Resilience involves the ability to respond and work flexibly within our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, moving towards positive life goals (Neenan 2018).
“Bouncing back from adversity” is not the way I would define resilience. After an adverse life situation or crisis, we need time to recover, reflect on our experiences, discover our values, build new skills, navigate our choices and new life direction. So I feel it’s more like an expedition or journey, that you have to plan for, make choices about, gear up and equip yourself for. This takes time, and good support.
– Rachel 🙂
We can apply a socio-ecological model of resilience (Ungar 2008, Ungar 2011). Using this model, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways (Resilience Research Centre 2019).
The resources on this site are designed to help build skills in resilience, to help empower each of us to successfully navigate these factors for our specific well-being needs. For example, in regards to the uncertain period we are all facing together and the additional stresses.
The Discover Balance page on this site gives some information about strengthening and practising flexible thinking, a hallmark of resilience.
References
Neenan, M. 2018. Developing Resilience. London and New York. Routledge.
Resilience Research Centre. 2019. What is Resilience? Nova Scotia. Dalhousie University.
Ungar, M. 2008. Resilience across cultures. Social Work, 38 (2), pp. 218-235.
Ungar, M. 2011. The social ecology of Resilience. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol 81(1), pp. 1-17.
The Well-being Doc :) 