Resilience

July 18, 2012

Interview with Andrew Zolli, author of the book Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

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Mike Carruthers:
When faced with a challenge or a defeat do you quit or are you resilient and bounce back?

Andrew Zolli:
You know resilience is much more wide spread than some of our popular literature might suggest. You might think that everyone who experiences a trauma basically falls over and is paralyzed by it but that’s actually not what happens.
 

Andrew Zolli, author of the book Resilience...

A wonderful researcher named George Bonanno at Columbia University has explored how people deal with the death of a loved one, how they respond to things like 9/11 and it turns out that a large percentage of people are perfectly fine awards. It doesn’t mean they don’t feel sad it means that they experience that sadness but aren’t permanently crippled by it.

Having other people in your life is a very important factor in resilience.

This is actually one of the most important things that happens in the context of dealing with trauma we don’t deal with it alone. We all know people who bury their feelings, who turn away from them, who never share them and some of those people have difficulty. We are a social species and we solve our problems together.

Your level of resilience is determined in large part by how you think.

Your overall disposition about the world and whether or not you feel like things are going to get better and have the possibility of getting better or whether or not that you believe that ultimately things aren’t going to get better and there’s nothing you can do to change it – directly effect the way in which you process the world.