8 Resilience
L
OOK AT A YOUNG CHILD TRYING TO WALK OR DESPERATELY SEEKING THE
right word to convey their thoughts. Imagine all the great inventors
of the world and all the stories about how they tried and failed hun-
dreds of times but did not give up. Picture the athlete who manages
finally to trim a few seconds off a personal best time by persisting
with their technique. All of these people are demonstrating
resilience. As Guy Claxton puts it: “Without the ability to take
good decisions about what, when, where and why to learn, and to
tolerate the emotional concomitants of learning, especially when it
gets difficult, learning power has no foundation on which to build.”
Hilary Cropper, chief executive of the FI Group, is adamant
about the business value of this attribute: “Resilience is essential.
But you need to create an environment in which individuals are not
under too much stress. People can live with ambiguity if they have
a base from which they can expand.”
Resilience is a key element of individual and species evolu-
tion. If you are resilient, you are more likely to survive and thrive.
For many people, home, school, college, and workplace have done
them no favors with respect to this attribute.
First, there is an emotional barrier in most people to being
open when things get tough, so we don’t show the sweat on our brow
or the pain in our heart because it looks like an admission of failure,
or because we have been humiliated if we did this in the past.
Secondly, the culture of too many learning environments—
both informal, like the family, and formal, such as school—is to give
up when the going gets tough. So, if a child has a tantrum, instead
of helping them to work through it, parents allow it to continue