Resilience
How long it takes you to get back to normal after something goes wrong.
The behaviour, in one line: When something breaks or a plan falls apart, I recover and get back to work quickly instead of spiralling.
Push a pendulum and it swings out, comes back, overshoots, and eventually hangs still. Two pendulums given an identical push can take very different times to settle. Resilience is your settling time, and the size of the push has almost nothing to do with it.
Things break. Builds fail, plans change, feedback stings, projects get cancelled. None of that is avoidable, so the useful question is not whether you get knocked off balance — you will — but how long you stay there. Two hours of it is a bad afternoon. Two months of it is a lost year. Same setback, different return time. Digital work also raises the rate. A deploy fails in public, a tool you built on is retired overnight, and the criticism arrives in writing at eleven at night. You do not get to choose the number of knocks. You do get to choose the return time.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| How fast you return | How hard you were hit |
| Feeling it fully | Feeling it less |
| Recovering between knocks | Absorbing knocks without recovering |
| Trainable, and only under load | A fixed trait you have or you don’t |
What it looks like. A build fails. You close the laptop, walk round the block, come back, and read the error properly. The alternative is three hours at the same stack trace, getting worse at reading it the whole time.
- The project gets cancelled. Eighteen months of work, shelved in a meeting you were not in. It will sting either way. The question is whether you are doing good work on the next thing within a week, or still arguing about it at Christmas.
- The feedback lands badly. Someone says the thing about your work you were afraid was true. Without a return you either defend hard and learn nothing, or fold and stop shipping. With one, you get to keep the useful part.
- Everything breaks at once. Production is down, the client is calling, and the one person who knows the system is on leave. Recovery is what makes the next four hours usable instead of frantic.
- Write down what happened, then write down what you told yourself about it. “The deploy failed” and “I am bad at this” are two different sentences, and only one of them is information.
- Fix your recovery to a routine — a walk, a coffee, ten minutes outside — and use the same one every time. A routine still runs on a bad day. A decision does not.
- Ask whether this will matter in a week, then in a year. Most setbacks fail both tests, and answering the question is what takes the charge out of them.
- Keep a list of things you finished despite a bad start. When you cannot judge your own track record, read it rather than guess at it.
- Break it into parts
Three parts: noticing the knock, separating what happened from what you told yourself about it, and running a fixed routine that puts you back to work.
- The part that carries it
The split between the event and the story. Nearly all of the spiral lives in the second one.
- The order to learn it in
- Learn to hear the story start. “I am bad at this” is the sentence to listen for.
- Write the event and the story as two separate lines, after the fact, until you can see the join without writing it down.
- Attach one fixed recovery routine to the split, so getting back to work stops being a decision.
- Put something at stake
Tell one colleague you will show them your “finished despite” list on Friday. An empty list is the cost.
- Compress it
What happened is information. What you told yourself about it is not. Recover on a routine, not on a mood.
- The smallest useful dose
One written event-and-story split for every real setback, and five minutes reading them back at the end of the week.
- Anchor it to something you know
A pendulum. Push it and it swings out, comes back, overshoots, and settles. The size of the push does not decide how long the settling takes.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Resilience run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Resilience in the course →
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