YOU CAN LEARN TO BE RESILIENT
Resilient people seem so capable that it is easy to think they were
born that way. Certainly, some youngsters do show early signs
of hardiness. Think of youngsters eager to learn everything and
interested in everything around them, as compared to youngsters
less involved in life. But, even if hardier adults report enthusiastic
and purposeful childhoods, it may be a mistake to conclude that
genes determine resiliency. After all, we know that some people
emerge as hardy only later in their development. So where does
resilience come from?
EARLY EXPERIENCES THAT BUILD RESILIENCE
Our early IBT research gave us clues to the origins of hardiness.
Years later, Debbie analyzed IBT’s employee interview data, as to
early conditions that differentiated the resilient and nonresilient
employee groups.1 Researchers in the early study were blind to the
employee hardiness levels of those with whom they interacted.
39
Resilience at Work
EARLY STRESS. Interestingly, many of the employees who
tested high in hardiness reported stressful early lives. Their
stress included serious illnesses in themselves or family members,
single-parent households, divorces, financial difficulties,
unemployment, alcoholism or substance abuse in family
members, and frequent, disruptive changes in residence.
These early lives if anything were more stressful than reported
by those employees low in hardiness.
SENSE OF PURPOSE. Another important feature of those
high in resilience is that many of them recalled their parents’
singling them out as special in some important way. Talents,
skills, maturity, or other unique, defining features contributed
to parents elevating these children’s role within the
family. As such, the parents supported these youngsters’
capabilities through either encouraging their gifts and talents
or assigning them family responsibilities, or both. These children
developed a keen sense of purposeful direction in
school, community, and work activities. In contrast to less
determined youngsters, these children emerged hardier, responsive
to growth-promoting opportunities, and creative in
carving out niches that fully expressed themselves.
NURTURED CONFIDENCE. In school, teachers or other
adults spotted and nurtured these youngsters. This helped
their confidence. These youngsters’ openness to and involvement
with the environment must have gotten their teachers’
attention. In any event, the high-resilience employees had
found learning stimulating and fun. They further expected
their efforts to lead to good results and cherished their central
roles at home and at school. When these hardier youngsters
encountered personal frustrations or setbacks, they utilized
the help and encouragement of others.
What exactly did the resilient IBT employees learn about themselves
in their youth? They learned that they were important enough to fully engage in living (commitment attitude), they could
influence positively much of what happens to them (control attitude),
and they could use ongoing changes in ways that benefited
their development and growth (challenge attitude). Their hardy attitudes
helped them to embrace life and to develop resources to
cope effectively with life’s circumstances.
EARLY EXPERIENCES
THAT UNDERMINE RESILIENCE
In contrast, the nonresilient employees remembered their childhood
experiences differently.
LITTLE FAMILYENCOURAGEMENT. Some recalled parents
who rigidly advocated to them about rules, values, and family
norms. They recalled few times, if any, when their parents
made them feel especially capable or talented. If they did,
however, it was inconsistent, oftentimes the result of external
pressures rather than personal sentiment. Many within this
group only vaguely recalled meaningful family interactions
and attributed much of this to outside preoccupations that
undermined family functioning. For various reasons, in their
youth, these adults recalled limited encouragement, help,
and empathy from their parents. They also reported that, before
long, they began hiding their feelings, frustrations, and
problems from their parents.
NO SENSE OF PURPOSE. The nonresilient employees insufficiently
appreciated how school and other community activities
served as stepping stones to a fulfilling life. Vaguely
defined talents and goals undermined their ability to grasp
the larger picture.
LACKOFINVOLVEMENT. As children, this group also shied
away from teachers. They did what they could to get by in
01
Resilience at Work
school, with little sense of involvement or influence. Even
though some of them did well academically, they still felt
socially inadequate. These employees reported more unhappiness
at home and at school than their more resilient coworkers.
As you can see, the nonresilient IBT employees did not have
hardy attitudes and skills. As youngsters, they learned early to
avoid life’s problems (alienation as opposed to commitment), to refrain
from influencing the manageable aspects of change (powerlessness
as opposed to control), and to fear changes that disrupt
stability (threat as opposed to challenge). These self-defeating attitudes
toward living prevented them from coping and interacting
effectively under pressure.
CAN RESILIENCE BE LEARNED
IN CHILDHOOD?
Genetic inheritance affects our performance and health on many
levels, but you can learn resilience as a child. There are many
examples of people, genetically disadvantaged and thus vulnerable,
who have nonetheless overcome such limitations, sometimes
in extraordinary ways. In contrast, there are also just as many examples
of people who, though apparently well-endowed genetically,
are surprisingly low in hardiness.2
Our IBT employee-history interviews showed how early experiences
can be a formative influence on resilience. The development
of hardy attitudes and skills in children varies with certain
characteristics of their environment and parental interaction. What
is the gist of this childhood hardiness? Circumstances that provide
children with opportunities to find purpose, direction, and meaning
in dealing with stressful changes strengthen resilient attitudes
and resources within them. The resilient IBT employees’ early
losses, setbacks, supportive parenting, and teachings gave them
numerous opportunities to learn how to turn change to advantage
and to use constructively the support from which to accomplish
this.
CAN YOU LEARN RESILIENCE
IN ADULTHOOD?
As long as you can use life experiences to grow, psychologically
and socially, as an adult. Resist falling
into the trap of thinking that once you reach adulthood, you are
what you are, and nothing will change that. Hardiness research,
detailed below, indicates that adolescents and adults can learn to
be resilient.
HARDINESS TRAINING
Our efforts to foster hardiness in adults began at IBT, in the years
following the deregulation upheavals. IBT decision makers came
to us, indicating that they knew us as careful and determined researchers,
but wondered if we could also help their employees to
become more resilient. The company was then in the throes of
massive downsizing and reorganization, with the aim of being
competitive in the new telecommunications industry. These upheavals
were taking a great toll on the employees, and they needed
hardiness badly.
In the first practical application of our research, we put together
a hardiness training program based on our findings about
hardiness we had found in the resilient group and the parent/child
relationships they had reported.3 Specifically, we devised techniques
and exercises to help trainees handle stressful circum-
Resilience at Work
stances by turning them to advantage (rather than by avoiding or
attacking them) and to help them interact with others by giving
and receiving assistance and encouragement (rather than by deepening
ongoing conflicts). Also, we included ways to use the feedback
from these efforts to deepen the attitudes of commitment,
control, and challenge. In addition, the trainers tried to give the
encouragement and support to trainees implementing the techniques
and exercises that the resilient employees in our research
sample had reported getting from their parents. As you will see
later, the training was effective in helping trainees learn hardy coping,
social interaction, and attitudes. It is this training procedure
that has led to the exercises you will encounter in chapters 6, 8,
and 10. The beleaguered IBT employees benefited greatly from this
training. The abiding emphasis of our hardiness training program
is on transformational coping and supportive social interactions
and using these to deepen the attitudes of commitment, control,
and challenge.
TRANSFORMATIONAL COPING. Through mental and behavioral
actions, you transform the features of stressful
changes and use them to advantage. At the mental level,
stressful circumstances are placed into broader perspectives,
so they can be managed more easily. An example is the time
perspective, which may help you realize that the deadlines
are all this week, so that next week you can get back to normal.
You also learn how to deepen your understanding of
problems, so you know what to do to solve them. An example
is the recognition that the stress is based on unfortunate
but resolvable misunderstandings between you and your
boss. At the action level, mental insights are used to plan and
carry out decisive courses of problem-solving actions. The
feedback gained from carrying out these activities deepens
your hardy attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge.
This process leads to greater resilience under stress.
SUPPORTIVE SOCIAL INTERACTIONS. The other abiding
emphasis of our hardiness training program strives to foster
supportive interactions that can help solve problems. Here,
you identify and resolve ongoing conflicts that exist between
you and others, and replace them with patterns of sharing
assistance and encouragement. In doing this, you learn communication,
listening, and behavior skills that bring about
supportive interactions to improve relationships. Often, the
trainee has to take the first steps unilaterally in trying to improve
the relationships. The training process helps you to
both understand and accept this approach, by realizing that
if you are helpful to a coworker, it will be difficult for him or
her not to respond in kind.
Trainees practice these coping and support skills in reallife
circumstances and use the feedback they get from their
efforts to deepen their hardy attitudes. They emerge with the
knowledge and skills to turn potentially disruptive stresses
into advantages. Once the program is over, they have developed
the courage, motivation, and strategies to approach
stressful circumstances resiliently.
GAUGING THE RESULTS. By now, there are a number of
research studies of working adults and college students, all
of which show the effectiveness of this type of resiliency
training. The general pattern of the studies uses questionnaires
to measure the hardiness levels in the participants before
the training begins and after it is over. In addition, we
measure their job or school performance in relevant ways,
before and after training. To clarify the relative effectiveness
of our training program, we further compare the participants
to people who receive other special training or no training at
all.
At IBT, we compared IBT employees going through hardiness
training to other IBT employees still on the training wait list.4
Those who had completed the training were hardier, performed
better on the job, were more satisfied with their job, and had a
greater sense of personal fulfillment than those still on the waiting
Resilience at Work
list. Their stress, strain, anxiety, depression, and blood pressure
also simultaneously decreased, and their supervisors’ performance
evaluations of them improved. These group differences persisted
over the six months following the end of the training program.
There have been other studies of hardiness training for working
adults who are undergoing great changes. When these adults
went through specific training for hardiness, as compared to other
adult trainees who received more conventional stress-management
training, the results matched those already discussed. These other
studies of similar training programs reinforce the value and effectiveness
of hardiness training.5
When we do hardiness training in the workplace, we typically
arrange for there to be an ‘‘alumni’’ meeting, roughly one month
after the training is over. This is an opportunity for trainees to
meet once again, share what has been happening to them after the
training, and fill out a questionnaire about how the training has
affected them. Across the various groups, 90 percent of the working
adults find the training of marked value and 93 percent feel
that they have definitely improved in their ability to deal with
stressful circumstances.
By now, there are also research studies of hardiness training
with college students.6 In these, the training for resilience is offered
as a regular credit course for students who need or want it.
These courses offer similar training to that used for working
adults, and show similar results. Not only does questionnairebased
hardiness increase as students go through the course, so too
do their grade-point averages and retention in school over the next
two years.
Taken together, these research findings on the effectiveness of
hardiness training show a number of beneficial results that persist
over time:
Trainees become more imaginative about how to bridge the
gap between their needs and those of their company and coworkers.
They are no longer overcome with panic, anger, and
detachment.
They feel more self-confident, as they think through all the
changes that are taking place. They no longer feel inadequate
and vulnerable.
They feel more energetic and enthusiastic on a day-to-day
basis. They have fewer headaches, upset stomachs, aches and
pains, and don’t have trouble getting out of bed anymore.
They feel more involved in the events going on around them,
and think they can really make a difference. They don’t think
of themselves as victims being preyed upon by those in
power.
They have a sense of a better future for themselves, rather
than thinking it is only other people that can get what they
want in life.
They procrastinate and avoid less, and do less stress-related
eating and drinking.
As they come to feel less overwhelmed and powerless, they
cut corners and disregard rules less.
They feel more flexible, and open to whatever happens. It is
less likely that they get stuck in old beliefs about how the
world works, as they become more open to possibilities and
how they can actually improve their lives.
SUMMARY
Developing resilience in people is our life’s work. We enjoy helping
people to improve their hardiness and, as a consequence, to
enhance their performance, health, morale, and conduct. It seems
clear from the research on adolescents and adults that you can
learn hardiness; it is not just in the genes. In this chapter, we have
presented a rough outline of what our training program involves.
In the pages that follow, we will take you through our specific
training techniques that will help you to navigate successfully
whatever work changes come your way.
Resilient people seem so capable that it is easy to think they were
born that way. Certainly, some youngsters do show early signs
of hardiness. Think of youngsters eager to learn everything and
interested in everything around them, as compared to youngsters
less involved in life. But, even if hardier adults report enthusiastic
and purposeful childhoods, it may be a mistake to conclude that
genes determine resiliency. After all, we know that some people
emerge as hardy only later in their development. So where does
resilience come from?
EARLY EXPERIENCES THAT BUILD RESILIENCE
Our early IBT research gave us clues to the origins of hardiness.
Years later, Debbie analyzed IBT’s employee interview data, as to
early conditions that differentiated the resilient and nonresilient
employee groups.1 Researchers in the early study were blind to the
employee hardiness levels of those with whom they interacted.
39
Resilience at Work
EARLY STRESS. Interestingly, many of the employees who
tested high in hardiness reported stressful early lives. Their
stress included serious illnesses in themselves or family members,
single-parent households, divorces, financial difficulties,
unemployment, alcoholism or substance abuse in family
members, and frequent, disruptive changes in residence.
These early lives if anything were more stressful than reported
by those employees low in hardiness.
SENSE OF PURPOSE. Another important feature of those
high in resilience is that many of them recalled their parents’
singling them out as special in some important way. Talents,
skills, maturity, or other unique, defining features contributed
to parents elevating these children’s role within the
family. As such, the parents supported these youngsters’
capabilities through either encouraging their gifts and talents
or assigning them family responsibilities, or both. These children
developed a keen sense of purposeful direction in
school, community, and work activities. In contrast to less
determined youngsters, these children emerged hardier, responsive
to growth-promoting opportunities, and creative in
carving out niches that fully expressed themselves.
NURTURED CONFIDENCE. In school, teachers or other
adults spotted and nurtured these youngsters. This helped
their confidence. These youngsters’ openness to and involvement
with the environment must have gotten their teachers’
attention. In any event, the high-resilience employees had
found learning stimulating and fun. They further expected
their efforts to lead to good results and cherished their central
roles at home and at school. When these hardier youngsters
encountered personal frustrations or setbacks, they utilized
the help and encouragement of others.
What exactly did the resilient IBT employees learn about themselves
in their youth? They learned that they were important enough to fully engage in living (commitment attitude), they could
influence positively much of what happens to them (control attitude),
and they could use ongoing changes in ways that benefited
their development and growth (challenge attitude). Their hardy attitudes
helped them to embrace life and to develop resources to
cope effectively with life’s circumstances.
EARLY EXPERIENCES
THAT UNDERMINE RESILIENCE
In contrast, the nonresilient employees remembered their childhood
experiences differently.
LITTLE FAMILYENCOURAGEMENT. Some recalled parents
who rigidly advocated to them about rules, values, and family
norms. They recalled few times, if any, when their parents
made them feel especially capable or talented. If they did,
however, it was inconsistent, oftentimes the result of external
pressures rather than personal sentiment. Many within this
group only vaguely recalled meaningful family interactions
and attributed much of this to outside preoccupations that
undermined family functioning. For various reasons, in their
youth, these adults recalled limited encouragement, help,
and empathy from their parents. They also reported that, before
long, they began hiding their feelings, frustrations, and
problems from their parents.
NO SENSE OF PURPOSE. The nonresilient employees insufficiently
appreciated how school and other community activities
served as stepping stones to a fulfilling life. Vaguely
defined talents and goals undermined their ability to grasp
the larger picture.
LACKOFINVOLVEMENT. As children, this group also shied
away from teachers. They did what they could to get by in
01
Resilience at Work
school, with little sense of involvement or influence. Even
though some of them did well academically, they still felt
socially inadequate. These employees reported more unhappiness
at home and at school than their more resilient coworkers.
As you can see, the nonresilient IBT employees did not have
hardy attitudes and skills. As youngsters, they learned early to
avoid life’s problems (alienation as opposed to commitment), to refrain
from influencing the manageable aspects of change (powerlessness
as opposed to control), and to fear changes that disrupt
stability (threat as opposed to challenge). These self-defeating attitudes
toward living prevented them from coping and interacting
effectively under pressure.
CAN RESILIENCE BE LEARNED
IN CHILDHOOD?
Genetic inheritance affects our performance and health on many
levels, but you can learn resilience as a child. There are many
examples of people, genetically disadvantaged and thus vulnerable,
who have nonetheless overcome such limitations, sometimes
in extraordinary ways. In contrast, there are also just as many examples
of people who, though apparently well-endowed genetically,
are surprisingly low in hardiness.2
Our IBT employee-history interviews showed how early experiences
can be a formative influence on resilience. The development
of hardy attitudes and skills in children varies with certain
characteristics of their environment and parental interaction. What
is the gist of this childhood hardiness? Circumstances that provide
children with opportunities to find purpose, direction, and meaning
in dealing with stressful changes strengthen resilient attitudes
and resources within them. The resilient IBT employees’ early
losses, setbacks, supportive parenting, and teachings gave them
numerous opportunities to learn how to turn change to advantage
and to use constructively the support from which to accomplish
this.
CAN YOU LEARN RESILIENCE
IN ADULTHOOD?
As long as you can use life experiences to grow, psychologically
and socially, as an adult. Resist falling
into the trap of thinking that once you reach adulthood, you are
what you are, and nothing will change that. Hardiness research,
detailed below, indicates that adolescents and adults can learn to
be resilient.
HARDINESS TRAINING
Our efforts to foster hardiness in adults began at IBT, in the years
following the deregulation upheavals. IBT decision makers came
to us, indicating that they knew us as careful and determined researchers,
but wondered if we could also help their employees to
become more resilient. The company was then in the throes of
massive downsizing and reorganization, with the aim of being
competitive in the new telecommunications industry. These upheavals
were taking a great toll on the employees, and they needed
hardiness badly.
In the first practical application of our research, we put together
a hardiness training program based on our findings about
hardiness we had found in the resilient group and the parent/child
relationships they had reported.3 Specifically, we devised techniques
and exercises to help trainees handle stressful circum-
Resilience at Work
stances by turning them to advantage (rather than by avoiding or
attacking them) and to help them interact with others by giving
and receiving assistance and encouragement (rather than by deepening
ongoing conflicts). Also, we included ways to use the feedback
from these efforts to deepen the attitudes of commitment,
control, and challenge. In addition, the trainers tried to give the
encouragement and support to trainees implementing the techniques
and exercises that the resilient employees in our research
sample had reported getting from their parents. As you will see
later, the training was effective in helping trainees learn hardy coping,
social interaction, and attitudes. It is this training procedure
that has led to the exercises you will encounter in chapters 6, 8,
and 10. The beleaguered IBT employees benefited greatly from this
training. The abiding emphasis of our hardiness training program
is on transformational coping and supportive social interactions
and using these to deepen the attitudes of commitment, control,
and challenge.
TRANSFORMATIONAL COPING. Through mental and behavioral
actions, you transform the features of stressful
changes and use them to advantage. At the mental level,
stressful circumstances are placed into broader perspectives,
so they can be managed more easily. An example is the time
perspective, which may help you realize that the deadlines
are all this week, so that next week you can get back to normal.
You also learn how to deepen your understanding of
problems, so you know what to do to solve them. An example
is the recognition that the stress is based on unfortunate
but resolvable misunderstandings between you and your
boss. At the action level, mental insights are used to plan and
carry out decisive courses of problem-solving actions. The
feedback gained from carrying out these activities deepens
your hardy attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge.
This process leads to greater resilience under stress.
SUPPORTIVE SOCIAL INTERACTIONS. The other abiding
emphasis of our hardiness training program strives to foster
supportive interactions that can help solve problems. Here,
you identify and resolve ongoing conflicts that exist between
you and others, and replace them with patterns of sharing
assistance and encouragement. In doing this, you learn communication,
listening, and behavior skills that bring about
supportive interactions to improve relationships. Often, the
trainee has to take the first steps unilaterally in trying to improve
the relationships. The training process helps you to
both understand and accept this approach, by realizing that
if you are helpful to a coworker, it will be difficult for him or
her not to respond in kind.
Trainees practice these coping and support skills in reallife
circumstances and use the feedback they get from their
efforts to deepen their hardy attitudes. They emerge with the
knowledge and skills to turn potentially disruptive stresses
into advantages. Once the program is over, they have developed
the courage, motivation, and strategies to approach
stressful circumstances resiliently.
GAUGING THE RESULTS. By now, there are a number of
research studies of working adults and college students, all
of which show the effectiveness of this type of resiliency
training. The general pattern of the studies uses questionnaires
to measure the hardiness levels in the participants before
the training begins and after it is over. In addition, we
measure their job or school performance in relevant ways,
before and after training. To clarify the relative effectiveness
of our training program, we further compare the participants
to people who receive other special training or no training at
all.
At IBT, we compared IBT employees going through hardiness
training to other IBT employees still on the training wait list.4
Those who had completed the training were hardier, performed
better on the job, were more satisfied with their job, and had a
greater sense of personal fulfillment than those still on the waiting
Resilience at Work
list. Their stress, strain, anxiety, depression, and blood pressure
also simultaneously decreased, and their supervisors’ performance
evaluations of them improved. These group differences persisted
over the six months following the end of the training program.
There have been other studies of hardiness training for working
adults who are undergoing great changes. When these adults
went through specific training for hardiness, as compared to other
adult trainees who received more conventional stress-management
training, the results matched those already discussed. These other
studies of similar training programs reinforce the value and effectiveness
of hardiness training.5
When we do hardiness training in the workplace, we typically
arrange for there to be an ‘‘alumni’’ meeting, roughly one month
after the training is over. This is an opportunity for trainees to
meet once again, share what has been happening to them after the
training, and fill out a questionnaire about how the training has
affected them. Across the various groups, 90 percent of the working
adults find the training of marked value and 93 percent feel
that they have definitely improved in their ability to deal with
stressful circumstances.
By now, there are also research studies of hardiness training
with college students.6 In these, the training for resilience is offered
as a regular credit course for students who need or want it.
These courses offer similar training to that used for working
adults, and show similar results. Not only does questionnairebased
hardiness increase as students go through the course, so too
do their grade-point averages and retention in school over the next
two years.
Taken together, these research findings on the effectiveness of
hardiness training show a number of beneficial results that persist
over time:
Trainees become more imaginative about how to bridge the
gap between their needs and those of their company and coworkers.
They are no longer overcome with panic, anger, and
detachment.
They feel more self-confident, as they think through all the
changes that are taking place. They no longer feel inadequate
and vulnerable.
They feel more energetic and enthusiastic on a day-to-day
basis. They have fewer headaches, upset stomachs, aches and
pains, and don’t have trouble getting out of bed anymore.
They feel more involved in the events going on around them,
and think they can really make a difference. They don’t think
of themselves as victims being preyed upon by those in
power.
They have a sense of a better future for themselves, rather
than thinking it is only other people that can get what they
want in life.
They procrastinate and avoid less, and do less stress-related
eating and drinking.
As they come to feel less overwhelmed and powerless, they
cut corners and disregard rules less.
They feel more flexible, and open to whatever happens. It is
less likely that they get stuck in old beliefs about how the
world works, as they become more open to possibilities and
how they can actually improve their lives.
SUMMARY
Developing resilience in people is our life’s work. We enjoy helping
people to improve their hardiness and, as a consequence, to
enhance their performance, health, morale, and conduct. It seems
clear from the research on adolescents and adults that you can
learn hardiness; it is not just in the genes. In this chapter, we have
presented a rough outline of what our training program involves.
In the pages that follow, we will take you through our specific
training techniques that will help you to navigate successfully
whatever work changes come your way.
Comments