resilience
Recent research has shown that when we focus on being happy, we’re focusing on the wrong thing. We should be focusing on responding resiliently to situations, and if we do that, it’s more likely to make us happy.
There’s no truer truism than the phrase ‘life is hard’. Everyone who has ever lived has known sadness, challenge, adversity and hardship. Yet we also know suffering to be suffused with meaning, adversity to be the seat of triumph and challenge a sensation sought out by many. Pain, as much as joy, lies at the heart of who we are and the stories we tell about ourselves, while our ability to overcome obstacles is a source of pride, accomplishment and confidence. I believe it was Chumbawamba who said, “I get knocked down. But I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.”
Where we had self-esteem, the new generation is all about resilience. We explore the history, science and practical aspects of parenthood’s most in-vogue concept.
Yet not all people have the same capacity to rebound from trauma. Some will stay down. Some may never even stand up in the first place. For some, negative experiences can be the starting point for a lifetime of mental illness, addiction and abuse. For many years, this was simply assumed to be a natural consequence of one’s background; if a child
