ReThink Resilience

“Life is difficult.” 

These are the opening words of M. Scott Peck’s 1978 classic, “The Road Less Traveled.” 

Peck went on to write:

“This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

 Peck, M. S. (1978). The Road Less Traveled.New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 15.

Of course, I would also argue that there is so much more to this statement. Peck is not saying to just get over it. He is arguing that pain and suffering, difficulty and loss, are a fact of the human condition. 

I don’t think many of us like this. 
But it is difficult to refute. 

I have spent over thirty years of my life studying, practicing, and implementing ideas related to resilience. I chose this path because I knew (perhaps always) that life is indeed difficult. I also believe that how we live with difficulty is not predetermined - that despite and perhaps because of the struggle that is life - we can still live well. Resilience is the idea in which I choose to ground this belief.

In my opinion, resilience has been minimized and limited by primitive definitions. 

• Most people, when asked, describe resilience as the ability to bounce back following difficulty. I have long disagreed, arguing that resilience is developed in our everyday lives, through small and often subconscious acts and events. 

• Many people think that resilience is an individual attribute. I believe that healthy people - resilient people - grow better in the context of healthy families that are part of healthy communities that are part of healthy societies. Of course, we aren’t all healthy. All the same, we are interconnected across multiple levels. We are not alone. We need each other.

• Some researchers have described resilience as a set of skills and attributes that if practiced and developed will help a person manage the hardships that are life. I argue that while we can practice these skills, the skills are actually demonstrations of something more significant. The skills or tangible actions we take flow out of who we are.

ReThink Resilience is about learning to live well in a life and world full of difficulty and pain.

As a consulting practice, we offer a range of services to bring the idea of resilience into practical applications. This includes:

• Training and Coaching
  From leadership to direct service teams to volunteers, ReThink Resilience offers a variety of packages that can be adapted to address your specific needs.

• Service Design
  ReThink Resilience applies resilience principles to system, organization, and program development, using human-centered design grounded in cultural empathy.

• Technical Support and Writing
  ReThink Resilience can help assess and tell the story of the communities and people you serve. Technical in this sense applies to completing an assessment of your population, conducting best practice reviews, and identifying strategies that will lead to meaningful outcomes, or change, in people’s lives.

In our blog space, we will look at bigger ideas, like community, cultural, organizational, and family resilience, as well as individual resilience. We’ll consider how our relationships and sense of connectedness impact us. We’ll talk about how our experiences - all of them - the good, the bad, and the ugly - contribute to resilience. We’ll discuss the importance of opportunities to learn and have new experiences. We’ll consider our values, and our sense of meaning, purpose, and hope. We’ll explore the broad range of skills that we have. We’ll examine family, community, socio-political, cultural, spiritual, and other factors, with full recognition that our world is divided and throughout all time people have oppressed people. 

So, tell me this…

• Do you ever wonder how two people can face the same life hurdles and have totally different outcomes?

• Do you ever get tired of life or feel beat down?

• Do you ever feel hopeless?

• Do you ever get frustrated with the way things are?

• Have you ever wondered why you feel a sense of peace in the middle of big challenges?

• Or watched other people who seem to navigate life’s pain with relative ease and wondered how? 

I invite you to join me on a journey of exploration into resilience.

We’ll not only address theory, but we’ll get real practical. We’ll share stories. And we’ll learn together.