1. Real strength is about resilience

When you think of the word ‘strong’, chances are certain synonyms come to mind: tough, robust, resilient, determined … Of all these, resilient is probably the closest to what we mean when we talk about real strength. You could go so far as to say that the two words are interchangeable.

Still, there are so many ways to define strength and resilience. If we look up ‘strength’ in the Oxford Dictionary, there are no less than 18 definitions. These include:

1. Capacity for moral effort or endurance.
2. Power to sustain force without breaking or yielding.
3. Physical power.

For ‘resilience’ alone, there are three:

1. The action or an act of rebounding or springing back.
2. Elasticity.
3. The ability to recover readily from, or resist being affected by, a setback, an illness.

If we were to take all these descriptions and turn them into a three-word description, we could say that resilience/real strength is ‘thriving despite adversity’. That’s about it in a nutshell. But let’s delve deeper …

The word resilience¹ first came into use in the 1970s. Emmy Werner was one of the first scientists to use the word resilience to describe a group of children from Kauai, Hawaii, who despite growing up in poverty with alcoholic and mentally-ill parents, still thrived as adults (whereas another group exhibited destructive behaviours). Resilience soon became used as a term in psychology, and many years later, in 2007, was defined as: ‘The capacity to withstand traumatic situations and the ability to use trauma as the start of something new.’

Then, at the beginning of the 21st century, the business world picked up on the concept of resilience and came up with something called Resilience Engineering: ‘the ability to reinvent business models and strategies as, and if, circumstances change’.

Now, you may wonder what on earth business definitions of resilience have to do with the human sort and, more importantly, real strength, but we think it’s rather a lot. In fact, if we analyse what Resilience Engineering is all about it helps us reach a much more sophisticated understanding of what we mean when we talk about real strength. After all, if they can engineer resilience for businesses, then surely we can do it for ourselves. The Resilience Engineering website (www.resilience-engineering-association.org) 
defines a resilient individual (or system) as one that can ‘sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions’ as well as being able to ‘do what’s required under a variety of conditions, rather than just the ability to recover from threats and stresses’.

OK, the language might be slightly dry, but both these definitions make a really important point and distinction between, say, toughness or robustness and real strength. Most people can bounce back, after all, from a one-off disappointment or failure, such as not getting a job they go for, or even quite a big change in circumstances – such as breaking up with a long-term partner. However, it’s people who can continually adjust themselves, and remain true to their values when faced with sustained and unexpected changes, that are truly strong.

“The best thing anyone described [resilience] to me as, was ‘emotional sun-screen’; it’s not covering yourself with a protective shield but it is about creating a protective layer. ”

Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience

2. Real strength is not about staying safe or 
self-protection

Being truly strong is not necessarily about looking at a challenge, working out the probability of failure and then deciding whether or not to attempt it. Instead it’s about creating flexible techniques that are robust, and knowing your strengths and weaknesses in order to tackle that challenge head on.

Real strength, then, is not about keeping yourself ‘safe’ (more of this in a minute), but knowing how to tackle the situation when you’re not. It’s also about being able to respond effectively to both disturbance and opportunity (in a business context we can see how this is vital, but it works for human beings too). Given the unknowns they both present, you’re likely to feel anything but safe in either situation, but real strength is knowing how to dive in anyway.

3. Real strength is not about avoiding pain, but 
embracing it

We already talked in the introduction about the fact that pain and trauma are an unavoidable part of life, and that it’s how you deal with them that separates the resilient from the not-so resilient. We will be looking at strategies to tackle adversity (good and bad) in more detail throughout the book, but for now, it’s perhaps helpful to remember that as human beings:

“Often our attempts to get rid of pain can add extra suffering and can be time consuming, energy draining and 
life limiting.”

Dr Michael Sinclair, Consultant Psychologist

This instinct to move away from any pain or adversity that we come into contact with in our lives takes many forms. Again, we shall be exploring these in more detail, but some common examples are:

• Avoidance – brushing things under the carpet.
• Numbing – drinking alcohol/comfort eating.
• Venting – destructive behaviour/blaming others/shouting and screaming.

The thing is, while these coping strategies are entirely natural responses to adversity – and might look, from the outside, as if the person is dealing with whatever they’re going through – they’re all just tactics to push it away. This only makes us feel more vulnerable and less able to cope in the long run. We haven’t learnt anything and we haven’t grown.

Similarly, people who rarely come up against adversity – those lives always seem to be on an even keel – may appear to be robust, but they’re probably not. Think of it this way: your life only stays on an even keel if you don’t take risks and embrace change. People don’t take risks because they’re too scared of the outcome; they can’t deal with change, i.e. they’re not as robust as they seem.

Truly strong people are those who are willing not to walk around pain (and by that we mean any kind of disturbance to their lives – change, adversity, trauma and upheaval) but through it. They are not afraid to sit with difficult feelings, to be curious about them instead of pushing them away. They may even welcome upheaval for the opportunities for growth that it brings as they understand that it’s only by going through this process that they can become stronger.

This is the most important thing you need to remember about real strength: humans need adversity for growth, just like flowers need rain. Think of it in terms of trying to strengthen any muscle. The brain is 75% water and 25% soft tissue like any other muscle after all – and so you can train it as such. But you have to do the hard work to get the results; there are no shortcuts. It turns out that the old adage – no pain, no gain – works for our mental strength as well as our physical.

“Resilience is all about tolerance for discomfort.”

Brené Brown, research professor, University of Houston and author of Rising Strong

4. Real strength is about thriving versus surviving

You may have heard some people being described as having a ‘survivor’ mentality, or being a ‘survivor’. But real strength isn’t just about surviving whatever trauma you’re going through, it’s about thriving because of it. It is possible – because of, and despite, setbacks – for you to become stronger and more confident and for your life to actually improve. Let’s look at the difference between surviving and thriving. What do those words actually mean?

The Oxford Dictionary definition makes the distinction very clear:

• Survive: Continue to exist despite difficulty or danger; not be killed by; remain alive after the death of.
• Thrive: grow or develop well; prosper.

The key word here is ‘grow’. Rather than seeing trauma as something to simply get through (and remain standing at the end of it), it should be seen as an opportunity to grow and learn. Not only this, but instead of wanting to hide in a dark corner until it’s all over, you’re then able to continue living your life according to your core values while going through that tough time. It’s about managing to do what’s important to you – to be the friend, daughter/son, partner you want to be – despite the difficult situation you may find yourself in.

“Tragedy doesn’t have to kick your butt. Tragedy can lift you up, to take you to a higher existence.”

Dr Gregg Steinberg, motivational speaker and author of Fall Up!

5. Real strength is about being courageous – 
allowing yourself to be vulnerable

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is an oxymoron. What does vulnerability have in common with courage after all? Doesn’t vulnerability mean weakness? The very opposite of courage?

But that all depends on your definition of courage …

In her TED talk, ‘The Power of Vulnerability’, researcher Brené Brown explains how ‘courage’ actually comes from coeur, the French word for ‘heart’, and that it’s: ‘to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart’.

We will explore vulnerability and its correlation to strength in more detail later on. For now, the crucial thing to understand is that in order to connect with your inner reserves of strength, you have to be willing to be, and to feel, vulnerable. This means being willing to show your whole self: warts, weaknesses, failings and all. It is only by doing this – allowing ourselves to be seen in all our glory – that we can truly connect with other people. And, as Brené Brown says, ‘connection is what it’s all about, it’s why we’re here’. It is also, as you’ll realize while you read this book, at the very heart of real strength.

Think of the chain reaction like this:

   Courage = vulnerability = connection = real strength.

If you miss out any of the links, the whole structure breaks down.

6. Real strength is about self–awareness 
and emotional honesty

If we look at building real strength as a journey, then being self-aware has to be the first step. It’s back to those coping strategies we talked about again: most of us, if not all of us at some point in our lives, use unhelpful coping strategies to manage pain. But this then only exacerbates the problem and leaves us feeling more fragile.

If we can build self-awareness, we can better understand why we feel the way we do and behave like we do in certain situations. This understanding then gives us the opportunity and freedom to change those things about ourselves that aren’t working; to stop ourselves when we begin to go down the wrong track and put ourselves on one that’s going to make us feel better, sooner.

In her book Rise: Surviving and Thriving after Trauma, which Sian Williams wrote after a particularly traumatic time in her life (her mother was terminally ill and she was diagnosed with breast cancer), Williams writes about how resilience ‘is not about ruminating and getting stuck in repetitive, negative, thoughts about why it’s happened. It’s more an honest exercise in self-reflection and exploration.’

Real strength is about having the self-awareness to recognize your feelings, then the courage to tell the truth about how you really feel to yourself and others. It’s only when we can be truly emotionally honest like this that the real work on ourselves can start and we can begin to build strength.

It takes practice, but anyone can become more self-aware. And with self-awareness comes self-improvement and, consequently, self-respect = real strength!

7. Real strength is about emotional regulation

Emotional regulation. Management. Self-control. Whatever you want to call it, they all amount to the same thing: the ability to not let your emotions overwhelm and govern you. This is especially the case when you’re going through a tough time, since more often than not this leads to behaviour which makes everything worse.

Think of it as another chain reaction:

   traumatic event + a certain emotion

   = a certain behaviour

   = a certain picture of how we feel about ourselves

For example, imagine you get made redundant. You may feel worthless and vulnerable, so you drink to block out the pain. This then makes you unproductive the next day, so you end up doing nothing to try and find a new job. You then feel disappointed with yourself, and so the cycle of escaping pain (through drinking or whatever) and putting off actually dealing with the situation continues.

To take another example, imagine you have a huge row with your partner and he/she wants some time apart to reassess the relationship. You feel hurt and anxious that you’re going to lose them, so late that night you end up calling your partner. But they aren’t ready to talk and seem unreceptive. And so you end up feeling more anxious and vulnerable than you would have done had you waited until the storm had passed. Not only that but in not giving he or she the space they’ve asked for, you’ve potentially damaged the relationship further.

As we’ve said, nobody can stop or control traumatic events. However, if you can gain some control over the emotions that a particular event elicits, then you can begin to control – to some extent – the behaviour which follows, feeling stronger as a result.

Of course, all this takes self-awareness. If you’re not aware of your emotions and when you feel them, then how can you control and manage them? With this in mind, it’s useful to think of self-awareness as emotional management’s big sister (she comes first!).

We’ll be looking in more detail about how you can develop self–awareness and learn to regulate your emotions. In the end, however, it’s only by mastering these things that you are able to live a life according to your values. Real strength and emotional regulation is about being able to rely on yourself to be the person you’re meant to be.

“It’s not about not feeling those feelings, but being willing to feel them in the service of continuing to live the life you want to be living according to your values.”

Dr Michael Sinclair, Consultant Psychologist

8. Real strength is about being optimistic

By this, we don’t mean blind optimism – saying everything is going to be brilliant when it so obviously isn’t! We mean realistic optimism; so hoping for the best but being prepared for the worst; aware of challenges ahead but optimistic about tackling them.

There’s no denying that after a bad spell, it won’t be long before there’s another. Rest assured though that there will be a way through, just as a there was a way through the last challenge. Real strength is the knowledge that ‘you’ll handle it’. You may not know how on earth you will overcome a certain challenge or reach a goal, but you know that there is a way and you will find it – you’re committed to the long haul.

“Being an optimist doesn’t mean being naïve, it means having belief that bad times are transient and that you have the skills to get through them.”

Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience

However, real strength is also the ability not just to react in a healthy way to trauma (to see the positive in the situation), but also to react healthily to opportunity. If you’re not able to do the latter – to first of all identify opportunities and then use them to your utmost advantage – then you’re at no higher level (in terms of resilience) than if you can’t react healthily to trauma.

What else does ‘optimistic’ mean in terms of real strength? Well, in a study carried out by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, it was found that strong people who bounce back from negative situations are good at transforming negative feelings into positive ones. They can do this because they are emotionally complex. They don’t see the world as ‘black and white’; they understand that it is grey, and that very high levels of positive emotions can sit alongside negative ones.

In the study, participants were asked to write short essays about the most important problem they were facing in their lives. While resilient people reported the same amount of anxiety as less resilient people in the essays, they also revealed more happiness, interest and eagerness regarding the problem. The fact that they reported the same amount of anxiety is interesting. It means that they don’t have a Pollyanna approach to life; it’s not that they see everything as hunky dory, they just have a different attitude to the problem: they are optimistic about their ability to overcome it.

9. Real strength is finding sense and 
meaning in adversity

As well as being able to draw positive emotions from negative ones and see problems as opportunities (which we’ll explore in Part 3), strong people also find meaning in adversity. In fact, it has been shown that the ability to do this makes us more resilient psychologically, and improves our physical health too.

In the late 1980s, James Pennebaker, a psychological researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, conducted an experiment with 50 healthy undergraduates. The students were asked either to write about the darkest, most traumatic, experience of their lives, or about superficial topics, for four days in a row for a period of 15 minutes each day.

Six weeks after the writing sessions, students in the trauma group reported more positive moods and fewer illnesses than those writing about everyday experiences. They also reported improved immunity and fewer visits to the student health centre. Pennebaker concluded from this experiment that confronting traumatic experiences was physically beneficial. This is because the students were processing their pain. Analysing their writing, Pennebaker noticed that they were trying to derive meaning from the trauma. They probed into the causes and consequences of the adversity and, as a result, eventually grew wiser about it. Interestingly, people who used the exercise to vent received no health benefits. There was something unique about the exercise of actual storytelling that helped people to find meaning and a silver lining.

Finding meaning can also come in the form of turning tragedy into something positive, or doing something for the greater good. For example: the parents of Isabella Peatfield who died in the Sri Lanka tsunami, who then set up a charity for Sri Lankan orphans; the man who ran the London Marathon for Cancer Research in memory of his father; the person who volunteered for Oxfam when made redundant and suddenly had time on their hands …

All these people found sense and meaning in their trauma by doing something positive as a result of it; specifically, something that benefitted others.

“Real strength is about having the resources within ourselves to be able to bounce back from setbacks and experiences of trauma.”

Dr Michael Sinclair, Consultant Psychologist

10. Real strength is about psychological flexibility

When we talk about psychological flexibility, we also talk about adaptability (a key component, as we’ve already seen, of Resilience Engineering) and emotional agility. Psychological flexibility has many components but, at its core, it is really open-mindedness: the ability to step back from, or rise above, challenges and consider your options rather than reacting in a knee-jerk way to them. It’s vital that you are not too rigid in your thinking (i.e. that you are psychologically flexible) if you want to be, and to feel, stronger, so that you can approach problem solving in a creative way.

“The most resilient people are those who are able to not just roll with the rough and the smooth, but also bend with it. If your thinking is too rigid then you won’t be able to bend.”

Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience

From a survivalist point of view, physical agility – basically the ability to move quickly, gracefully and effectively out of harm’s way – is vital.

However, the same can be said of emotional agility (more of this later) in terms of surviving emotional pain.

Psychological flexibility, then, is the cousin of agility and adaptability, but is more rooted in mindfulness: the ability to sit with things in order to really see them for what they are, and then the know-how to change them and take effective action, if necessary and possible.

This is how Dr Michael Sinclair defines psychological flexibility:

“The ability to contact your present moment experience, without defence, as fully as possible as a conscious human being. To change or persist in behaviour so you can move towards the stuff you really care about in life; what you value. To be mindfully aware of thoughts and feelings and to commit to value-based living.”

11. Real strength is about balance and perspective

It can be easy to blow things out of proportion on occasion or fall into a victim mentality, thinking you’re the only one that bad stuff ever happens to. Real strength, however, is about catching yourself when you do this and righting yourself again. It’s about finding that balance between gauging how bad a situation really is versus how bad your anxious, panicked brain is telling you it is, after which you can respond appropriately.