Leadership is a Relationship

CHAPTER 3Jump Back Together (Resilience)

Every story of resilience begins in darkness. Without grief, strife, and frustration, there could be no resilience—it is our response to suffering. As Dr. Maria Konnikova writes in her overview of the psychology of resilience:

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?¹

If you've just secured a long-awaited promotion at work, scheduled a first date with a crush, bought your dream house right on the beach, and won the lottery, it's hard to display resilience, however motivated you might be. When times are good, making yourself resilient—or creating a culture of resilience—means preparing for when things will go wrong.

Even though resilience implies the eventual arrival of hard times, it's nonetheless enjoyed a new period of fashionability, along with similar ideas like “grit” and “perseverance.” The literary critic Parul Sehgal notes how resilience has become “an obsession among middle-class parents who want to prepare their children to withstand a world that won't always go their way.”² It's never appeared more in the written record: ...