Why do some people cope better with exceptional situations than others? „The answer is resilience,“ says clinical psychologist J. Christopher Kübler, revealing how he helps his clients to build their mental resilience.
We’ve all met them: people who have „nerves of steel“, are „a rock in the storm“ or time and again prove themselves to be „spring chickens“. We use idioms like these to describe a remarkable quality that experts refer to as resilience. They refer to a state of mind and behaviour that not only enables us to withstand immense pressure – in keeping with the Latin meaning of „resilire = to bounce back“ – but also allows us to overcome our challenges and even grow as a result.
Anyone who believes they were born with little innate psychological resilience will be pleased to learn the following: experience in counselling, coaching and psychotherapy shows time and again that most people possess resilience skills that simply haven’t been activated yet. In other words: there is more to us than we could ever imagine.
General factors contributing to resilience
Thanks to extensive research, scientists are now able to identify a whole range of key factors contributing to resilience. These include, for example, intellectual abilities, social skills, problem-solving skills, a strong sense of self-efficacy and self-regulation, as well as effective stress management. Resilient people also tend to be solution-oriented, good at building relationships, open-minded, curious, self-motivated, determined, goal-oriented, purpose-driven, positive thinkers, self-aware, calm and at peace with themselves. Faced with this list of ideal qualities – which cannot be extended any further – the question inevitably arises: How can I become such a resilient person? And above all: Is it really necessary to possess all these factors in order to cope with life’s adversities?
Resilience as an individual skill
In this regard, it is important to understand the following: lists such as those of resilience factors make general statements based on a statistical average of the individuals studied. For coaches, counsellors or psychotherapists working in practice, this form of scientific insight is of little use. Their day-to-day work, after all, centres on individual people and their specific life situations. The question here is rather one of individual resilience competence. In other words: What challenges is this particular person facing? Which resilient behaviours, tailored to them, would be most effective for them? And what resilience factors do they need in order to be able to behave in this way? A person who is constantly in the public eye in their professional life, who is expected to display diplomatic skills (despite their choleric temperament) and who is constantly pressed for time (which does not exactly help their high blood pressure) needs skills tailored to these circumstances. In turn, different resilience factors help someone who is required to maintain a high level of concentration at all times, who tends to adopt a somewhat phlegmatic demeanour, and who experiences headache attacks of varying severity at least once a day. This is precisely what resilience coaching is all about in practice: finding individual solutions and approaches for each person.
The Practice of Resilience Coaching
Depending on the concept of resilience and personality, there are certainly very different approaches to coaching. One very helpful approach, for example, is based on the „potential hypothesis“. This suggests that most people do not have a significant deficit in resilience skills that needs to be somehow compensated for or filled. We possess the skills we need; they are simply not (sufficiently) activated (at times). Resilience coaching in this sense therefore amounts to a „treasure hunt“ and „unlocking that treasure“. It is about identifying skills we already possess and activating them. Psychological methods can help here – methods that each of us uses in our daily lives as part of our own „mental management“ – though usually without realising it, and sometimes not as versatile or skilfully as we could be. This is because this „mental management“ generally takes place unconsciously and involuntarily. Experts refer to hypno-imaginative, psycho-energetic and systemic constellation techniques, which we somehow employ in our daily lives and which need to be optimised through coaching. For example, by learning to consciously tap into our seemingly involuntary skills. Because this type of resilience coaching builds on both existing skills and the ‘psycho-techniques’ we already use in our daily lives, there is a very good chance of achieving a noticeable improvement in one’s own resilience skills within a short space of time. Because, as I said: there is more within us than we could ever imagine!
History of resilience research
In 1950, Jack Block introduced the term „resilience“ into academic discourse. Initially, however, it went largely unnoticed. It was not until 20 years later that Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith revisited the topic in a widely acclaimed long-term study of children on the island of Kauai. Their research question was: why do children develop so differently when faced with equally adverse conditions? They had observed that some grew up under severe stress and with psychological difficulties, whilst others appeared to cope well with their circumstances. The researchers attributed this to differences in resilience. Since then, much of the research into resilience has focused on the question of which psychological factors give rise to resilience and which environmental or upbringing-related conditions have a decisive influence on these factors. The current popularity of the term „resilience“ is linked to a growing awareness of issues such as stress, coping, burnout, salutogenesis and mindfulness. They all address a core practical problem: how can people foster and develop their psychological resilience in such a way that they can cope healthily with the challenges of everyday life?
