So what is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to adapt to, recover from, and thrive in the face of adversity, stress or significant challenges. Resilience can be improved, it is a learnt skill. It is often associated with attributes such as optimism, flexibility, and the ability to stay focused under pressure.
But the word resilience shouldn’t be used as a stick to beat people with, as in, ’you need to be more resilient’. It is a progressive learned skills. With an increase in stress and the ability to deal with that, comes an increase in resilience. But the stress needs to be appropriate to the individual. For example, you ask one person who gyms regularly to bench 80kg and a marathon runner to bench 80kg, the marathon runner will be under far too much stress they’re likely to fail and no resilience will be gained, the regular gym goer may be under no stress and so no resilience is gained…the stress need to appropriate to the individual, just outside their own personal comfort zone so mental resilience can be learned and built gradual.
Comfort, stretch and panic zones
The concept of comfort, stretch, and panic zones is a framework used to describe different states of personal experience and learning. This model helps individuals understand their reactions to various levels of challenge and stress:
Inside the comfort zone, not growth occurs; we go about our daily routine with no stress, low anxiety, low risk, minimal challenges, pottering on, familiar with our surroundings.
We can push ourselves out of comfort zone and into the stretch zone; this is where we grow and develop most as an individual; it it otherwise known as the growth zone where we are exposed to moderate levels of stress and anxiety due to new challenges and experiences; for me this is often climbing or paragliding with my partner; always stressful and challenging; never fun at the time BUT it does always force me to problem solve and looking at it optimistically after shouting at my partner a few times, it an opportunity for learning and build mental resilience. For all of us here, that we can relate to it, its that next sortie, that next skill, always a level of stress but it forces new learning and for us to problem solve.
After the stretch zone is the panic zone; this is a zone of increased stress and anxiety that is so high we may feel overwhelmed, leading to a fight or flight response; learning becomes significantly hindered.
Understanding these 3 zones help individuals to encourage growth within themselves without causing too much stress whereby learning would be hindered. By recognising and respecting these zones, people can manage their experiences more effectively, ensuring they remain in the stretch zone as regularly as possible for optimal growth and resilience.
Mindset and the power of the mind
‘Stop telling yourself that you’re not qualified, good enough or worthy. Growth happens when you start believing and doing the things that your not qualified to do’
Mindset is a powerful determinant of how individuals approach life, learn and achieve their goals.
Fixed vs a growth mindset
The concepts of fixed and growth mindsets were introduced by psychologist Carol Dweck in her research on motivation and success.
A fixed mindset is the belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents are static traits that cannot be significantly developed. People with a fixed mindset tend to think that their abilities are set in stone and that no amount of effort can change their inherent level of talent or intelligence.
A growth mindset is the belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents can be developed through dedication, hard work, and learning. People with a growth mindset understand that effort and persistence are essential to achieving success and that their abilities can improve over time with practice; they tend to embrace challenges, value feedback, have a continuous level of learning, higher resilience and commitment to improved performance over time.
Commitment is key
The commitment to succeeding is key, it is very easy to make excuses in your mind for not achieving something even before you have begun the attempt, often this is a way of pre-excusing failure in a person’s mind as they find the idea of failure too painful or uncomfortable.
Unfortunately whilst this self preservation mechanism protects a person from emotional pain of failure by accepting within themselves that they will not achieve the objective in the first place, it prevents a person from ever actually committing to achieving a goal or target which is truly hard and testing. Total commitment to an objective makes you vulnerable to failure, but it is only by making yourself vulnerable to failure that you mentally unlock your full potential to perform. The mindset of I can do this, I will do this, instead of the mindset of this is a bit hard, I’m not going to be able to do it but I will make a show of trying to do it in order to be able to say that I had a go.
