Are you Diving or Thriving? 6 Resilient steps to bounce back better than you were before

Even though I teach resilience skills, there was a time last year when I felt like giving up.

I’d lost my job, my best friend, my business, my partner and almost my home.  Despite having taught resilience skills to thousands of people - I struggled to help myself.

Yet some people thrive in far worse circumstances than mine - and some people dive.

What about you?  In the face of adversity – are you a diver or a thriver?

Are you Diving or Thriving with Resilience?

The difference between the divers and the thrivers is resilience. 

Resilience is one of those key higher order skills - more important than learning to be a good leader, improving your job skills, motivating others, becoming a better person - or even more important than learning to be a good parent.

Resilience is a mindset

Why?

Because if you resile from a situation, you can learn.

If you learn, you can adapt.

If you adapt, you will prevail.

How to Take Charge of Your Resilience – a Survivor’s Example

Let me tell you about Rhonda Cornum.  During the Gulf War, she was a flight surgeon with 229th attack Regiment.  One day she went out in a black hawk helicopter on a search and rescue to pick up a downed US fighter pilot. 

On the way her chopper, too, was shot down.  Of the eight crew, five died in the crash - three survived, including Rhonda. 

resiliience of Rhonda Cornium to survive a helicopter crash and prisoner-of-war

Let me paraphrase what happened next in her own words 

“So, I got shot down. The next thing I know some Iraqi soldier is dislocating the shoulder in my already broken arm.  As we were crashing, I remember thinking I had two options. Either I'd be dead, or I'd be captured. Being captured was better.

I could still wiggle my fingers and that was good, because I knew we were really good at doing orthopaedics.  Then this guy put a gun to my head and I was thinking this is really not going to well is it?

So, I decided to think of something positive and I was really wracking my brains and I thought, well, I've had a great life. I’ve had a great husband and a great kid. I've had the chance to do a lot of really great things. And at least it won't hurt, which is a better end than a lot of people get. Then I heard the gun go 'click,' and I thought, well, this isn't that bad after all.”

Is Rhonda Cornum resilient? What do you think? Here’s someone who isn’t going to let her circumstances shape how she feels, but has made a decision about how she wants to be. 

Levels of Resilience

Somewhere between Rhonda Cornum's level of resilience and the rest of us we can take a step to improve our levels of resilience. Resilience is learnable.

The good news is it’s not that hard, you don’t have to try harder, work longer or go faster - resilience is learnable.

Seven Levels of resilience from collapse to Self-actualise

There are six characteristics that separate the resilient from the less resilient - accepting your circumstances; self, especially self-compassion; friends and strangers; setting direction; community; and learning from adversity. I call these the Resilience compass - together they help you find the best way when things get tough.

And it’s worth doing. After all, this is not the first adversity, you will face, and it will certainly not be the last.  Once we have dealt with pandemics and recessions we still have to think about global warming, inequality, disruptions and competitors and a myriad of other issues.

The Year That Tested My Resilience

I’ve had my own experience of this - over the past few years I’ve lost my best friend, my job, my business , my partner – and almost my home.

It started with my friend getting bashed and acquiring a brain injury so severe that he is now in permanent care.

Then in lost my job.  The business - a start-up making a medical food for the dietary management of depression - went with it too.

Oh, and did I tell you that in the meantime, I discovered my apartment was covered in flammable cladding.

There was a ray of light in all that – I’d met the most beautiful, gorgeous woman, that I decided I wanted to marry.

But still it was a dark, dark time.  Especially the start-up - I’d spent five years working on it. I’d put my heart and soul into it, including two years working without pay.  It was going to be my swansong - after which I would retire.  But we got wiped out by change in government regulation.

After six months I picked himself and started something new - another business, and just as it was taking off COVID-19 hit.  Nobody wanted to talk about my new venture.

And just as the restrictions started, the love of my life broke it off. 

Heading into lockdown - on my own, the business failed, burning through cash, and with everything I had ever worked for gone, living in an apartment covered with flammable cladding - life was not looking appealing.

But I should know how to deal with it, right?  After all, I’m Mr. Resilience? 

Cris Popp - Teaching Resilience Hiking

In 2007 I had developed the Resilience Compass © (RC) - the six characteristics of resilient people.  I had taught these resilience skills to all sorts of people - medical professionals, the Australian Defence Force (ADF), office workers, roadwork crews and even the police.

It should have meant that I could deal with adversity.

But what I really wanted to do was escape in all the usual ways.  And for a short time I did - drink too much alcohol, buried myself in activities, stayed up too late, binged watch TV and ate comfort food (all of which make it worse).

Remember those levels of resilience? I was diving, not surviving, and certainly not thriving.

One of the 6 characteristics of the compass - and something all resilient people do - is learn from adversity.

This was an opportunity to reassess what really matters.  And with nowhere to go, and not much to do - I was forced to do that.

That's why I'm writing to you today.   Because what matters is learning and growing - we know from research that people with a growth mentality are happier, healthier and more successful in the long-term. 

Resilience is the key to that - a higher-order skill that can be learnt.

The Resilience Compass © - 6 Characteristics of Resilient People

There are six characteristics of resilience that together I call the Resilience Compass©.

 
1. Circumstances

The first characteristic, circumstances - is about accepting your situation exactly as it is. You can’t build a house on faulty foundations.  Rhonda Cornum was in no doubt about having a gun at her head.

2. Self

The second element self – is having a sense that while the problems might be big, even huge, you will prevail.  It’s also self-compassion, which I will come back to the moment.

3. Friends & Strangers

The third is friends and strangers - being able to turn to others helps us to put our own problems in context, and let off some of the emotional charge - the anger, despair or fear that are so normal at this time.

4. Direction

The fourth characteristic, direction is about asking “How do you want to be when all this is over?”   What do you want to be remembered for?  As they say “Don’t waste a good crisis”

5. Community

The fifth characteristic, Community is about making decisions for the greater good – not for your own self-interest.  The Akron people of Africa have a saying “your neighbours problems have arrived, yours will be here shortly.

6. Adversity

The sixth element is learning from adversity - as they say, whenever you fall over, pick something up.  You’ve had the pain - get the gain. 

These skills are learnable.  One team I worked with to build the resilience had had some issues - problems - for more than three years.  After doing one workshop, applying the compass their confidence about solving the problem had doubled, they’d identified an average of five action steps, where previously they had seen none, their stress had dropped and their focus increased.

These skills are learnable.

Self-Compassion is Key to Resilience

There is one key skill that underpins all of these.  I said earlier that learning to be more resilient will not require you to do more, move faster, work harder or be smarter - it will require you to change the way you look at road-blocks.

But most importantly it involves it involves learning a huge dose of self-compassion.

To be resilient:

You don’t need to “harden up” - you need to soften down.

You don’t need to “get over it” - you need to go through it.

You don’t have to “get on with it” - you need stop and recover.

You do need to practice self compassion, not self-shame.  To become more resilient you need to be kind to yourself, because you’ll make mistakes. A lot.

Resilience Requires Self-Compassion

I still get it very wrong.  In fact I got very wrong again recently.  

Just last month I went on a solo hike to a place called to Eagles Peak (in Victoria, Australia).

I’ve done dozens of these walks now, ranging in length from four to ten days - in all sorts of conditions  - you’d think I’d know how to handle myself?

Well it got cold and wet. I couldn’t have any hot meals because I forgot my stove - a rookie mistake.

I couldn’t take my bearings because the clouds were too low. I got completely lost and then my GPS failed because it got water-logged.  

I got pretty angry at myself. I thought:

“What am I doing here?”, “Why do I do this?” 

I thought I would have to set off the emergency beacon.  I started berating myself “How embarrassing,” You’re an idiot”, On and on and it went, “You should know better” etc.

It was horrible to hear myself and worse to be on the receiving end of that kind of talk - especially self-talk.

Then that one resilient attribute kicked in - self-compassion.

It afforded me a moment of peace, I calmed myself down, went through the options, backtracked carefully, found the right track and walked out.  No need for the emergency beacon.

And no thanks to the negative self-talk – that didn’t help at all.

Compassion is so important because you and your team will get it wrong over and over. That's what life is about.

That's what learning is about.  You do something that doesn’t go as planned - you course correct. 

Your team are only going to admit errors when they know they aren’t going to get in trouble.

And you are only going to accept uncomfortable truths about yourself when you can take them in with kindness

Then you can learn from them.

And if you can learn from them, you don’t have to repeat them - you will be more resilient.  You can learn to bounce back better, faster and more easily.

What did I learn on this trip? Yes, I’ve learnt I need a GPS that is waterproof.  Maybe don’t go out in bad weather.

More importantly I’ve learnt the transferable skill of calming myself in the face of panic, retracing my steps and course correcting.  Very useful when you are facing an uncertain future.

Resilience is learnable and repeatable.

If you want your organisation or team to be strong and future-proof, your team will need to embrace resilience and compassion. 

If you want your people to recover faster, learn quicker and adapt better - to become change agile and future ready - then they will have to get used to failing, to becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

They will need to accept that sometimes you will get lost in the wilderness, but you can find your way out.  

Learning the skills of resilience is not free – it will cost you time and effort. But it’s worth it and it’s best to do it now rather than wait for the next crisis,

So what will you do? How will you help your people? How can you help them learn to bounce back better, faster and more easily.

Bouncing back with resilience on a trampoline

How can you help your team to stop reacting, and start responding instead?

How can you support your people to recover from each new change or crisis without diverting time, energy and resources away from your goals?

How can you help maximising the learnings and build their resilience - their fitness to deal with whatever tomorrow brings. 

Like Rhonda Cornum, you too can choose how to respond, rather than being forced to react.  You too can bounce back better.

Resilience is learnable.

Download a free resilience diagnostic, a copy of the Resilience Compass © and other resources: https://b2bapp.io/forms/PoppVentures/70f68126342e0366b9271eec944b78e27f6e2ed9