.

Your task

Reflect on the way personal-skills development and building supportive communities each contribute to resilience.

For example, drawing on your own life experiences, consider difficult times when you’ve drawn on a) your inner resources and b) the strength of others. How do these two experiences compare?

Use the comments to share your conclusions and other insights that you’ve developed over the course of this week.

You can also add to the discussion by liking other comments that you find interesting or helpful and using reply to extend the conversation.