Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
You are not born resilient, you build it
Ten chapters on what resilience is actually made of, and how each piece is trained by an ordinary person on an ordinary week.
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01 What it is
Bouncing back is only half of what resilience means
The book's definition has two parts. First you recover from the setback. Then you learn from it, so the same thing does not happen the same way twice. A person who only recovers has coped. A person who recovers and learns has been resilient.
Anne, the book's opening example, loses her job. She sends out applications, interviews well, and gets nowhere. Rather than keep going, she reads the market honestly and starts a freelance writing business instead. She takes courses, builds a site, chases better-paying work, and ends up running an agency with staff of her own.
Being resilient does not mean you stop feeling stress or emotional suffering. The book is direct about that: it means you work through them better. And it is not a temperament you either got or missed. It is a skill you can build and grow over time.
Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.Elizabeth Edwards, quoted in Chapter 1
Start the journal the book asks for in Chapter 1. First entry, two lists: where in your life you already bounce back, and where you do not. That is your starting position, and you cannot track progress without it.
02 Three words
Resilience, perseverance and patience are three different jobs
The book separates them carefully, because they work at different speeds. Resilience is the trait of recovering. Perseverance is the action of continuing. Patience is the self-control that keeps you steady while nothing visible is happening.
Patience is short term: dealing with irritations, misfortunes and provocations without becoming angry, upset or annoyed. Perseverance is long term: continued effort against resistance, including the resistance that comes from inside you. Perseverance without patience wears you out on the flat stretches. Patience without perseverance never moves.
The book's example is J. K. Rowling, rejected by multiple publishers and told by Bloomsbury to get a day job. She was divorcing, living in a small flat with her baby daughter, and writing in her free time on government subsidies. Resilience got her past each rejection. Perseverance kept the letters going out. Patience is why the waiting did not finish her off.
Those with perseverance have the “grit” to achieve their long-term goals no matter how difficult it will be or how long it will take them to do so.The Practical Power of Resilience, Chapter 2
The book prescribes games for this on purpose: chess, a crossword, a large jigsaw, a Rubik's cube, Lego with the children. Pick one and give it twenty uninterrupted minutes. You are training the waiting, not the puzzle.
03 Four kinds
Resilience comes in four kinds, and they lend to each other
The book splits it into psychological, emotional, physical and community resilience. These are not four names for one thing. Each faces something different, and each is built by different means.
Psychological resilience is coping with uncertainty and staying focused during a crisis. Emotional resilience is understanding why you feel what you feel, and calming a racing mind after a hard experience. Physical resilience is the body's capacity to keep functioning and to recover from illness, injury or physical demand. Community resilience is a group's capacity to come back from a flood, a recession, terrorism or a war.
The useful part is that the gains cross over. The book says that if you build emotional resilience for your personal relationships, your resilience at work will improve too. It also says that emotionally and psychologically resilient people are more physically resilient, because they are less likely to become sick as a result of emotional stress. Start with whichever one is easiest for you to reach.
Equal breathing, from Chapter 3. Close your eyes and count from one to four as you inhale through your nose. Exhale for four seconds. Focus on the fullness and emptiness of your lungs. That is the physical lever, and it works in a corridor before a meeting.
04 What decides it
A stressor does not land on you in general, it lands on your vulnerability
The book introduces two terms and treats them as a pair. A stressor is a life experience big enough to disrupt normal functioning. Vulnerability is the set of personal factors that make you more likely to be flattened by one.
Stressors are not always bad news. Getting married, having a baby and being promoted sit on the book's list alongside losing a job, serious illness and a bad accident. Whether an event counts depends on your own values, expectations and beliefs. If you already find the work too hard, a promotion is a stressor.
Vulnerability comes from genetic makeup, childhood experiences and personality traits. Two of those three are workable. Sitting between the stressor and the outcome are the buffers the book names: optimism, problem-solving skills, meaningful personal relationships and community support. Resilient people also hold an internal locus of control, meaning they see themselves as having a hand in what happens to them. The book says that is a mindset change, and that it takes practice and repetition.
You can decrease your vulnerability by dealing with negative childhood experiences and problematic personality traits. However, you can’t change your genetic makeup.The Practical Power of Resilience, Chapter 3
After the next stressful episode, rule four columns in your journal: the stressor, what made it happen, how you reacted, and the consequences. The book's point is that you cannot buffer a pattern you have never written down.
05 Seven components
The seven Cs are two engines and two steadiers
Control, Competence, Confidence, Connection, Character, Coping and Contribution. The book calls them the components of a resilient personality, and the way it describes them they are not seven equal items on a list.
Three of them turn each other. Feeling you have a say in your own life builds competence. Competence raises self-esteem and makes you willing to try things outside your comfort zone. That willingness hands you back more control. Two more run on other people. Connection gives belonging, purpose and self-worth. Contribution builds gratitude, and the book adds a quieter benefit: giving to others makes it easier to ask for help when your own turn comes.
Character and Coping are what hold when the engines are under load. Character is knowing your own right from wrong well enough that you are hard to manipulate. Coping is the practical one: break the difficult thing into smaller achievable parts, keep away from what triggers extreme anxiety, and let some things go.
A good half of the art of living is resilience.Alain de Botton, quoted in Chapter 5
The Chapter 5 exercise. Write down one time a window closed on you: a plan collapsed, a rejection, an event you missed. Then write what opened afterwards, and how long it took you to notice. The exercise exists to shorten that noticing time next time.
06 Naming
An emotion you refuse to name comes back with interest
The book is blunt about suppression. Your emotions will not go away if you ignore them. They surface again later, and then you have a sudden flood to handle instead of a feeling.
The alternative is to process them as they happen. Name the emotion and be specific: the book says the sooner you can name an emotion after feeling it, the easier it becomes to control. Then ground yourself in the present, because a racing mind is what makes a feeling seem larger than it is. Then write it down. Journalling is where most of the book's practical work sits, and it does not need to be a book: a phone will do.
Mindfulness here is nothing exotic. The book calls it an ability everyone already has, and says you do not need to change yourself or your beliefs to use it. It is full attention to the present, and it is what lets you notice a feeling early enough to name it at all.
If you can name the feelings you are experiencing, it gives you power over them, and it will prevent you from being overwhelmed by negative feelings.The Practical Power of Resilience, Chapter 6
The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique. Name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste. Look for the small details: the way light reflects off a surface, traffic in the distance.
07 At work
A workplace gets resilient when mistakes are allowed to teach
Every employee receives critical feedback and fails at something eventually. What decides whether that builds people or breaks them is what happens in the minute afterwards.
The book names the fork. Where errors are treated as a matter for blame, people hide the next one, and the same failure comes back around. Where the environment is psychologically safe, the error gets said out loud, the process changes, and it stops recurring. The book adds the reason: employees who do not have to fear consequences for what they say process information better, which is what lets them understand their past mistakes at all.
There is a predictable moment when this bites. While someone is learning to apply a new skill, their skill and motivation dip. A manager who reads that dip correctly and provides support immediately gets effective learning, and the groundwork for innovation. Helena, the book's case study, was pushed into a management role with no support and then blamed when a project failed. She stayed because she explained, in detail, what had actually happened. One director listened, became her mentor, and she went on to win the job properly.
The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.Joshua Waitzkin, quoted in Chapter 7
08 Wording
How you word a setback decides how far it spreads
This is the most portable idea in the book, and it costs nothing. Resilient people describe failures as temporary, contained and not entirely their own doing. The wording is not decoration. It decides how much of your life the setback is allowed to occupy.
The book supplies the sentences. Say “my manager didn’t like that presentation I prepared” rather than “my manager never likes my work.” Say “I’m not very good at statistics, but I can get better if I study hard” rather than “I’m not a good student.” Say “I couldn’t finish that project successfully because I didn’t receive the support I needed” rather than “I messed up the project because I don’t have the skills and I can’t do my job.”
The same move turns up in the chapter on growth mindset, compressed into one word. Add “yet” to the sentence you are already saying. Not good at this yet. Didn’t get that promotion yet. It turns a verdict into a position on a curve, which is the entire difference between a fixed mindset and a resilient one.
Write down the sentence you have been telling yourself about a recent failure. Rewrite it three times: once so it covers this occasion only, once so it covers this area of life only, and once naming a cause outside yourself that genuinely played a part.
09 The whole book
Not born with it, built in pieces
Resilience is a skill, and the book's whole argument is that it is as available late as it is early. You will still feel stress. You will still get knocked down. What changes is how quickly you get up, how much of your life the knock is allowed to touch, and whether you take anything useful out of it.
Resilience
The trait itself. Coming back from the setback, and learning enough from it that the same one does not keep arriving.
Perseverance
The action. Repeated effort against resistance, which the book calls grit, and which is what carries you when willpower alone runs out.
Patience
The self-control in between. Handling irritations, misfortunes and delays without becoming angry, upset or annoyed.
Building resilience is a lifelong process, and the book closes on the one line that matters: it is never too late to start.
Adapted from The Practical Power of Resilience: Beyond Surviving
Vince Perryellis · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 16 cited sources in the source edition