Courage is the new resilience
In this additional post on courage, I want to explore the difference between courage and resilience. By the end of the post, I’ll suggest you focus on courage to build the resilience needed for positive change in your life.
IN 2023 and 2024, Caroline and I have been given the honour of presenting workshops on both courage and resilience. Much of our past research focussed on the theory of resilience. This was for our book Resilient Relationships (Routledge Books, 2023). We have also looked to encourage university students on their undergraduate journeys through using both resilience and courage.
Everyone wants resilience: the ability to bounce back from adversity. The evidence on resilience is vast but inconclusive. Scientifically, we understand a lot about psychological resilience; and science understands that the single biggest factor in determining the strength of your personal resilience is the security of your relationships: your early childhood relationships, your current family bonds, your friendships, your long-term love-relationship, and even how attached you feel to society, the people around you.
No person’s journey is set in stone but, if the relationship area of your life has gone well and is going well, you are more likely to be resilient: to be able to withstand the stresses of life, including bouncing back from mental illnesses. So the practical message for developing resilience is clear: take care of your relationships. The other important way to build resilience is to practice overcoming adversity using the hidden skills you may have in overcoming adversity earlier in your life. Any way that you learn from your past mistakes to do better in the future or to practice overcoming anything that seems hard helps build resilience.
But resilience is still a dirty word in today’s society. Younger people in particular are told to “just be more resilient” as if being ‘un-resilient’ is anyone’s fault. It isn’t. And people wanting to become more resilient don’t know how to do it. Motivational videos will have you think that working out at the gym builds your resilience, but that inly builds up your physical strength not your psychological resilience. It takes emotional vulnerability, trust and connection. Still, it’s very difficult to say to your parents, friends or love-partner things like:
Could you please parent me better?
Could we take care of each other better in our friendship?
Can I have a guarantee that this love thing we’re doing continues forever?
Our upbringing and relationships seem out of our control, and taking care of relationships is a long-term thing anyhow, it doesn’t seem to help me NOW. SO what can I do about my resilience now?
That’s where courage comes in. To enter the house of resilience, you need to walk through the door of courage. It takes courage to say these very helpful things to your parents, friends or love-partner:
I can forgive you for where you guys went wrong in your parenting, but could we please talk about it, to understand it, so that I can move forward in life?
Hey, I really value our friendship, but I’m likely to screw up occasionally and if I do, I hope we can talk it through so that we can trust each other more.
I love you and I really want this marriage to work. If you ever feel us drift apart, let me know. Together we can put in the effort to keep us on track.
These statements take courage. Then comes the courage and persistence to work on good relationships to build long-term resilience. Almost anything worthwhile in life takes courage, or else you aren’t even off the starting blocks and into the water. You need resilience to withstand the water and waves while in a long-distance swimming race, but you need courage to put your hand up to be in the race and jump into the water in the first place.
Resilience is the ability to withstand stress.
Courage is choosing to FACE the stress in the first place.
What takes courage? Anything and everything:
Going to university
Applying for a job
Pitching your ideas to your boss
Getting to know another human being
Saying ‘yes’ to a long-term relationship
Confronting your parents and working through conflict
Getting out of bed and facing life every day
The previous three posts looked at what courage is, how courage works in the brain and how to get it working in your life. It also looked at how, in reality, a mouse has more courage than a lion. We all need courage to FACE what we need to:
Feel the Fear +
Aware of All factors +
Choose Courage +
Effort to choose useful action.
If, however, you are able to FACE what you need to with courage, including putting effort into keeping our relationships, then you will build as much long-term resilience as you possibly can.
Cheers
Dr Christian Heim