Resilience is in our nature

There is a lot of talk about resilience, but what is resilience and how does it help us with our community action?

Resilience is defined as the ability to find the inner strength to bounce back from a set-back or challenge.

Given the variety of challenges that can occur in life we will have all experienced bouncing back at some point. This is because resilience is built into us, it comes naturally to us, and we are made to work in harmony with nature. So if resilience is built into the human system and we are designed to bounce back to our natural state of wellbeing, why does this not always look true?

It doesn’t look true because we all have ups and downs. When we are faced with a challenge we can find ourselves in a low state of mind - we can feel discouraged or hopeless, and our natural state of wellbeing doesn’t seem available to us. We forget that we are naturally resilient. If we can remember that we are able to bounce back even in the midst of a challenge we will find that we feel better about life, ourselves and our community. From here, our action to overcome any challenge will be more effective.