Resilience is another of these interesting words in fashion at the moment. A quick search on google.com and I hit more than 63 million pages in just about 43 seconds (Avril 2017). WOW! Definitely in fashion. The word itself sounds a bit like “resistance” or “endurance”, however the “l” in it, gives a bit of a smoothness and links it –phonetically- to “salience”.
We know “words are wild beasts, and in the jungle of our cognitive thinking, we can either tame them or be their prey”.
And when it comes to “taming a word” one starting point can be as simple as going back to the origin of the word, when it appeared first, where it appeared from. It’s like going back to a word first (or true) intention, before it evolved, at times taking a meaning of its own, often a manipulated meaning.
Resilience, like many other words we are using, stems from the latin “resilire”, more precisely its present participle “resiliens”. “Resilire” is built as “re” for back and “salire” for jump, hence the signification “to jump back”, “to rebound” or “to recoil” (and yes, salience is also originating from salire).
Resilience is all about jumping back, or jumping again. It’s all about using movement and letting the energy created with the movement brings us somewhere, exactly like the effect of a spring. Ready for something cool? Did you know that result comes from the same latin word “resilire” but this time from the past participle, like the final product of the actual action. Resilience and result? Or better, developing resilience for results, and behind these two words, the flexibility of movement, the jump and the ernegey created with it. Of course none of us are simple spring ready to recoil… though some of us are as nervous as a spring about to recoil.
We are rather a set of complex emotions, dynamic processes, mixture of chemical components, all these in a dynamic system always in some kind of movement.
This is extremely useful when looking at developing resilience. We can work component per component -like the management of emotions, the art of reframing, the mindset of letting-go, the mindset of determination, etc.- at the same time, keeping an eye on the interaction effect between all components. My preference is to start with the notion of movement, precisely the movement created by each action we initialize and behind it, its release of energy. This energy is often the ignition needed to move our thought forward… Think about it as a key starting a car engine. Now starting the action first means forgetting thinking about it; instead focusing on enjoying the movement, and what can be learn from it. And yes we drop the idea for control for the one of flexibility, which means… we have identified the horizon we want to steer to. Here we go then, in developing resilience, two crucial steps to take: step 1, define your horizon – step 2, build up the skills of flexibility.
talking4good.com 