Values › Strength › Resilience
Core value · Strength family
Resilience
Bouncing back from setbacks
Also covers Endurance, Fortitude and Toughness
What does resilience mean as a core value?
Resilience as a core value means recovering well from setbacks: feeling the blow, then rebuilding, and taking pride in how you come through hard times.
Setbacks happen to everyone. What you care about is what comes next. Resilience as a value means you take pride in recovering: getting through redundancy, illness, a failed venture or a painful loss and finding your way back to something good. You feel the blow, sometimes badly, and then you start rebuilding. Endurance and fortitude matter to you, and you probably respect people more for how they came through hard times than for having avoided them.
What does resilience look like in practice?
- You give yourself a short time to be upset after a knockback, then start working out the next step.
- You look for the lesson in a failed project without dwelling on who was to blame.
- You rebuild routines quickly after a disruption like a move, a bereavement or an illness.
- You talk about past difficulties with some perspective, even humour.
- You steady a team after a lost contract by focusing everyone on what can be done now.
When is resilience overplayed?
Bouncing back fast has a cost when it means you never process what happened. Grief gets filed away, burnout gets pushed through, and you may expect others to recover at your speed. It can also keep you in situations that are harming you: if you can survive anything, why leave? Kept in proportion, it allows time to be knocked down, accepts rest and help, and sees walking away as a resilient choice too. Next time something knocks you, you could give it a week before deciding you’re fine.
Often confused with
Resilience vs Persistence
Persistence is keeping going when progress is slow. Resilience is recovering when something actually knocks you down.
Resilience vs Adaptability
Adaptability is adjusting smoothly to change. Resilience is about recovering from things that hurt, and often involves a period of struggle first.
Resilience vs Strength
Strength is withstanding pressure. Resilience accepts that you’ll sometimes break, and cares most about how you recover.
Questions to sit with
- Which setback are you proudest of coming back from, and what actually helped?
- What haven’t you let yourself feel because you were busy recovering?
- Where might your ability to endure be keeping you somewhere it’s time to leave?
More values in Strength
Courage, resilience and staying power.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
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