What accounts for the difference in resilience from one person to another, and from one moment to another in one person? Is resilience something we're born with, or can it be learned? (Image: Shutterstock)
I once saw a patient in my primary care clinic for a persistent nasal drip. Though a common symptom, the degree of misery it was causing him was decidedly uncommon. According to him, it had nearly stopped his life in its tracks. He couldn't go out or concentrate. He was even having trouble doing his job. I prescribed a simple steroid nasal spray and went to see my next patient, an elderly woman dying of metastatic breast cancer.
In stark contrast to my first patient, she was the picture of equipoise, seemingly fearless in the face of her impending death. What I remember most from my visit with her was that she had a lot to teach me about how to die well.
I left my clinic struck by the obvious contrast in the mindsets of these two patients, made more dramatic by the differences in the obstacles each was facing. I began wondering what accounts for the difference in resilience from one person to another, and from one moment to another in one person? Is resilience something we're born with, or something that could be learned?
That question culminated in the publication of my book, “The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self.” Grounded in the premise that our ability to control what happens to us may be limited, but that our ability to establish a life state that enables us to surmount the suffering life brings us is not, the book distills the wisdom necessary for the creation of true resilience into nine principles supported by research suggesting resilience isn't something with which only a few of us have been born, but something we can all develop.
➤➤ Be sure to attend Alex Lickerman's Motivational Track session, “The Undefeated Mind: How Resilience Can Be Learned” April 2 at 1:30 p.m. at the 2019 BenefitsPRO Broker Expo.
We all face difficulties in life which make us suffer. But wisdom is so powerful that it can even put a halt to suffering without changing the circumstances that cause it. Most of us deem a problem solved when it no longer confronts us, but a problem is really solved when it no longer makes us suffer, our escaping or overcoming oppressive circumstances representing only one particular means to that end. Certainly it may be the means we most prefer, but it's not the only means at our disposal.
As Viktor Frankl wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.”
This means neither denying problems exist nor denying they make us suffer but instead learning to use suffering as a springboard for creating benefit. When confronted by circumstances we cannot control, we become capable of enduring them only by finding a way to create value with them—as Frankl, a psychiatrist, did while a prisoner at Auschwitz by attending to the suffering of his fellow prisoners and dreaming of the day he would lecture about the lessons learned while imprisoned.
His example teaches that the essence of victory lies in refusing to be defeated. Whether our problems are diminutive or global, mundane or existential, resolvable in the way we want or not, winning doesn't just require we constantly attack with all our might: it is constantly attacking with all our might. Whether we can declare genuine victory doesn't depend only on the final outcome, but also on what we feel in the moments leading up to it. How can we say we've won in achieving the best possible outcome if at every moment leading up to it we suffered at the hands of the belief that victory would never be ours?
Given that we spend much more time fighting for victory than attaining it, what we feel during the former is even more important than what we feel during the latter.
When most of us experience a significant loss—the death of a spouse or a parent, for example—we suffer but then typically recover. Knowing we're likely destined to recover doesn't mitigate the suffering while we're going through it. Possessing an undefeated mind isn't just necessary for victory; it is victory. In refusing to give up, we refuse to give in to oppressive circumstances and the experience of suffering itself.
Resilience doesn't consist only of returning to our original level of functioning after a loss; it also consists of not experiencing its decline in the first place.
This is what it means to possess an undefeated mind: not just to rebound quickly from adversity or face it confidently, but to get up day after day, week after week, year after year and attack the obstacles in front of us.
An undefeated mind isn't one that never feels discouraged or despairing; it's one that continues in spite of it. An undefeated mind doesn't fill itself with false hope, but with hopes to find real solutions it may not want or like. It grants access to creativity, strength, and courage necessary to find real solutions, viewing obstacles as the means by which we can capture the lives we want.
Victory may not be promised to us, but possessing an undefeated mind means behaving as though it is, as though to win we only need wage an all-out struggle, work harder, try everything we can, and everything we think we can't, in full understanding that we have no one on whom we can rely for victory but ourselves. We understand there's no obstacle from which we can't create some kind of value.
Everyone has the capacity to construct an undefeated mind, not just to withstand traumas, economic crises, or armed conflicts, but to triumph over them all. Extraordinary people may be born, but they can also be made. We need only look around for proof that an undefeated mind isn't so rare a thing as we think.
I invite you to join me at the 2019 BenefitsPRO Broker Expo where I'll speak about the principles I write about in The Undefeated Mind that will teach you how to become the most resilient person you can be.
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