Resilience and hardiness has long been a topic of research and discussion within different paradigms and fields of study, for example, in military psychology, psychiatry, health statistics and measurement, medical anthropology, education, medicine and organizational settings. Resilience means the skills, abilities, acquaintance, and insight that accumulate over time as people struggle to conquer adversity and meet challenges. It is an ongoing and developing fund of energy and skill that can be used in current struggles (Saleebey, 1996; Liebenberg, 2005).Most commonly, the term resilience has come to mean an individual's ability to overcome adversity and continue his or her normal development.
According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is the process of adjusting enough in the presence of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or major sources of stress such as financial and workplace problems, family/ relationship problems, and severe health problems or workplace and financial stressors (American Psychological Association, 2013).
Resiliency is one concept that has never been the human races forte. Many things that happen in our current day and age require a great deal of perseverance and resiliency. People often will give in to the problems in their lives and learn to accept them, instead of persevering through them and working out the issues. The fact of the matter is, if you learn to persevere through problems, your life will be a lot more happy and pleasant to live. In Tennessee Williams’ play, “ A Streetcar Named Desire” suggests that you cannot give up on issues; you must be resilient to those issues and persevere to be happy.
Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Unbroken, wrote a truly unforgettable novel.
Now a major motion picture, this novel contained the true story of a man named Louie
Zamperini going through the unimaginable. Zamperini owned an immense amount of
courage and resilience to overcome his worst enemy: Mutushiro Watanabe, also known
as, “The Bird.” Based out of Torrance, California, and an array of Japanese islands, this
book remains a true testimony to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.
Louie Zamperini owned the spotlight in Unbroken.
Another relationship that has a lasting impact on a person is one’s family. Parents play a large role in their child’s overall well-being. One way parents help is by helping their child be resilient. Resilience plays a large role in the speed that one will recover from a negative event. Therefore, children who are brought up in a rough environment will have a higher level of resilience to negative things later in life. Parents can influence their child’s level of resilience by helping their child find a skill that their child can be passionate about and feel successful doing. A child can also gain resilience by planning for tough situations, before these situations occur (Gorman A52-A55).
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” (C.S. Lewis) Adversity is a difficult situation, it happens in everybody's life. It is something you cannot control but it is something that you can overcome, whether it is a big or small problem there is always a way to get over it. I believe that everyone has a characteristic to overcome adversity you just have to find it, mental toughness, determination, physical strength. Without characteristics like these it would be a lot harder to overcome.
Arguably, some will say that resilience is a characteristic that is innate rather than a learned skill. At the same time, according to Zhang & Wang (2015), “(t)he term resilience can be seen in three different directions: a trait, an outcome, and a process (as cited by Van Schrojenstein, et al., 2016). Meaning, resilience is forever transforming over the duration of one's life, and depending on the circumstance and life event, the direction in which resilience plays a role will also depend on the outcome of how the individual handles the
occupational groups have found that an individual’s level of psychological resilience is significantly related to burnout. Individuals who score more highly on measures of individual resilience also score more highly on measures of psychological well-functioning and vice versa.
Secondly, the process of being resilience also helps me to confront and acknowledge the pain. So many people prefer to blame others or circumstances for the things that are not right in their lives. We all want to avoid mistakes and do things well, but when things go wrong, and we should make the moment as an opportunity to learn and do better next time. I’m a kind of perfectionism person, maybe not, I prefer not to touch the same situation and avoid to make the same mistakes as before. I think it was affected by my childhoos experience. When I was a little girl growing up, my parents frequently warned me do not make mistakes. They believed that as long as I did things slowly and carefully, and there was no need for mistakes to be made. Therefore,
When faced with an obstacle, it is easy to give up and move on. However, being resilient in the face of adversity can help a person persist when confronting an obstacle in the future. A time where one would need to persevere would be through difficult transitions, such as a move to a new school or state. I had to stay determined and persist when I moved to a different state twice.