Resilience Part 2

July 19, 2012

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

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Mike Carruthers:
How well you cope or don’t cope with life’s difficulties has to do with your beliefs.

Andrew Zolli:
Social scientists have a research field called hardiness research in which they actually study people who are innately resistant to the effects of trauma.
 

Andrew Zolli, author of the book Resilience...

And what they discover is that those people believe some things commonly about the world. They believe that the universe is a meaningful place, that they can effect change and that successes and failures are placed in their path to teach them.

Interestingly the more difficulties you have in your life the more resilient you become.

This is paradoxically why some of the most resilient places are places that regularly experience disaster. The gulf coast is routinely bombarded with hurricanes and the cultural memory of the fact that that can happen helps communities understand any particular crisis like Katrina.

And the same is true in our personal lives.

It’s one of the reasons why people who have their maximum ability to be resilient happens often when they are young but not too young. They’re old enough to have accumulated a lot of life’s knowledge and wisdom but young enough to have a lot of adaptive capacity and fluidity - our resilience over the course of a human life sort of arcs upward as we get into our 20tys and 30tys and then for most of us it begins to plateau and then diminish as we get older.