No, not so much physical strength but inner and psychological resilience. Able to respond well to pressure, deal with setbacks well, respond positively to challenges and basically, able to bounce back – quickly. Important? Yes, more than ever. In these dynamic conditions, I am going to fall on my face a lot. I am going to need to bounce back in record time, learn from my experience, and attack the next challenge with equal boldness. It’s the same with the people we train.

On one hand it’s the external conditions around us that mean we need to be more resilient. If we have just lost our job, for example, we can’t afford to not bounce back quickly. But resilience is also important simply because this changing and challenging environment means that we need to be more willing to try new things and venture into places and experiences we have not been or maybe where no one has been before. It’s far easier to do things they way they have always been done but that is not going to work now. So taking risks and trying new things inevitably means we’ll make mistakes and that is where resilience comes in. In fact, we probably live in a time where there are unlimited opportunities for us to develop our capacity for resilience.

And I believe it’s something that we can learn and develop even though some of us may be more naturally disposed to being resilient than others. It’s not a fixed character trait which means it can be learned. But just how do you do that? How do you stay upbeat in the face of rejection or disappointment or just day-to-day pressures that seem to be increasing for all of us?

Why is one person able to bounce back more easily than another? Take two different people who have lost their job. Both of them respond by being sad, listless, anxious about the future and indecisive. One of them gets his head together after a few weeks of this, tells himself the economy is going through a bad patch and that he has marketable skills. He updates his CV, sends it out to dozens of companies in his network and gets rejected by them all. He then tries six more companies and eventually lands a position. The other spirals into hopelessness, believes he got fired because he can’t perform under pressure and does not try again because of a paralysing fear of failure.

Martin Seligman says in his new book “Flourish” that one of the keys to resilience is learned optimism. His research shows that people who don’t give up and are resilient have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary and changeable and suggests that people can be immunised against this by teaching them how to think like optimists.

The Penn Resiliency Program designed by Jane Gillham, Ph.D and Karen Reivch, PhD has introduced an innovative set of lessons for young people, based on cognitive-behaviourial theory^⁠ which teaches resilience skills by introducing resilience concepts through role-play, short stories and cartoons. These are then practiced using a variety of tools for solving problems and difficult situations, which are based on real-life. The skills practiced are assertiveness, negotiation, decision-making, social problem-solving and relaxation. These projects are now being taught to train teachers in Australia and the UK how to deliver resilience skills. The same type of training has also been developed and is being successfully used in the US Army. Although these projects are in their infancy let’s hope that such training does begin to become more mainstream.