Resiliency: The core value to achieve and sustain success.

Viktor Emil Frankl, was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist who was arrested and was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Nazi concentration camp, like millions of Jews all over Germany. He suffered same hardships and threats like everyone else in the concentration camp, but he was amongst the few peoplw who survived the Holocaust. After coming out he devoted his life to studying, understanding and promoting “meaning.”  

I was searching some reference on the internet when I came across some content from his famous book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”.  It’s a wonderful book which teaches us resilience, a trait, a power, a faculty, a decision, which separates the survivors from victims. This book tells the secret behind Frankl’s survival. What made him sustain and maintain is sanity in one of cruellest and goriest of military camps ever in the history of mankind.  

There are many examples like Dr. Frankl’s who have survived various calamities, catastrophes, personal, and physical, financial, emotional and they not only survived but became better and stronger persons.  They have different stories; they belonged to different timelines, in different continents, from different ethnicity. They are as different as any two individuals could be. But then, all of them had one common attribute, common trait that helped them survive.  A special quality, the quality which helped them survive the difficult circumstances is called resilience.

Who are these resilient people? What makes them different than rest of us? Highly resilient people are flexible, adapt to new circumstances quickly, and thrive in constant change. Most importantly, they expect to bounce back and feel confident, that they will. They have a knack for creating good luck out of circumstance that many others see as bad luck.

Another significant trait among resilient people is, that they never play victim or come in blaming mode when their lives are disrupted. On the contrary the losers fall into victim frame of mind at the very first instance and start looking for people, places, things, situations to blame for their hardships. They won’t take steps to overcome their difficulties even after the crisis is over.

Victim thinking keeps people feeling helpless, and by blaming others for their bad situations, they place responsibility on others for making their lives better.

Negative emotions such as fear, anger, anxiety, distress, helplessness, and hopelessness decrease your ability to solve the problems you face, and they weaken your resiliency.  Constant fears and worries weaken your immune system and increase your vulnerability to illness.  In such times the best medicine is resiliency pill.

Resiliency means being able to bounce back from life developments that may feel totally overwhelming at first. When resilient people have their lives disrupted they handle their feelings in healthy ways. They allow themselves to feel grief, anger, loss, and confusion when hurt and distressed, but they don’t let it become a permanent feeling state. An unexpected outcome is that they not only heal, they often bounce back stronger than before.

Just the way Viktor Emil Frankl did, not only he survived the holocaust but he went on to later establish a new school of existential therapy called logotherapy, based in the premise that man’s underlying motivator in life is a “will to meaning,” even in the most difficult of circumstances. Frankl's logotherapy and existential analysis is considered the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, among the broad category that comprises existentialists.  (Existential psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that, like the existential philosophy which underlies it, is founded upon the belief that human existence is best understood through an in-depth examination of our own experiences. It focuses on concepts that are universally applicable to human existence including death, freedom, responsibility, and the meaning of life. Ref. from Wikipedia)

Coming back to our discussion about resilient people, they usually handle major difficulties easier than others. They expect to rebuild their disrupted lives in a new way that works for them, and the struggle to overcome adversity develops new strengths in them.

Resilience is more important than ever in today’s world.  We live in a volatile and chaotic world, which is hugely competitive, there is cut throat competition in the world, and the fight for survival is fiercer than ever. There is no one unscathed, everyone is wounded, is bleeding. Unfortunately in this race, people believe that they would find solace and success in making the other person bleed more, because they strongly believe that the other guy out there is responsible for their bleeding.  But, this attitude and frame of mind doesn’t heal, it broadens your wound and makes it worse and more painful.

The answer to this misery is in being more resilient. People with resiliency skills have a significant advantage over those who feel helpless or react like victims. Resilience makes you in-charge; it makes you master of your destiny, captain of your ship.

Resilience is not a God given gift, it’s a trait which can be acquired and can be learned. Now there is an emerging science called resiliency psychology, which has identified what strengths to acquire and how almost anyone can develop them. It is now known that each one of us have an inborn predisposition to become resilient and change-proficient. The evolution has taught us that, the negativity and all other anti-resilient traits are socially acquired traits through observation and influence. 

Your resiliency strengths come from self-motivated, self-managed efforts to develop resiliency skills.  But like everything else that we wish in our life to happen, resiliency is also about the decision, a choice. Unless you are not mentally ready and wish to commit to this change in attitude no amount of counselling, training or book reading will make any effect on you.  Your intention to develop resiliency methods that work for you is what determines your success or failure.

A few people are born resilient. Like natural athletes, they have it in them from the start, or maybe they are born with stronger immunity towards negativism than most of us. The rest of us have inborn resiliency potentials that we can access and develop if we choose to.

Resiliency is a combination of many of the traits I discussed in my previous posts about conquerors, winners and attributes of success. Resilience is the resultant behaviour which is an outcome of the acquisition of the conqueror traits.

Your ability to resile over and over comes from allowing your mind, attitudes, feelings, values, skills, and unique nature to be different in every situation, organized by your purposeful consciousness.

The art of resiliency gives you a powerful advantage in today’s world; an advantage, which is waiting to be acquired. Are you ready to commit yourself towards that change?