The picture that accompanies this post is of a wild morning glory flower from a vine that popped up in an outdoor pot a couple of years ago.  Trish and I both love morning glories and every year she diligently nurtures plants from seeds or we buy young plants from a nursery.  We plant them indoors, in our sun room, and the vines wind up a series of drift wood pieces and trellises.  The delicate flowers bloom for just one day each, opening with the sun and closing by dusk.  The vines bloom from midsummer until early fall when they die back.  They never seem to regrow, so we start over each year. 

We have never been able to grow these plants outside, but wild vines do of course exist.  The vine in our outside pot probably originated with a seed in bird poop, deposited by one of the hundreds of birds that come to our feeders.  We were stunned when the flowers started to appear one year.  Not just that the vine grew and flowers bloomed, but that the vine was so prolific!  One day we counted five blooms on the one small vine!  And it punched out those flowers daily for months.  And it came back the next year.  And the next.  That, my friends, is resilience.  I marvel at that vine.  How does it not just survive but thrive under such difficult conditions?  And that thought, of course, got me to thinking about resilience in general.  It’s a struggle to be resilient under normal times; it is nearly impossible to find resilience these days.

Last time I wrote about my current difficulties in letting go of petty annoyances (some not so little) when I used to be able to let things roll off of me like proverbial water off a duck’s back.  That’s all about coping energy, something I have coached about often over the years.  And coping energy is strongly tied to resilience.  “Resilience” has a couple of useful definitions.  The first reads, “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”  The second, “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”  The second, of course, can apply to a human as well.  Much has been written on the topic of resilience and my thinking has been formed by lots of different thinkers (ok, mostly by Brene Brown, but you knew that).  What follows, though, is not a scholarly treatment.  They are my own musings.

When I was working, I often coached people on coping energy when the stress of the work environment got to someone.  This activity picked up in frequency when we moved from Air Products to Intertek, the former a comparatively slow paced R&D environment and the latter a fast-as-lightening contract lab.  I had to do no little amount of coaching on myself as well as others!  At first, my approach was to find out what seemed to be causing the most stress on someone and then see if I could find a way to reduce that stress by removing the stressor.  It could have been a project, a lab responsibility, a customer, or even a working relationship.  After a while, I realized that approach just didn’t work.  First, the same stressors did not have the same effect on other people.  Second, once I removed one stressor, another one took its place.  It wasn’t the environment, I realized, it was something about the person.

In some cases, the person’s temperament was just not suited to the environment.  No matter what we did, it just wouldn’t work.  Those people needed to move on and find an environment in which they could be successful.  But in most cases, the issue was resilience tied to a lack of coping energy.  When I wrote last time about how I seem to have lost the capability to keep certain stressors from getting to me, I put that in the context of having had, in the past, so many high impact stressors going at once that the more minor ones were easy to deal with.  That’s not exactly the right way to put it.  The reality was that I had developed some pretty impressive levels of coping energy along with some serious resilience—and I mean that in both definitions of the word.  The question for today is: how?  How did I build that resilient nature, how did I nurture it in others, and how can I get it back today?

As I’ve noodled over this for the last week or so, and listened to Brene’s podcasts, what crystallized in my mind was something that should be painfully obvious (but instead is just painful):  resilience comes from looking within, dealing with what you find there, embracing both your weaknesses and strengths, and paradoxically allowing yourself to not be resilient from time to time.  I remember some of those days while at Intertek.  I felt like the world was just caving in around me.  As the GM, I had to be careful to not show that to anyone else except a couple of trusted co-workers.  But I certainly would go into my office, put my head in my hands, and just shake for a while. 

The key is to not get stuck there.  You should allow yourself to feel, to absorb the difficulties and even to wallow in it for a bit.  But then realize that it’s not all hopeless; that there is a way out; that there ARE things you control; that you CAN do something and make progress.  “Courage is not the absence of fear,” said Nelson Mandela, “but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”  Similarly, resilience is not the absence of despair but the triumph over it.  Resilient people do not ignore a bad situation or act as if it’s not as bad as it truly is.  Resilience is recognizing the difficulty, being a little afraid, and plowing forward anyway, staying focused and knowing you just have to keep going.  You have it in you!  I know you do!

But you have to want resilience; you have to work for it.  Coping energy and resilience don’t just happen.  Sometimes, going through something really difficult shows you that you are stronger than you thought you were.  Sometimes experience alone teaches you the same lesson even if the situations were not dire.  Regardless, you have to do the hard work on yourself to accept who you are or who you have become and then put in the effort to change those things you don’t like so much about yourself.  And THAT comes down to Personal Accountability, one of my favorite hot buttons.  Resilient people have taken the time to do that navel gazing, understand and accept their flaws, and lean on their strengths and those around them to make things happen.  Believe me, I have learned all this stuff the hard way.

So, now each morning I look out the window and I see that wild morning glory vine punch out another flower or two and I marvel at the simple beauty and strength.  And I remember that resilience is hard won but worth the effort.  Especially these days.