Resilience. Is it a “thing”?

Written by Fleur Johnston, CEO & Founder, PeopleBench

Fleur will present at the Wellbeing for Future Focused School Conference in Brisbane on 5 & 6 August 2022

“Resilience? Just what educators don’t need – another buzzword”—Comment on a recent social media post.

The history of the word “resilience” is, in fact, a fascinating read:

A chain of transfer processes between diverse fields of knowledge and science. Arising from the verb ‘resilire’ in classic Latin as a figurative designation for a variety of retrograde motions (jumping back, rebounding, reflecting, returning), the word is found from the year 1430 in late medieval and early modern French (texts). 1

The concept is not new. Throughout history, engineers, archaeologists, statisticians, and psychologists have applied the concept of resilience to their disciplines.

This makes sense: resilience is all about enabling sustainability. Who doesn’t want to ensure the things they care about can be sustained?

In social or behavioural science realms, the concern is about the capacity of humans to be at their best—to show up in the world every day, able to contribute to the collective success of humanity. It is no small hope.

In the world of education, we are passionate about our capacity to help our youngest, most vulnerable, most potential-filled humans to thrive. We facilitate their access to—and acquisition of—knowledge, skills, attitudes, and patterns of behaviour that set them on a path of personal, professional, and community growth. It is no small task.

Australian Organisational Psychologist—and creator of the internationally-recognised Resilience at Work (R@W) scale—Kathryn McEwen (2011), defines resilience as “being able to withstand or overcome adversity and unpleasant or difficult events successfully, and to be able to adapt to change and uncertainty” .2

McEwen’s work distills the behavioural science into seven evidence-backed factors. Each of these factors offers its own body of research about action we can take to improve our overall likelihood to have or maintain a resilient response when change and challenge inevitably come along:

Living authentically
Finding your calling
Maintaining perspective
Mastering stress
Interacting cooperatively
Staying healthy
Building networks

Critical concepts from the psychological research into resilience also remind us that:

Resilience is not a fixed trait. Our capacity to have a resilient response is impacted in any given moment by what is going on around us and within us.

Resilience is not a personality construct. People are not inherently “resilient or not resilient”; we all have the capacity to learn strategies and acquire skills to build our resilience over time.
While each of the seven resilience factors are areas of potential strength to draw on, each can also be overdone at the expense of another. It is important to aim for balance to maintain our resilience at work.
Ultimately, while many things at work—and in life—are beyond our control, focussing on the things that we can control or influence and letting go of the things which we cannot change (choosing instead to attend to parts of the model which might “top us up”) is a useful strategy for restoring our sense of balance.

So, yes, resilience, as a concept to help us understand and cultivate improved human capacity to keep going and recover even when things get tough, is a “thing”.

Resilience is a well-researched, psychologically validated concept and, if we invest in cultivating it in our students, teachers, and our school’s culture, systems and processes, we just might set ourselves up for success as we step into the inevitably more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous future.

I’m looking forward to participating at the Wellbeing for Future Focused Schools Conference in Brisbane on 5 & 6 August 2022 and sharing more about the action that leaders and team members can take to build staff wellbeing and resilience in schools. See you there!

1 Gosling-Reismann, S., Hellige, H., & Thier, P. (2018). The resilience concept: From its historical roots to theoretical framework for critical infrastructure redesign. https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/sites/artec/Publikationen/artec_Paper/217_paper.pdf

2 McEwen, K. (2011). Building resilience at work. Australian Academic Press. workingwithresilience.com.au