The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition defines resilience as, “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Reivich and Shatte identify four uses for resilience. Many individuals must call on their reserves of resilience to overcome the negative experiences of their childhood.  Abuse, divorce, poverty, and neglect can weigh heavy on those who have experienced any of them during childhood.  Resilience helps to contain the damage of these experiences and help the individual live the life they want.  Resilience also helps us steer through the everyday stresses and hassles that fill modern life.  A third use of resilience is to help us bounce back from adverse events such as job loss, divorce, a death in the family.  We can become either helpless or resigned to our fate or can use our internal resources to bounce back.  Finally, resilience helps us reach out into the world and find renewed purpose and meaning in life.  This allows us to achieve what we are capable of.

Martin Seligman, in Learned Optimism (1990), determined that resilience skills can be learned.  While we cannot change the events of our past or the world around us, we can change the way we think about those events.  One of the ways we can start changing our resilience mindset is to be more realistic in our thinking.  By accurately assessing one’s own strengths, identifying the true causes of problems and evaluating oneself and others, we get a truer picture of the events unfolding around us and our level of control over those events.  

We all need resilience, but leaders in particular need to understand how resilience – or change-readiness – can make them and their organizations successful over time. Leaders need to understand how to develop resilience in their teams and in their organizations as well as cultivating their own ability to bounce back from change and challenge.

Given my work with executives and the challenges they face, I, along with Karlin Sloan, wondered how we can help leaders develop resilience.  The first step was to create an assessment that could assess an individual’s level of resilience and identify what attributes of resilience were strengths and what attributes could be strengthened.  

Based on the existing research and our coaching experience, we created a resilience model.  It is based on the biopsychosocial model described by psychiatrist George Engel (1977).   He suggested that to understand medical issues, one needs to consider the physical, psychological and sociological factors that contribute to the illness.  Our research has suggested that we can think about resilience in the same way. How we care for our bodies, think about ourselves and those around us all contribute to our ability to be resilient.

We created a list of attributes that resilient people display. We divided these attributes into three categories: attributes associated with how we relate to ourselves (the psychological self); how we relate to others (the social self) and how we relate to events in the environment (the context).

Below is a list of the 15 attributes we identified and how we distributed them among the three domains.

Relationship to Self (Psychological Self)