Three invaluable tools to boost your resilience
Three invaluable tools to boost your resilience
Made in partnership with The Open University. OU consultants: Dr Jenny Douglas and Dr Sara MacKian. You just feel like you are climbing a mountain every day. And every day, you get up and the same mountain is ahead of you. TEXT: Lucy Hone is director of New Zealand’s Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience. TEXT: Her own resilience was tested in the most horrific way in 2014 My wee girl Abi, who was 12 at the time, hopped in the car with her best friend Ella, and Ella's mum, who was also a really dear friend of mine. And on the way down, a driver sped straight through a stop sign, crashed into them and killed all three of them. So, I just have this peculiar insight, really. I've done the academic study, I've trawled over all of the research - and then I've had to really test what works in a really, obviously horrifically personal way. And I can say that I feel really lucky now, because having had that training, I did at least have some tools at my fingertips. But I want to make a really important point here that too often people focus on resilience, thinking it's just a personal thing. And actually, we know that it's much, much bigger than that. Not seeing yourself represented in society is potentially damaging for your resilience, whether it's race, sexuality, ability, mental illness. Any form of prejudice like that - that feeling that you don't belong, you're not seen and you're not heard - is hurtful and reductive when it comes to resilience. So why is it important for a country to be resilient? Because it enables us to mobilise our resources faster. And in that, I mean everything from portaloos to trust. Think about our ever-changing environments that we know we all live in nowadays - bushfires, Covid, the earthquakes. Change and adversity come thick and fast, and resilient societies, resilient nations, are so much better able to respond in that time. To be able to protect their weak, their vulnerable, to be able to protect the economy - to weather whatever comes, in a much better way. So, on that personal perspective, the good news is that research shows that resilience really requires what we call "ordinary magic". It's not some elusive trait that is only available to a few. We can teach people to be more resilient. The three strategies that I relied on when the girls died, and to be fair, I absolutely still rely on now, I've wheeled them all out again recently, are... The number one, is understand that suffering is part of life. Whether it is divorce or redundancy, losing a partner - really tough things happen to us all. So knowing that, going into this terrible experience, knowing that adversity was common and that suffering was common, really did make a difference because it prevented me from feeling singled out. Number two, tune into the good. We get sucked into what we call in psychology and negativity bias. We're really good, humans, at looking at all the crappy bits. But actually we’re not so good at tuning into the good stuff. And it's really, really important for us to counterbalance that by choosing to focus our attention on some of the good stuff. And resilient people are really careful to choose where they focus their attention. Number three, ask yourself, "Is this helping or harming me?" "Is the way I'm thinking is the way I'm acting, right now, helping or harming me in my quest to get through this?" All too often, people think that resilience is about that good old stiff upper lip. And it's not that at all. Actually being resilient is also being able to accept your vulnerabilities, knowing when you need to get help, and to reach out. Studies have shown that having strong, supportive relationships is probably the most important thing we can do to build resilience. We were really lucky. We had a really supportive community, who helped us. And all of this what you need when you navigate trauma and adversity. Nobody goes it alone. And one of the key researchers in the field, Chris Peterson, used to say: "Other people matter." That that was the three-word summary of his decades of research.
