How Resilient Are You?
...The world of elite sport and the resilience myth.
Earlier this week I watched Simone Biles: Rising on Netflix.
Firstly, watch it!
This was such an inspiring and important documentary that I feel needs to be seen. It of course shows her meteoric rise to the top of her sport, the increasing pressure, and THAT moment at the Tokyo Olympics, but for me it told an important story far beyond that.
I worry that resilience is often viewed as the ability to keep going, to keep pushing and to keep building no matter what. To ignore what your mind and body are saying and to keep going anyway.
I grew up in the competitive dance world and was therefore extremely familiar with the ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality. We would wear our injuries as a badge of honour and pride ourselves on continuing in spite of our pain. Very similar to the world of competitive gymnastics. Add the pressure of being one of the most famous athletes in the world (Simone Biles, not me) and you have a pressure cooker situation.
Resilience is not about the ability to rigidly power through.
Resilience is the ability to remain flexible and adaptable in the face of life’s challenges.
Resilience is the ability to step back for a moment and respond to a situation, rather than react.
Resilience is to have the self-awareness to know what we can withstand, know when we need to rest, when we need to ask for help, and know that we need to be kind to ourselves.
Resilience is to not lose ourselves in despair. But to know that adversity is unfortunately part of life and we can, and will, navigate it from time to time.
Resilience is to know that human nature is to be more aware of the negative - a safety mechanism that once alerted us to life threatening danger which now is alerted when an email from our boss lands in the inbox – and to find the good in our day anyway.
Dr Lucy Hone, author of Resilient Grieving, shares a powerful question that will really stick with me...
Is this helping or harming me?
While we navigate challenging times, we don’t always feel we are in control or we have a choice of what happens. When we are able to ask ourselves if our thoughts and actions are helping or harming us we put ourselves back in the drivers seat. We are able to regain perspective, control, spare ourselves further difficulty.
When we are struggling and we scroll through everyone’s ‘perfect’ lives on Instagram… is this helping us or harming us?
When we’re exhausted and burnt-out but fear other people’s judgement so carry on anyway… is this helping us or harming us?
When we fixate on trying to reach perfection and find ourselves struggling and beating ourselves up but won’t take a break… is this helping us or harming us?
We are all resilient. This is not a select trait for the few. We can build resilience by staying flexible, self-aware, and by taking a moment to pause.