RESILIENCE- to bounce, to pivot- or both?

RESILIENCE.
A Facebook memory from September 3rd 2015.

All those years ago, I viewed resilience through the lens of mechanics— bouncing a Medau ball.

When the ball hits the floor, compressive stress momentarily flattens it. It stores kinetic energy like a spring before releasing it upward. Push the ball down in the right spot with the right amount of push, and it returns to your hands. You can push it back down again, creating a perpetual reuse of energy and flowing movement. Or, you can allow it to rest in your hands—and it will lose its energy. Change the position of your hands- push in a different direction or lift into the air, let it drop - rebound- and use the energy to pivot and to keep the movement going.

Roll on to 2020, and I looked at resilience through entirely different eyes: how an organisation  anticipated, absorbed, adapted, and recovered when faced with multiple disruptions and the usual pivot did not have sufficient turning power! Resilience was exhausting—everything was pushing and pulling, making it practically impossible to store energy for the next thing.

Today, resilience isn't just about encouraging a flowing movement in a Medau class or navigating ever-evolving, unforeseen crises.

True resilience is not just mechanical or emotional elasticity. When a crisis hits, do we see brick walls, or can we find ways to climb over them—or around them? Do we see open doors, or only partially closed ones?

Employing resilience takes deliberate practice:
• Slowing down.
• Picking things apart.
• Truly understanding what is happening beneath the surface.

We can't just bounce back to the old way of doing things. We anticipate, using lessons from previous experiences, to bounce forward.