Determining: What Is Involved In Being Resilient?

People have learned to be resilient in order to overcome serious hardships. A person’s resilience can be seen through how they handle bad experiences; to be resilient in the face of adversity. People who never give up and always fight back even when it gets hard are resilient. Some believe that resilience is a trait that can be learned.

Considering resilience as a dynamic process, it becomes evident that it may vary with time, i.e. an individual may be highly resilient at some instances but vulnerable at other, depending on the interactions taking place between the person and their environment and between risk and protective factors in an their life (Winfield, 1991; Werner & Smith, 1992; Borman & Rachuba, 2001). According to Masten (1994), resilience is a pattern over time, characterized by good eventual adaptation despite risk, acute stressors, or chronic adversities.

On the other hand some factors work against one’s resiliency such as an absence of a parent, violence, and abuse. Being resilient is an ability learned throughout a person’s life and experiences. It cannot be taught but must be

Resilience is about being independent, standing on your own two feet or taking back the power.

For some people the strong word resilience can impact one’s life in a significant way. Overall, resiliency is having the ability to still enjoy and continue your life with positive, good times, regardless of a hard past or bad experience. It can be shown in various ways throughout a text, including the setting, the plot, and characterization. This is how the texts, The Other Wes Moore, The Art of Resilience, and The Third and Final Continent share their common theme. This theme the three texts convey is that resiliency is vital for a positive as well as successful life.

Over decades, the research of resilience has developed from understanding individual’s resilience qualities and protective factors, to the process of resilience and the interventions that promote resilience (Richardson, 2002; Wright et al., 2013). Recently, the focus of resilience shift to the neurobiological process because of the development of science and technology (Wright et al., 2013). While these literatures emerging, there are two noteworthy issues. First, the outcome of the studies were mainly emphasized on main-stream population (Ungar, 2006). Second, little attention was given to resilience across cultures (Ungar, 2006; Ungar et al., 2005). Hence, it is important to investigate how resilience is being defined and understand in different cultures; what are the challenges when conducting a cross cultural research; and what are the key elements when implementing intervention in different cultures.

This summer I read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and it was amazing. I really loved every page of Jeannette Wall’s novel, and it just seemed to get better and better as I kept reading. Wall’s novel is recognized as “a remarkable memoir of redemption and resilience.” But what is resilience? To be honest I couldn’t really truly comprehend what resilience was. I had a very vague definition of it, but, not anything I could explain with certainty. In this paper I will find my own definition of resilience, which’ll not only help me finish a summer assignment but also help me to fully understand resilience.

Resilience, fundamentally, is the ability to bounce back from hardship and the phenomenon of overcoming stress or adversity, for example: personal crises, poverty, mental illness and trauma (Occupational Health & Wellbeing, 2012). This skill can help individuals overcome the most difficult of situations (Occupational Health & Wellbeing, 2012). Resilience theorists generally agree that the presence of protective factors can reduce the effects of exposure to adversity. The more protective factors (or “assets”) available, the more resilient a person will be. Protective factors are conditions or attributes that help people deal more effectively with stressful events and eliminate risk. On the contrary, risk factors are attributes or characteristics

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from life’s daily challenges it’s about being strong and having the ability to respond positively to what life throws at us. We may find ourselves in many challenging and stressful situations throughout life however having the skills needed to cope and deal with them helps us have an effective response to all negative situations.

Resilience is a term that is often applied to those who have faced hardship and viewed the experience in a positive light as an opportunity to grow and change for the better (Wagnild & Collins, 2009). The definition however seems to vary from place to place. Ungar et al. (2008) stated “definitions of resilience are ambiguous when viewed across cultures" (p.174) which is why the understanding of resilience may be difficult to capture (as cited in Windle, Bennett & Noyes, 2011). Although the literature agrees on several common themes about resilience there are many varying opinions on how to define the concept or the attributing factors. Earvolino-Ramirez (2007) and

Resilience is something that some people would give anything to have, the price however is sometimes steep. The price of resilience can be personality, a relationship with family, or a person's modesty. By hardening themselves against the outside world some people lose a part of their personality and become much different than they were before, such as Allen Wheelis from “Grass”. Other times people sacrifice a relationship with someone they care about to become resilient, shutting them out so that they can not hurt them anymore, Elizabeth from “Jericho”, a short story by Margaret Price, is an example of this. Lastly some people who are resilient get what is called survivor’s pride, and in turn become arrogant, an example

I believe that resilience, educational achievement, being engage with religion, positive parenting and peer relationships are some of the key drivers to the Latino/ Hispanic protective factors against negative outcomes. I believe these are essential because resilience consists of individuals who appear to make it despite growing under adverse circumstances and implied that those individuals were somehow invulnerable. Families that provide structure, limits, rules, monitoring and predictability, combats negative outcomes in many forms. Such as (parent child conflicts, poor parenting, school failure, low self esteem, early substance abuse). Factors that promote positive parenting include human capital that consists of employment, income and

Harrington’s article on resilience was informative regarding the elements of resilience and its usefulness in the workplace, but the article lacked substance on practical ways employers can foster more resilient employees. Harrington acknowledges that resilience is a “multi-modal construct”, and identifies key elements to resilience that are all unique to an individual and spread far beyond the workplace, such as spirituality and family life (Harrington, 2012, p. 29,30). The uniqueness of elements affecting a person’s resilience, and the fact it is built over time, appear to leave little room for employers to make a mark on someone’s overall resilience. Harrington offers only one piece of advice for employers, to consider the environment they

When I chatted with my friends with this topic. They usually said that I had a high level of resilience, because I shew my openness when I was facing the risk. I agree about it because my personality is my main reason I have high resilience. My thought in every time is always not to care about the things happened in around me. You may think that this personality is bad. However, it helps me to pass though adversities a lot. For example, when I finished my HKDSE examination and saw the result. I found that many people feel stress, because they overrated the importance of DSE. I thought it is not my entire life and tried to not care about it. As the result, I failed because I got level 2 in my Chinese language. But, I accepted it and retook the exam. Luckily, I am undergraduate now.

First of all, I would like to define what resilience is. Major scholars believe it is the process to recover from trauma, or the ability to respond to adversity. According to Sergeant and Laws-Chapman (2012), resilience refers to “the ability to adapt to adverse conditions while maintaining a sense of purpose, balance, and positive mental and