This morning I attended the St George BEC Business Breakfast to give a presentation on the topic of Resilience and how being resilient can provide a point of difference in your business.

The topic fascinates me.

Are we born resilient?

Do we develop more resilience?

Is it possible to become less resilient?

How could resilience be a point of difference for your business?

Resilience generally means "bouncing back" or "rebounding" and can be applied to science, biology, engineering, IT and more recently has significant use regarding the human ability to deal with adversity.  Adversity can be any event that causes a system to stretch from its natural state; this could be any hardship, difficult, misfortune, stress, catastrophe etc

Psychology describes resilience as:
If we are keen to understand whether we can build resilience then this third point is where I believe the key is.  Exposure to events and adversities that over time build our resilience.  I think of resilience as being like a muscle and like any muscle can be developed through regular exercise and stretching as well as a good diet and rejuvenating sleep.

Think about people you know who are resilient.  How have they developed their resilience?  What characterises their resilience? 

Think about yourself.  How many of these same characteristics do you have?  What contributes to you being more resilient?  What depletes your resilience? 


Depleteing and building resilience:

Martin Seligman wrote Authentic Happiness.  In this book he identifies a number of explanatory styles - how we view the adverse events in our lives.

Permanence describes how long the adversity will impact the individual. 

Pervasiveness describes how deeply the adversity will impact the individual. 

Personalisation describes the extent to which an individual believes they are responsible for an event or if it was out of their control

How we choose to explain the events in our lives either builds resilience or depletes resilience. 

If you live in Sydney and are interested to learn more please attend St George BEC Business breakfast on April 21 - click here for details.  Otherwise stay tuned for video and / or podcast of the session