Resilience

When I had my near fatal car accident thirty years ago, many people thought I would never recover from my severe brain injury. I believe what gave me the fortitude to pursue my goal of recovery was resilience. Recently, Tiger Woods was injured in a terrible car accident. People are saying don’t count him out. He has come back before because of his resilience. 

What is resilience?

Resilience is keeping on, keeping on. 

Not just because, but because of a goal or a dream. 

Resilience can be both the uphill climb or the downward slope.

Resilience is determination. 

It is the strength to say I am doing this no matter what. 

What is resilience?

It is the zig – the zag – the roadblock.

Overcoming insurmountable obstacles and the naysayers…

But you know where you are going and one day you will get there.

What is resilience?

Resilience is not letting tragedy define the person you want to be.

When I began to really think about what resilience is, I realized how important it is in our life today.

In The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova writes in  “How People Learn to Become Resilient,” about George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, who heads the loss and trauma lab, and has been studying resilience for over 25 years. Bonanno discovered one of the central elements of resilience is perception. Do you perceive a traumatic event as crippling, or an opportunity to grow?

In my own life, I see my accident as a gift that I was able to recover from and in that process become a new person. 

Bonanno also believes that “stressful” or “traumatic” events don’t necessarily predict the direction of  one’s life. Living through adversity, does not mean that you will suffer moving forward. It can, in fact, mean that you will face life with resilience. I think what matters most is whether one lets the adversity become traumatizing. If you frame adversity as a challenge, you are able to move on, learn from it, and achieve your goal.

This is resilience.