Emotional Resilience is a person’s ability to adapt to stressful situations or crises.
More resilient people are agile and can “roll with the punches”, bounce back and adapt to adversity, without lasting difficulties.
Forbes Magazine created a short video that highlighted that it’s not the smartest in school who is the most resilient. The one who has ‘grit’ always wins over IQ and a combination of persistence, hard work and passion creates resilient people.
What others have said about Emotional Resilience.
Diane Coutu in May 2002 in the Harvard Review in an article, How Resilience Works says “my exploration has taught me much about resilience, although it’s a subject none of us will ever understand fully. Indeed, resilience is one of the great puzzles of human nature, like creativity or the religious instinct.”
In January 2015 a Harvard Business Review article ‘What Resilience Means, and Why it Matters’ reported on the research of a pair of British consultants confirmed the importance of resilience to business success. Resilience was defined by most as the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and keep going in the face of adversity.
A whopping 75% of 835 employees from public, private, and not-for-profit firms in Britain reported that the biggest drain on their resilience reserves was “managing difficult people or office politics at work.” That was followed closely by, “stress brought on by overwork and by having to withstand personal criticism.”
Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg gave a powerful and emotional commencement speech on building resilience to the University of California, Berkeley’s Class of 2016.
Sandberg said, “You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience, but like a muscle, you can build it up and draw on it when you need it. In that process, you will figure out who you really are — and you just might become the very best version of yourself.”
The pioneer of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, believes that resilience is a quality that managers can foster in their organisations, if they have it first.
In a blog I wrote a year ago about how science in the Middle East is being used to document teens stress levels, Putting Resilience Interventions to the Test. social scientists and psychologists had to consider what, exactly, resilience is. They have yet to agree. “Some believe resilience means restoring mental health after a traumatic event. Others consider it a conscious determination to persevere under difficult circumstances. Still others describe it as a child’s ability to benefit from external resources, such as a caring adult. To complicate matters, humanitarian groups use the term resilience to describe any or all these positive outcomes.”
Resilience “isn’t simply in the child, but embedded in their family, caregivers, and community,” the researchers stated.
Dean Becker, the President and CEO of Adaptive Learning Systems, in Pennsylvania, says that resilience is: “More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.”
Dr Judy Hinwood our Course Development Manager at Stress to Strength says, “resilient people handle the emotion and find a solution.”