😷 Recovering from a sports injury or health crisis.
💔Accepting grief or loss.
😰Thriving after a professional setback.
⛈️Rebuilding after a natural disaster or a community trauma.
The ability to “bounce back,” often described as resilience, can require learning, evolving, and growing — both personally and professionally.
But are there different kinds of resilience? And can we learn how to be more resilient, or is resilience a fixed trait some lucky folks are born with?
Here’s what I’ve been learning on my research journey:
Academic researchers categorize resilience in four general ways:
🧠Psychological – Our ability to manage through uncertainty and challenge
❤️Emotional – Self-awareness of our emotions and our capacity to regulate them
💪Physical – The body’s ability to recover and heal
👥Social – A community or group’s capacity to bounce back from adversity
In Resilience, the Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges (3rd edition, 2023), researchers Steven Southwick, Dennis Charney and Jonathan DePierro argue that resilience isn’t a superpower or fixed trait, but a collection of skills that can be built over time through systems and intentional practices.
Ann Masten’s Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development (3rd edition 2025) shares her research studying resilience in children, families and communities facing significant adversity like war, poverty and pandemics. She says resilience skills emerge from everyday resources, relationships, and environments.
The good news? The experts say we can learn to be more resilient.
The harder news? It takes practice and persistence.🤓
Digging deeper, I learned that *loads* of things affect our ability to bounce back, including our:
- Biology and our individual brain’s neuroplasticity
- Access to (and ability to integrate) knowledge, tools, and wisdom
- Ability to discern what’s in and out of our control
- Goals, vision, and motivators
- Skill at shifting our attention/focus and prioritizing what matters
- Emotional regulation and gratitude practices
- Previous experience with setbacks, adversity, or trauma
- Social or cultural systems
We’re also shaped by the stories we tell ourselves, how (and if) our leaders show up, our sense of connection, and even the ways we navigate shame.
I’m on a journey to learn more about resilience, and I’ll continue to unpack what I find in upcoming posts, sharing what fascinates me, puzzles me, and some dots I’m connecting. But here’s today’s key takeaway:
💡We all have agency (the power and capacity to influence our lives and our surroundings) AND we all can grow our resilience skills.
🚫But you can’t do it with toxic positivity.
⛔You can’t do it by ignoring or invalidating our environment, feelings, or emotions.
⚠️And you can expect setbacks along the way.
This, my friends, is work that takes practice, persistence, and staying open.
And while I’m not an expert on resilience (yet!), I’m committed to showing up and sharing what I’m learning from the experts to help us all – whether you’re working on your own resilience, or you’re being asked to help your loved ones, your teams or your organizations get better and faster at bouncing back, adapting, and growing. So stay tuned…
Disclaimer: I am not a licensed therapist or resilience expert…I’m a voracious reader, leader, certified coach, and communications pro who is intensely curious about resilience and burnout and how it’s playing out in our workplaces and lives today. If you’re struggling with your mental health, please seek out a qualified professional. ❤️
