Resilience seems to be the buzzword of 2021. However, as I talk to young people in my sessions about what they understand by the term resilience, I’m seeing a worrying trend - without fail, young people describe resilience as ‘not giving up’ ‘keeping going’ or ‘being brave’.
Why do I find that worrying? Well, because firstly, it’s literally not what resilience means - I’m not a huge fan of getting into dictionary definitions (don’t worry, I’ll even things up with a Batman quote later). The Oxford English Dictionary defines resilience as “The ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc.”
This is an important distinction, and one which I always take them time to explain to the young people in my sessions. A resilient person isn’t someone who is always happy, it’s not someone who never experiences bad things. Instead, it’s someone who can bounce back from bad things. Equally, a resilient person might have a day when they can’t face getting out of bed - but they do get up the next day.
It’s also important to remember that sometimes it’s ok to fail. Google has a great policy on celebrating failures - why? Because sometimes failing and just getting back up and trying again and again is throwing good time, energy and money after bad. Sometimes
it’s ok to say ‘this isn’t going to work, so perhaps it’s time to move on’. This takes a huge amount of resilience. And it’s something most of us will experience at some point, whether it’s walking away from a relationship that has become toxic, saying a friendship has run its course or accepting your great business plan isn’t going to work (like that time I gave up my job to make surfboards). For young people, we don’t necessarily want to encourage them to give up, but nor do we want to teach them that failure is the worst possible outcome. We learn from failure, and if we can take that learning with us, we become stronger.
To quote Michael Caine in Batman Begins “Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up”.
When we experience pain, or adversity, and we find ourselves days, weeks or months down the line, starting to find our way again, we’ll see that we had resilience all along. We bounced back.
If I could implore all parents/carers/teachers and youth workers to do one thing, it would be to have a conversation with the young people you have contact with about resilience. Ask them what they think it means, talk to them about how it’s normal to have bad days, it’s ok to sometimes feel hopeless, and reassure them that there are things we can do to build up our resilience.
Going back to the young people in my sessions, when I ask them what they can do to build on their resilience, they have some really wonderful answers:
Talk to someone
Exercise
Play sports
See friends
Sleep
Eat good food
Watch a movie
Read a book
Cry
These are all activities that could help a young person build their resilience. We mustn’t forget that they are still young people though, and as one of the brilliant one to one workers mentioned in a YZUP team meeting recently, we shouldn’t look at a young person who shows lots of resilient behaviours and assume they are therefore resilient - if we do, we risk ‘adultifying’ them - i.e. heaping on more and more responsibilities because they seem to be coping so far. This risks reinforcing the idea young people have of resilience already - that you just have to keep going no matter what.
We can praise young people for finding activities that help build their resilience. We can support them to explore new activities, encourage them to continue with their pastimes and search for new things to do alongside them - we might even discover something new ourselves in the process!
If you want to know more about resilience and how it relates to our work with young people around substances check out this blog on Celebrating the Small Things, this one on Keeping Mentally Well Through Exercise and this one about Daffodils.