How to thrive: is being mentally tough enough?
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, resilience has become one of the most popular concepts for teams and businesses to focus on, and it would be difficult to find a team or business that doesn’t have the word “resilience” as part of its core value set. This is not surprising considering that COVID-19 has been superimposed on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), creating a new set of socio-political-economic conditions, the likes of which the world has never seen.
It is as if the world we live in and share has become scorched, not only by drought or through the compounded effects of decades of global warming, but by negative human emotions of fear, uncertainty and panic.
Our historical understanding of resilience has been centred around grit, greater resolve, more persistence, the ability to “pivot” and unwavering determination in every and all endeavours. While these are powerful psychosocial traits and are key contributors to human performance and success, they are limited within the context of the promotion of long-term resilience.
The reason for this is that a new set of socio-economic conditions emerged seemingly overnight and continue to rapidly and exponentially evolve, morph and recalibrate. Fixed behaviours, no matter how powerful, cannot defend against the changes that we are experiencing and are likely to go through in the future.
If resilience is broader and more expansive than persistence, determination or grit, then what is it? The Oxford English Dictionary defines resilience as: noun: capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
While the definition of resilience is clean, simple and easy to grasp, there
