I’ve recently contracted with a firm called Building Resilience to help a large human services agency train their managers in resilience peer coaching. Agencies like these are not the only organizations in need of resilience training. Burnout, “quiet quitting” and continual turnover impacts workplaces and communities all over our country.
Resilience is not the same as Acceptance
Last week, I mentioned this work to a friend, who quipped “Aren’t you just coaching people to learn how to accept things the way they are?” Really? Has passive acceptance become what people think when they hear the word “resilience”? I pushed back. “Resilience is not denying our anxiety and frustration with the status quo. Resilience is looking clearly at reality and building the skills to chart a path through it.” At least, that’s what I think.
But I got curious. So I looked it up.
Resilience defined: “The capacity to withstand, or to recover quickly from difficulties.”
To me, this does not imply passive acceptance of circumstances. More like a badass response to the multiple pressures that compound our stress, conflict and trauma.
However, as I recall the myriad information sources out there claiming to help us deal with these problematic feelings, I can understand where my friend got her perception. So many headlines and by-lines all promise “mindfulness” “relaxation” “clarity”, and they offer everything from yet another meditation technique and isolation tanks to Rolfing and sound therapy.
I’m sure there are many legitimate and well-meaning practitioners of these kinds of methods, as well as others, but so many of them seem to me to be about escape; from tension, stress, pain; from the toxic “reality” dished up by our culture on a continual and unrelenting basis.
The latest issue of Psychology Today has an article titled “Finding Peace in an Anxious World” by Robert Puff Ph.D. I had high hopes that this would highlight some solid and proactive actions to address anxiety in a way that does not deny its validity. But instead, Puff offers more escape: “We tend to get overwhelmed when we think too much about the future. We don’t know what the world will look like in five to 10 years, and given that, we don’t need to focus on that.”
Seriously? This is exactly the thinking that considers only short term impact and encourages us to do whatever feels good in the moment – like spending down our 401k, continuing to heat with oil, and buying stuff we don’t need on Amazon. Over time, this myopic mindset culminates in disasters like a dissolving Democracy and climate change.
Resilience is not escape.
What if we understood our anxiety to be a natural and even necessary response to a world that teeters on the precipice of dangerous change? From a raging climate to the rise of authoritarianism around the world and in the US, (the supposed bastion of Democracy), to the pressures on our jobs, our relationships, our children; our anxiety does not call for escape. Anxiety is a healthy signal that we need to take clear and effective action. Effective action, over time, creates resilience.
Mindset Coaching
One reason I like the Positive Intelligence model of Mindset coaching is that the Sage qualities are essentially tools to help a person dig in to reality and build resilience, rather than escape stress and anxiety. The qualities line up in a sequence that works from the inside out: Empathy, Explore, Innovate, Navigate and Action.
Empathy: The ability to understand and find compassion for another’s perspective
Explore: Ask questions, get curious, withhold judgement
Innovate: Work with multiple sources and perspectives to create new solutions
Navigate: Identify what is truly important and prioritize in alignment with values
Action: Take clear direct action to address issues and create needed change
I truly believe that we can make our lives and our world better only by directly and clearly acknowledging what we see around us. If you are struggling with the changes that impact you and your world, let’s connect and see whether Mindset Coaching is right for you. We are all going to need some help going forward to make the most of what’s ahead of us.