I wanted to call this one "What if There is no Such Thing as Failure?". I still want to call it that but there is so much more to Resilience than the absence of failure.
When I went to look up the definition of resilience this morning, I found an organization "first tee" that delivers resiliency programs to kids while teaching them golf.
The opening part of their website starts with Resilience Begins with Failure. Their coaches often begin a program with the following question:
“Who has made a fabulous mistake we can all learn from?”
In a discussion about past "failures" participants come to see that failure or mistakes don't actually exist. We decide in our thinking that a particular outcome wasn't what we wanted and then label it a failure or a mistake. All failure is, is not achieving a desired outcome yet or on that attempt. E.g., I failed to jump over the one-meter-high jump bar. When the idea of failure starts to look ridiculous and why would we make up that something is a "failure" then you are well on your way to your natural resilience.
Resilience as defined by Wikipedia:
Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally or emotionally with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.
Other definitions supplied by the internet:
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
Our natural state is to flow in an ever-present state of now. There is never any other time than now. Given that, I find it curious that definitions of resilience - like the one above - include the word toughness. Toughness implies difficulty. Difficulty or toughness is another one of those label words that doesn't really exist. Something is only tough or difficult if you decide that it is. Curiously.
Dr. Giles P Croft puts it wordily succinctly: Resilience is the visible manifestation of our psychological immune system. Our built-in mood rebalancing.
He sees resilience as the same as "if I look at a bright light, my pupils will constrict and then dilate again when the light is gone."
It's innate. Built in. We are born with it.
Humans are designed from the inside out for resilience. When babies learn to walk for example, they don't consider every fall or stumble a difficult setback or a failure to overcome. They grin and pick themselves up and go at it again. And again, and again until pretty soon they are cruising all over the house like champion walkers. And runners. And climbers.
The only reason we move away from our default of resilience is when we add in thinking about what just happened and label it in a negative way.
Back to the babies - "Oh well, what can I expect, that was my 3rd time failing at walking. I guess it's just not in the cards for me. It's just like that time I didn't roll over 2 months ago. It's a pattern of failure. I'll just stay down here."
Hopefully, that sounded funny to you because it's ridiculous.
I was going to write that we are like the materials definition of resilience. We have the ability to spring back into shape. Except that's not true either.
We never actually get "out of shape" or broken in any way. At our core, we are an ever-peaceful space of wholeness from which we can flow into the ever-changing, ever-variable life experience of now.
With grace, love,and built-in resilience.
When I work with people on the table there's a point where your spine, your body becomes fluid and then everything is up for grabs, all possibilities exist. This happens when you become present to life, present to yourself, your core nature. I see my role as a coach and a guide. You are the one becoming present to yourself.
When I work with people in transformative coaching, there's a point in the conversation where you realize the truth of who you are, who all humans are, and how we are designed so perfectly. At this point, your ideas of who you are and what reality is becomes fluid, everything is up for grabs, all possibilities exist. In a Real-lized felt sense. I see my role as guide along the way to who you really are. You are the one becoming present to yourself.