What is Resilience?
With this blog post, I want to share my reflections on resilience and why I believe it is becoming the defining skill for professionals seeking to maintain a healthy, wellbeing-focused life and career.
So first, what exactly is resilience?
It is the ability to recover effectively and efficiently from setbacks that impact our sense of wellbeing.
These impacts might include intrusive thoughts that spiral us into low moods, emotional outbursts that leave us feeling embarrassed or guilty, or unhealthy habits that reinforce unhelpful cycles. You probably recognise the kind of patterns I mean. These are common, human experiences.
Someone with a healthy and well-developed resilience practice is able to return to a calm and steady state without being overly affected.
In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded by competing worldviews, misinformation, cultural and literal conflict, and a continuous stream of alarming content. In this environment, many of us could benefit from a reliable way to switch off and reconnect.
This is where I come in as a coach with decades of experience in overcoming adversity and building a personal resilience practice from the ground up. I call my approach the Resilience Firewall. You can find the worksheet I created as a free download in the Resources section.
To offer a brief example from my own life: I experienced my parents' divorce as a young and sensitive child in the late 1980s. This early disruption shaped how I entered adolescence. By the time I began high school, I was not fully equipped to understand potential, let alone reach it. I still remember my teacher telling me, “Shaun, you aren’t working to your full potential.” That comment stayed with me. It became a turning point that led me to leave school at 17 and follow my own path.
Experiences like this, while difficult, can become powerful anchors for resilience. When we learn to reframe early challenges as meaningful lessons, we reclaim the ability to choose how we move forward. Once I was making my own choices and my own career changes, I realised it wasn’t learning that had overwhelmed me, it was the environment.
More on environmental influences in another post.
Peace,
Shaun 🙏
