My Evolution of Resilience

I used to believe that life was somewhat linear, unfolding steadily toward growing up, becoming wise, finding fulfillment.  If a big bump derailed a life from that path – “bad things happen to good people” – then resilience played an important role in helping us bounce back. Recovering what had been working well before, progressing again steadily onward.

Then the pandemic shut down the world last spring. Last summer’s protests against racial/social injustice taught us once again that “America never was America to me” as African-American poet Langston Hughes so passionately expressed almost 100 years ago.

Then…the divisiveness running so deeply in the American psyche led to a hostile insurrection against the U.S. government this winter.

I have re-framed resilience as bouncing forward, as I do in my new online course Transforming Any Adversity into Learning and Growth.

Even more than resilience helping us move in any direction, back to normal or forward to a new vision of a new day, I’m coming to see that resilience is the capacity to work with everything simultaneously  – heartache and hope, peril and possibilities, dangers and determination.

Indeed, resilience is needed most when we experience life at its worst and choose to keep our faith and work toward life at its best. [See the full poem When This Is Over]

When this ends,
may we find that we have become
more like the people we wanted to be…
we were called to be….
we hoped to be
and may we stay that way…
better for each other
because of the worst.

I suggest you check out the new course Transforming Any Adversity into Learning and Growth, which launches February 4, 2021.  Six live 90-minute webinars on how to cultivate the resilience mindset that allows us to chose what direction our life can take, especially when we feel clueless and overwhelmed. Dozens of guided practices and live Q&A. However you frame and claim your resilience, this course itself could be…transformative.