This week, two things occurred that made me wonder about resilience and how that can help us be more effective.
The first was a conversation with academics about the state of the 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds in college. Because of the pandemic, they spent a couple of formative years isolated at home. The academics claim these people have less resilience, especially in social situations. I believe that.
My high school social interactions were critical to my sense of self and who I wanted to be when I went to college. In contrast, these college students did not have the practice of noticing anyone’s changes. They didn’t have models of alternative behaviors that might inform their options.
Without experience or models, how can they create options? They might feel stuck.
The academics are seeing a lack of resilience. While the students might have plenty of intellectual experience (and intellect), too few of them have sufficient emotional experience to build their resilience.
Contrast that with my mentoring experience for my fiction writing. I have several years of experience writing short fiction. (I’ve sold at least a dozen short stories, published several collections, and am working on more stories.) I sent in my most recent assignment on Monday night and received feedback this morning. Of the five (yes, five!) things I tried to practice, I succeeded at one. I got partway on two. Totally missed on the other two.
Because I have experience learning how to learn and learning how to write, I can take that feedback and try again.
I have experience with both my writing process and models of writing. That means I can exercise my resilience.
When we don’t have experience and feel stuck, we need more resilience to be effective.
Three Questions to See When More Resilience Can Help Us Be More Effective
The less experience people have with change, the less practice they have. The less practice, the less resilience.
In the agile community, many of us used to say, “If it’s harder, do it more frequently.” As an example, many teams found it difficult to release their software frequently. Why? Often, there was a bottleneck to frequent releasing. If the team practiced releasing more often, they could find and eliminate those bottlenecks.
It’s the same thing with resilience.
Here are three questions the academics might use to coach these young people to learn to acquire more resilience:
- Would you like to change something about how you respond in this circumstance? If you don’t know the what and why of adaptability, you can’t change. And if you don’t see your reality, you can’t use the resilience approaches to see what you might change.
- How many options do you see for this circumstance? In Three Secrets to Exercise Your Resilience, I offered ways to use the Rule of Three and how to rank options.
- What would have to be true to achieve this outcome?
The less we practice resilience, the less adaptable we become. We don’t generate options and experiment (as I do in my writing). Even if an experiment “fails,” we don’t get to feel better about ourselves. (Yes, last week’s short story did not work, but I felt good about trying.)
All of that trying—practice—leads to more resilience.
In general, more resilience offers us ways to live a more effective life, where effective means we are happy with the outcomes. Practice with change helps us develop that resilience.