How to be Resilient – Face Reality, Find Meaning, Creatively Improvise.

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.

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 prisoners 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!