RESILIENCE BEYOND A MERE STATE

What do you call it when you get knocked down and you just get right back up? What do you call it when you suffer a set-back in your health, relationships, business, finances, project, or whatever and with the set-back your attitude goes, “This will not get me down!” “I will handle this, learn from it, and continue to move forward in life.”? The word that has come to describe this is resilience.

Recently I read a chapter on resilience in a new NLP book of patterns and processes being developed in the UK. I was especially interested in it given that Meta-States arose from my study of resilience in 1991–1994 (next week’s Neurons). But at the end I felt disappointed by the chapter. The author treated the subject as if resilience is just a regular state and didn’t know that it was a meta-state. But resilience is not a mere state. It is a rich, layered, and complex state that involves multiple states of mind and emotion.

Consider the attitude described in the belief, “If I get downed down, I will get right back up!” That’s an intricate part of resilience. As a belief statement, it entails a decision and a commitment to oneself. “If knocked down, I will get up.” Yet how does a person come to a decision like that? How does make a commitment of that caliber to oneself? Behind that attitude there must be a passion, another commitment, a belief in what one is doing that’s highly important so that one doesn’t just quit.

A commitment that one will not quit, even with a set-back, is a powerful commitment, is it not? Now the commitment could be to a wide range of things. It could be to oneself— to live fully, to learn and develop, to be one’s best self, to actualize one’s potentials. It could be to a particular passion— I will find the cure for cancer, I will make this business succeed, I will step up to leadership in my group, etc. Whatever the commitment is to— it is a commitment or a passion and one that works as a vision. And that’s why the person will “get right back up” when knocked down.

There’s a lot within and behind that resilient attitude, “I will get up!” And there’s more. There must also be a hidden believe behind it that “a set-back” or a “knock down” is not fatal and not permanent. Lots of people do not think or perceive that way. When they fail at something, when something falls apart, when there’s a major or even a minor disaster in their life— they just throw up their arms and quit. Why? They treat the problem as serious and fatal. It is something from which it is un- recoverable. That’s why such individuals do not have the attitude, “I will get up.” Their attitude is, “Oh no! This is devastating, I’ll never get over this.”

What I’m highlighting is that there is a lot in the subjective experience of resilience. It is not a simple state like the primary states. A state like stressed or relaxed, love or apathy, fear or anger, sad or joy, aversion or attraction, etc. is simple. You can point to where in your body you feel that state. The

feeling of the state is distinct. Not so with a meta-state.

There’s another facet of resilience that makes it a complex experience— the triggering event is usually one that activates a lot of different responses in us and one that usually takes a certain amount of time to process through. Suppose the set back was the loss of a job or a divorce. The intensity of the set- back or the knock-down will depend on how meaningful, how significant the job or the marriage. The more meaningful, the more severe the set-back. In that case, to be resilient will require much more. And what if these events surprised you? You didn’t expect them.

Typically the first stage of resilience is shock and surprise. Something knocked you down that you did not expect or anticipate and so getting your head around it, trying to figure out what in the world has happened, and why, and what to do about it —this is usually the first aspect of resilience. And this indicates another thing about resilience— it occurs over a period of time. Now there are various models about handling loss, grief models. And in different cultures, grief can take a week or two or two years or forever. It all depends on what a person or group of persons believe about grief and the rituals that have been developed to process through the sense of loss.

The process of resilience involves this. That’s why for some people, to become resilient after a loss or set-back takes years while others bounce back within days or weeks. This again reveals that behind the various aspects of resilience are additional beliefs and layers of beliefs. The bottom line— resilience is a meta-state. It is a not a here-and-now in-this-moment experience that you can trigger and step into. It is a subjective experience that involves a unique set of beliefs about loss, time, set-backs, life’s meanings, your self, relationships, your resources, coping skills, and much more.

Finally, because resilience is such an important and critical meta-state for each of us to operate from, in this series of posts, we will explore these facets of resilience. We will do so for the purpose of making explicit how resilience works and how you can become highly resilient in your attitude and coping skills.