Diane Koutu, writing for Harvard Business Review, suggests 3 very useful distinctions around being resilient. I like them because they addresses some of the weaknesses of otherwise excellent schools of thought such as Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism - namely that it encourages people just to soldier on and put a brave face on things and not ask for help which can be seen as failure.

Image: Spring Creek Chronicles: Grouse's resilience mirrors humans' tenacity

The first thing you need to do is to face reality - denial of your difficulties is not the same as being resilient.

The second thing, which resonates with Viktor Frankl's findings of what made the difference between life and death in concentration camp prisioners survive (described in his book Man's Search for Meaning) is to search for useful meaning in the difficulties.

Finally the third thing is to creatively improvise solutions - if it was easy you would have already sorted it!

To download an excellent synopsis (PDF) on How Resilience Works

FOR FURTHER STUDY ON THE SPECIFIC THEME OF RESILIENCE, ATTITUDE and COMMITMENT check out the 4 articles below:

The Art and Science of Resilience and Survival: 12 Rules Of Life.

The ABC Equation of Anger Management (The Ellis ABC Model)

How the way we talk can change the way we work ... and think.

What's the difference between a promise and a responsibility?

About Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson delivers keynote conference speeches, workshop facilitation and in-house consultancy in four key business areas:

1. Creating High Performing Teams in enterprises including Virtual and Mobile Teams (based on the Bioteams Book)
2. Establishing effective Collaborative Business Networks enabling companies to co-operate effectively in areas such as sales and product development (based on the book - The Networked Enterprise)
3. How to use the latest social media technologies including blogging and online communities to promote enterprises, brand, organisation or event
4. Development of graphical on-line interactive Business Games, Dashboards and What-if Simulators for organisations to support Performance Improvement, Strategy Development and Executive Team Development.

   
   Tags: anger, learned optimism, resilience

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