Welcome back Viphilus*
OK, last time you’ll have to
look at the Capacity Table.
Today we are looking at how
to build capacity in the marker of resilience.
Resilience is a word that I hear thrown around and from the way it is used, I
don’t think it is well understood. Resilience is a measure of something’s (or
someone’s) capacity to absorb energy upon deflation and recover upon unloading.
So you’re saying, “Say whaaaaaa?”
Clearly, from that
dictionary definition, resilience is a term used in the field of engineering.
How about this version: it is the ability of a substance or object to spring
back into shape; elasticity. No? OK, try this one:
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from
difficulties.
Resilience is a measure of
toughness. Do you remember the old Timex commercials where they declared the
toughness of a Timex watch? “It takes a licking, and keeps on ticking!” (for a blast down memory lane, click here).
Now let’s look at the marker
of toughness in each of our 4 dimensions:
Physical resilience is our resistance to injury, tolerance of pain
and how calloused we are to the external world. Marital arts instructors train
students to become “calloused” to pain by giving them exercises that actually
develop callouses. Callouses are something that we develop naturally through extensive
use of certain body parts, like feet and hands
… but we can speed up that process by intentionally targeting the areas
that we want toughened up by subjecting
those areas to controlled amounts of stress or pain. The body adapts and learns
to deal with the localized trauma by thickening the skin or desensitizing the
nerves in the area that it knows will be coming under attack.
Emotional resilience is a measure of our capacity to bounce back from
disappointment, frustration or loss. It’s been said that disappointment is the
gap between expectation and reality. To lessen the potential for disappointment
you need to either bring reality to a higher level or lower expectations. Which
do you think is easier? A big (and I mean HUGE) part of the training that I
deliver centres around helping people manage their expectations. Now this is a
tricky one … it doesn’t mean to lower your standards of what you expect from
yourself or others … it means to lower (or even eliminate) your emotional
attachment to the results.
I deliver a training program
called The Omega Program: a program in which some participants can spend years.
The lesson on managing expectations is one of the very first ones taught because
that skill/habit, in my opinion, is one of life’s most important ones to
develop. So much of our emotional resilience is predicated on our ability to
manage our expectations. I could write on this for a year … but I’ll offer this
single simple bit of wisdom …do everything
in your power to reduce or eliminate your emotional attachment to the outcomes in
life that you hope for. [Personally
– I have only been able to do that through the power of God … but that’s me].
Mental resilience is the capacity or ability to pursue a solution
despite continued failure in trying to find it. This one sounds like it is a
combination of emotional resilience and mental endurance … and it probably is.
It’s about having the mental toughness to not give up. Other words that come to
mind are stick-to-it-tiveness. Maybe
the best word for this is grit. It’s the combination of determination to
accomplish an objective, combined with the ability to ignore the pain of
disappointment.
To be honest, I have no idea
how to intentionally exercise this one, other than to find your reason for
wanting to achieve an objective, and to let that reason almost irrationally drive
you to accomplish it, regardless of failed attempts. It’s the passion of
purpose that takes over and moves you in a way that even if you fail, you fail
forward. At this point, motivational speakers like to throw in the Thomas Edison
legend of how many hundreds (or thousands) of times he failed in his attempt to
invent the incandescent light bulb. As the story goes, Mr. Edison never saw
those attempts as failures, rather, they simply became a growing inventory of
ways of how not to invent a lightbulb. I actually like this story
because it is about grit. It comes out of an almost irrational belief (or hope)
that the there IS a solution and it WILL be found through sufficient effort.
My exercise solution for
this then is to simply find your purpose and pursue it with passion.
Spiritual resilience is needed when your passionate pursuit of
purpose is met with the sober reality that the solution is not forthcoming:
that a particular “solution path” is a dead end. This is when the belief or
hope that things will still resolve somehow becomes truly irrational. Spiritual
resilience is the ability or capacity to have hope in the face of all evidence
to the contrary. The metaphor that is widely used for this is this: “when God
closes a door, He always opens a window.”
As with mental resilience, I
believe that exercises that help us intentionally grow in this capacity are
indirect at best. My best wisdom on this comes from Scripture. I referenced it
last week but held off showing the full quote because I was waiting to connect
the final dots. Paul writes to the church at Rome:
We glory in our sufferings,
because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.
(Romans 5:3-4).
It is clear how suffering or
challenge produces perseverance (endurance) … we discussed that last week. And
it is clear how endurance produces character growth (which is what this series
of post is about – character building). But how in the world does character
produce hope? Well, it’s not a coincidence that I worded it that way because …
and I can’t state my belief about this strongly enough; hope is not simply
an optimistic expectation of an external thing … it is an internal construct
that drives the machinery of our character. Character develops hope and hope
develops character. They are fused in a way that eludes my understanding or
ability to articulate … but I know it to be true and have both seen it in
others and experienced it in myself.
Spiritual resilience is
about having hope … and that hope is grown through character building, which
snowballs back into having more hope.
It begins with a choice … a
single word that not surprisingly is an action word.
HOPE!
I hope to see you back next
Monday.
Blessings Viphilus,
Your friend, Omega Man
* Viphilus means, "lover of life"
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