The ability to cope with stress and recover from adversity is known as


The personal strength that enables people to cope with stress and recover from adversity is called:

Which is the best boarding school in my area?

Communities of organisms coexist in organized, balanced _____? A-ranges B-territories C-ecosystems D-populations

Ep-40 if you run aground in an outboard boat and you are not taking on water, what is the first step in attempting to free your vessel?

Read the excerpt from “Mother Tongue.” Lately, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no other way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. How does Tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? Tan discusses her thoughts about language to build the idea that the English language does not have words to match some Chinese terms. Tan discusses her relationship with her mother to build the idea that mothers and daughters in all cultures often have misunderstandings. Tan discusses her mother’s use of English to build the idea that a form of language can be purposeful and meaningful even if it is nonstandard. Tan discusses the English language to build the idea that there is a lack of appropriate synonyms for the word “broken.”

Seven Factors Comprising Resilience

Linda: A piece of clay sat in the potter’s studio. Everyday, it watched as the potter

Source: LubosHouska/

picked up another piece of clay and transformed it into a beautiful vase. Feeling jealous, the clay shouted, “Pick me! I want to be a vase, too!”

One day, the potter picked up the piece of clay. Excitedly, the clay exclaimed, “Today, I will be a vase!” The potter proceeded to pound the clay on a tray. Then he cut the clay into strips and kneaded it. The clay said, “What are you doing? This is abuse! Put me back on the shelf.”

But the potter just kept on going and began to spin the clay on a wheel until it was totally dizzy. Finally, the potter stopped. Breathing a sigh of relief, the clay declared, “Thank God, it’s over.” But no sooner had the words been formed than the potter put the clay in the kiln and baked it alive. When the potter removed the clay from the oven, the clay ranted and raved, “How dare you!”

Next, the potter covered the clay with a glaze that made the clay feel uncomfortable and tight. Then he put the clay back in the kiln to be baked again. The clay despaired, “I won’t make it another step.” Finally, the clay was removed from the kiln and placed on a shelf, where it began to pray, “please leave me alone and never come back. I don’t want any more abuse.” But a little while later, the potter came back anyway.

“Stay away from me! Don’t you dare touch me!” cried the clay. “I can’t believe what you’ve put me through!”

The potter replied, “Do you want to see yourself?”

The clay said, “Leave me alone. I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”

Very gently, the potter said, “Look,” then held the clay up to the mirror. The clay saw that it was now a beautiful vase. The potter said, “This is exactly what you asked for. You asked to be transformed into a vase. You just wanted to wake up one day and be a vase, but that’s not the way it works. This is what it takes, clay. You have to go through all those steps.”

Like the clay vase, we may secretly or even openly long to become stronger and more beautiful inside and out. Then when life hands us the experiences that will shape us into who we can become, we often resist. We might even hate the process while we are suffering.

We often feel like the vase in the kiln that we are being baked alive, angry at our predicament or angry at who we believe is victimizing us. There are ways in which we can move through any ordeal that life hands us to make the suffering more bearable, even in the midst of the painful experience. Consider the following factors.

7 Factors

  1. We can adopt an orientation that embedded in the trauma, tragedy, or loss is opportunity
  2. Hardiness
  3. Sense of Humor
  4. Purpose and Meaning
  5. Spiritual Orientation
  6. Reframing adversity as opportunity for growth
  7. Gratitude is counting one’s blessings. It is more than a feeling. It is a chosen attitude toward life.

In the middle of the trauma, we may not be able to remember these factors. The immediate misery can feel like torture, and the best we can hope for is to just get through it. But at the first possible moment that we can reframe the trouble as a possibility for growth, we are well on our way to developing resilience, which is a major component of our most dazzling beauty.


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Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as “resilience.” (He is widely credited with being the first to study the concept in an experimental setting.) Over many years, Garmezy would visit schools across the country, focussing on those in economically depressed areas, and follow a standard protocol. He would set up meetings with the principal, along with a school social worker or nurse, and pose the same question: Were there any children whose backgrounds had initially raised red flags—kids who seemed likely to become problem kids—who had instead become, surprisingly, a source of pride? “What I was saying was, ‘Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school?’ ” Garmezy said, in a 1999 interview. “There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came. If I had said, ‘Do you have kids in this school who seem to be troubled?,’ there wouldn’t have been a moment’s delay. But to be asked about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds—that was a new sort of inquiry. That’s the way we began.”

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Environmental threats can come in various guises. Some are the result of low socioeconomic status and challenging home conditions. (Those are the threats studied in Garmezy’s work.) Often, such threats—parents with psychological or other problems; exposure to violence or poor treatment; being a child of problematic divorce—are chronic. Other threats are acute: experiencing or witnessing a traumatic violent encounter, for example, or being in an accident. What matters is the intensity and the duration of the stressor. In the case of acute stressors, the intensity is usually high. The stress resulting from chronic adversity, Garmezy wrote, might be lower—but it “exerts repeated and cumulative impact on resources and adaptation and persists for many months and typically considerably longer.”

Prior to Garmezy’s work on resilience, most research on trauma and negative life events had a reverse focus. Instead of looking at areas of strength, it looked at areas of vulnerability, investigating the experiences that make people susceptible to poor life outcomes (or that lead kids to be “troubled,” as Garmezy put it). Garmezy’s work opened the door to the study of protective factors: the elements of an individual’s background or personality that could enable success despite the challenges they faced. Garmezy retired from research before reaching any definitive conclusions—his career was cut short by early-onset Alzheimer’s—but his students and followers were able to identify elements that fell into two groups: individual, psychological factors and external, environmental factors, or disposition on the one hand and luck on the other.

In 1989 a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner published the results of a thirty-two-year longitudinal project. She had followed a group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and happy; the other third qualified as “at risk.” Like Garmezy, she soon discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them “developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of ten, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of eighteen.” But the remaining third developed into “competent, confident, and caring young adults.” They had attained academic, domestic, and social success—and they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.

What was it that set the resilient children apart? Because the individuals in her sample had been followed and tested consistently for three decades, Werner had a trove of data at her disposal. She found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure. But another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Werner also discovered that resilience could change over time. Some resilient children were especially unlucky: they experienced multiple strong stressors at vulnerable points and their resilience evaporated. Resilience, she explained, is like a constant calculation: Which side of the equation weighs more, the resilience or the stressors? The stressors can become so intense that resilience is overwhelmed. Most people, in short, have a breaking point. On the flip side, some people who weren’t resilient when they were little somehow learned the skills of resilience. They were able to overcome adversity later in life and went on to flourish as much as those who’d been resilient the whole way through. This, of course, raises the question of how resilience might be learned.

George Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College; he heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and has been studying resilience for nearly twenty-five years. Garmezy, Werner, and others have shown that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity; Bonanno has been trying to figure out where that variation might come from. Bonanno’s theory of resilience starts with an observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with other animals. The vast majority of people are pretty good at using that system to deal with stress. When it comes to resilience, the question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently or effectively than others?

In this article, we will review what resilience is and show parents how to foster its development in children reliably.

Table of Contents

  • What Is Resilience
  • How To Build Resilience (4 Strategies)
  • Resilience Theory: It’s a Process

As parents, we want to protect our children from harm.

But we know we can’t shelter them from every single threat or challenge that may come their way, now or in the future.

So we want our children to be able to cope with stress and change – to bounce back from whatever life throws at them.

In short, we want to raise resilient children.

But how can we do that? The good news is that researchers are finding that resilience isn’t some elusive innate quality – it’s not a “you’ve either got it or you don’t” proposition.

Rather, resilience is something that’s built and strengthened through specific life experiences. Let’s examine the science on resilience and delve into how to develop it in our children.

What Is Resilience

Resilience is the process of handling stress and recovering from trauma or adversity.

From early life hardship or abuse to fractured relationships, health problems, or natural disasters – trauma can come in any number of packages. Resilience is what lets someone keep functioning and even thrive afterward.

Resilient individuals recover faster and more completely from painful life experiences, and may even emerge relatively unscathed from severe hardship.

Childhood experts have long been fascinated by the fact that some children who’ve faced trauma can come out mostly unharmed, while others crumble. They wanted to kpnow why.

At first, researchers often focused on identifying risk factors and vulnerabilities that could contribute to negative outcomes in children​1​​. But resilience researchers turned this approach on its head: They started looking into factors that contributed to positive outcomes in at-risk children, instead​2​.

They call these factors “resilience factors” or “protective factors.” These are the variables that, when present in a child’s life, correspond to increased resilience. Not only that, but they also seem to add up: The more protective factors are present, the better the chance a child can adapt positively to difficult circumstances.

However, risk factors can add up, too. Children exposed to six or more risk factors are 2.5 times more likely to develop externalizing disorders, such as conduct disorder, violent crime, and drug abuse. They are also 1.8 times more likely to develop internalizing disorders, such as depression and anxiety disorder​2,3​.

Resilience is essentially the accumulation of protective factors vs. risk factors. Think of it like a scale: Stack the protective factors on one side and the risk factors on the other.

The child develops resilience when the effect of the protective factors outweighs the risk factors. This means that children with a history of adversity may require a lot more positives to tip the scale and develop resilience.

Resilience Factors

So what are these resilience factors that can help children adapt and cope with hardship?

Researchers have identified numerous factors that they group into three general categories: family, individual, and community. They touch on various issues, but there’s a recurrent theme that runs through many of these factors: connection with supportive people.

Indeed, six decades of research indicate that a child’s resilience mostly depends on their connections to other people, rather than their own inherent qualities​4​.

Let’s take a look at these three categories of resilience factors, and then we’ll discuss how to foster them in our children​5​.

Family Factors:

  • Good parenting (more on this later)
  • Low family stress
  • Sound parental mental health
  • Absence of alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.

Individual Factors:

  • Emotional regulation
  • Perception of control and ability to impact one’s own life
  • Self-esteem and self-efficacy
  • Ability to dream or having a sense of purpose in life
  • Social skills and communication skills
  • Empathy
  • Sense of humor
  • Physical well-being
  • Higher intellectual capacity and cognitive competencies
  • Gender: Girls tend to be more resilient than boys
  • Easy temperament
  • Favorable genes
  • Advantaged socioeconomic status

Community Factors:

  • Supportive extended family
  • A close relationship with a mentor
  • Positive school experiences
  • Safe neighborhood
  • Close community
  • Part of religious or faith community
  • Extracurricular activities

How To Build Resilience In Children (4 Proven Strategies)

Given this understanding of factors influencing resilience, we can form specific strategies to help build it in our children.

While some of these resilience factors can’t be changed, like the genetic makeup of each child or their sex, there are many more of them that we can actively provide or support.

Here are four proven strategies for raising resilient kids:

1. Provide Warm, Responsive, Supportive Parenting

The single most common factor in building resilience is having at least one close, positive relationship with a warm, responsive, and supportive parent or another adult caretaker.

Plus, when parents build a positive relationship with their children, they can teach and instill in them many further resilience factors.

Research indicates that parents can build this positive relationship through what child development experts call authoritative parenting. This parenting style is characterized by high responsiveness coupled with high expectations.

Authoritative parents are warm and responsive to their children’s emotional needs, which facilitates the development of emotional regulation, a key resilience factor. They also allow autonomy and encourage independence, helping their children gain a sense of control of their own lives – another resilience factor.

Authoritative parenting also encourages other valuable factors like self-esteem, social competence, and communication skills.

Tough love parenting, in contrast, does not support these resilience factors and is less likely to produce strongly resilient children.

2. Teach Coping Skills

Directly teaching coping skills can help children develop increased resilience.

Coping methods are not only useful for dealing with severe hardship – but they’re also helpful for handling everyday challenges and transitions. So parents can treat ordinary changes or difficulties as opportunities to instill these skills.

In addition, through learning to cope with changes in their everyday lives positively, children can build a sense of self-efficacy and perceived control that will carry them through future challenges.

Positive coping skills include:

  • Problem-solving
  • Ability to make realistic plans
  • Positive reappraisal of situations
  • Volunteering
  • Regular exercise
  • Extracurricular activities and group activities

3. Work Towards a Healthy, Stable Environment

Parents can also build their children’s resilience by working to ensure they have a positive home, school, and social environments.

Seeking help for any mental health or marital issues, finding ways to build our own resilience, and modeling coping strategies are all ways parents can improve our home environment.

At the same time, parents can get involved in their children’s schooling and work with teachers to ensure a positive school experience.

And, finally, they can support their children in developing positive social networks, as well as keep them away from peers who exert a harmful influence.

4. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Strive to create a positive and healthy environment for our children, but don’t keep them in a bubble.

We can’t maintain a perfect home, or protect our children from all possible school and social stressors.

And the good news is that we don’t need to.

That’s because not all stress is harmful to children. In fact, gradual exposure to stress – at manageable levels – can actually help them develop coping strategies and build resilience. Psychologists call this eustress or positive stress because it can promote growth in coping skills.

But there’s one key caveat: The help of a supportive adult is critical in managing stress and thereby turning stress exposure into resilience builder.

Resilience Theory: It’s a Process

Stories abound of people who’ve overcome great hardship or recovered from horrific experiences, only to thrive and prosper.

It would be easy to imagine that it takes something extraordinary to thrive against the odds. But in reality, what we need to build resilience is as simple and ordinary as everyday connections and support.

This may explain why resilience expert Ann S. Masten has found that resilience, far from being exceptional, is actually quite common. She called this the “ordinary magic”​6​.

Human brains are malleable. This malleability or “plasticity” is greatest in early childhood. So the earlier we start strengthening our children’s capacity to resist stress, the better. Although possible, it’s much harder to rewire our brains as we grow older.

As we work to build resilience, it’s important to remember that resilience is an ongoing process, not a fixed point or end goal​7​.

From Resilience Theory, the conceptual framework psychologists use to understand how resilience works, we know that resilience fluctuates over time and circumstances. A child may struggle in one domain but adapt well in another. The child may also be more or less resilient at different points in time​2,8​.

Final Thoughts on Resilience

Strengthening the protective factors and building resilience are all part of the process. Parents play a big role in helping our children learn to adapt to whatever’s coming their way.

Resilience: the ability to cope with setbacks

Resilience is the ability to face setbacks, unforeseen events, obstacles and failures without allowing them to dominate, derail or destroy your life. It is not about being unaffected by stress or pressure; it is about recognising when you are affected by it and having coping strategies to manage it. Your levels of resilience can be increased and improved; resilience is not a static quality.

Why is resilience an important skill to cultivate?

Well, to state the obvious, higher levels of resilience are better for your overall emotional and mental welfare.

Starting your ‘first proper job’ is a time of great change and it is likely that you will have huge challenges to deal with, which could range from learning from mistakes at work to relocating to a new area away from friends and family. Although you will receive training on the job and many employers run stress management or resilience workshops and offer mentors, these challenges will have less of a negative effect on you if you have already enlarged your ‘inner pool’ of resilience.

Candidates who have higher levels of resilience are likely to have higher levels of problem-solving skills, self-awareness, adaptability and emotional intelligence. These qualities are attractive to recruiters.

It’s also true, however, that job hunting itself requires high levels of resilience. It is very rare for a candidate to be offered the first and only graduate job they’ve applied for; it is likely that you will have a number of rejections and only resilience and self-belief will ensure that you continue to apply.

How to become more resilient

Developing your resilience is a very personal thing; there is no one-size-fits-all technique. You will need to experiment to find what works for you. You can find a range of resources online and through your university.

If you are not sure where to start finding what works for you, consider:

  • seeing if your university runs any resilience or stress awareness training days
  • attending as many practical careers workshops run by your careers service as possible: as one careers adviser told us, it allows you to try something out and fail at it within a safe environment
  • reviewing your life and thinking about times when things went well and not so well. Identify how you responded: what helpful or unhelpful actions did you take? What have you learned about yourself?
  • remembering everything you have achieved so far to date: it can help bolster a positive, ‘can do’ outlook
  • identifying successful strategies to keep calm and investigating problem-solving techniques (some people find mindfulness, meditation and positive visualisations helpful, while others don’t).

Which employers and industries particularly seek resilience in candidates?

Unsurprisingly, those employers that particularly want resilience tend to be in those sectors with higher levels of stress and longer hours – for example in:

  • the medical/healthcare professions and other frontline public sector roles
  • investment banking
  • law
  • sales
  • retail
  • hospitality
  • logistics.

It is also extremely likely to turn up in job descriptions for any graduate management role. However, most jobs involve dealing with some kind of pressure, so it would be reasonable to expect your resilience to be assessed during any recruitment process.

How do graduate recruiters assess resilience during the recruitment process?

It is possible that you will be asked a question about resilience in the application form – one law firm has previously asked ‘Describe an occasion when you found yourself dealing with an unexpected situation. How did you demonstrate your resilience?’ – but it is more likely to be assessed during online tests and at assessment centres and during interviews.

How you deal with challenges and setbacks may be assessed via an online situational judgement test or an ‘immersive video experience’ – in both cases, you will be given a scenario (such as a client raising a complaint) and asked how you would respond. Your resilience may also be assessed via a games-based recruitment exercise, although they are more likely to be explicitly testing your persistence and drive than your resilience per say.

Assessment days involve stepping into the unknown and so they are by their very nature a test of your resilience, even though recruiters usually go out of their way to be friendly. How you deal with the unknown may be further tested in case study exercises. For example, you may be given a scenario and then, a few minutes later, you might be given some new information that could alter your decisions.

Interview questions that are designed to assess your resilience include:

  • How do you deal with setbacks?
  • How do you cope with pressure?
  • What has been your biggest failure to date and how did you deal with it?
  • Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a major crisis.
  • Describe a time when something didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped. What did you do and what did you learn from it?
  • Tell me about a time when you worked with someone you didn’t agree with.
  • How would you respond if you received negative feedback from your manager?

How to demonstrate your resilience in the recruitment process

To demonstrate your resilience in a recruitment situation, you will need to:

  • be aware of how you react to stressful situations and call upon the constructive strategies that help you manage them (such as the ones listed above)
  • get as much practise as possible beforehand – access our links to free practice online ability tests and book to attend any mock interviews, mock assessment days and employability workshops run by your careers service.

You are not expected to be superhuman

Just to re-emphasise: you are not expected to be perfect and to never be affected by stress or by setbacks, either as a student or as an employee. One of the best actions you can take is to know when to ask for help.

What is the definition and meaning of resilience? What is business, community or urban resilience? What examples are there?

What is resilience? Definition & meaning

Resilience is originally a term that defines the resistance of a body or material to shock or deformation used in physical sciences. Nevertheless, in the seventies and eighties, the concept of resilience spread and it is used nowadays in other fields of study such as biology, psychology, economics, sociology or ecology.
In a broader sense, and particularly regarding the human sciences, resilience can be considered as a capacity, for a given system, to overcome the changes caused by one or more disturbing elements and to recover its initial state and/or normal operations. In ecology, the term resilience can be used to describe ecosystems that continued to function more or less the same in spite of adversity.

What is business resilience? Definition & meaning

Business resilience is a business-wide term that comprises crisis management and business continuity and that represents the ability of organizations to rapidly adapt and respond to all types of risks – such as natural disasters, cyber attacks, supply chain disruptions, among others. Besides the ability to face the consequences of a major incident, business resilience also includes the capacity of an organization to adapt and adjust to a new environment and new circumstances.
Business resilience planning is a governance and risk management responsibility that boards must address in order to survive and thrive in an increasingly hostile environment.

Examples of risks that need business resilience

  • Cyber attacks;
  • Data breaches – the loss or theft of confidential information;
  • Security incidents such as vandalism, fraud, theft or protests;
  • Acts of terrorism;
  • Climate change extreme events and adverse weather;
  • Supply chain disruption – upstream or downstream;
  • Lack of talent to recruit.

Is business resilience the pinnacle of corporate social responsibility (CSR)?

Companies engaged in a CSR process, as defined by the European Union and using the criteria of the ISO 26000 standard, are called upon to organize and develop their activities, taking into account the impacts they can have on social, environmental and economic levels. CSR practices are primarily preventive and include foreseeing potential problems in order to neutralize or reduce their effects before they occur – as a result, business resilience increases.
The implementation of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach is therefore mainly directed towards preventing risks and hazards by anticipating the strategies that will address these problems and ensuring that the commitments made (both internally and externally) are met. In fact, CSR development is a process of permanent adaptation that directly promotes resilience, as any crisis situation is considered surmountable through the development of appropriate methodologies.

Ecological Resilience & corporate social responsibility (CSR)

The notion of resilience applied to ecology consists of an ecosystem’s ability to recover its initial balance after having experienced modifications caused by multiple sources (natural or human). Examples of situations where species and plants need to be resilient may be when tropical animals need to adapt and handle the loss of their homes due to deforestation in rainforests or soils that keep healthy after being used for intensive single-crop productions.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) encompasses sustainable development and consists of an integrated strategy whose practices and policies avoid as much as possible any negative environmental and social impact. This means preserving natural resources and biodiversity and fighting against climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the end, the processes that produce resilience at the business and organizational levels end up being same as those that produce ecological resilience. Therefore, the resilience capacity of ecosystems is usually improved when organizations adopt CSR strategies and put them into practice.

What is urban resilience? Definition & Meaning

In urban planning, urban resilience is also used to think of urban systems in terms of the disturbances they are likely to experience. In summary, urban resilience means better organizing urban areas through the combination of different disciplines such as architecture, design, eco-design and sustainable construction, urban planning, health planning or energy, waste, traffic, and parking management. In the end, the union of these systems makes it possible to develop resilient cities – cities that can better handle natural and human-made disasters, protect human life, absorb the impact of economic, environmental and social hazards and promote well-being and inclusive and sustainable growth.
For example, urban resilience might mean choosing the materials for the construction of infrastructures that have the best fit with the local climatic condition or re-planning a city anticipating that it will double its number of citizens soon and therefore avoiding traffic or parking problems in the future. It may also include educating citizens to act democratically and sustainably and that governments try to diversify the economy of their countries, better engaging with the private sector and supporting the development of circular economy business models.

For more information, read our article: United Nations World Cities Day – Resilient Cities.

What is community resilience? Definition & Meaning

The resilience of societies, or community resilience, refers to a society’s ability to be prepared for shocks and crises, as well as its capacity to overcome them. According to a 2017 research article that was looking for a universally accepted definition of community management, there are several definitions and most of them share the same keywords and ideas. In this way, some authors Cox and Perry (2011) defined community resilience as a reflection of people’s shared and unique capacities to manage and adaptively respond to the extraordinary demands on resources and the losses associated with disasters”. By their turn, Castleden et al. (2011) see it as “a capability (or process) of a community adapting and functioning in the face of disturbance ”.
According to the same study, community resilience is a concept that is understood and applied uniquely by different investigation groups and that can either be seen as an ongoing process of adaptation, the simple absence of negative effects, the presence of a range of positive attributes, or a mixture of all three. However, the authors of this study found nine common components of community resilience among the literature:

  1. Local knowledge;
  2. Community networks and relationships;
  3. Communication;
  4. Health;
  5. Governance/leadership;
  6. Resources;
  7. Economic investment;
  8. Preparedness;
  9. Mental outlook.

What is resilience in psychology? Definition & Meaning

The concept of resilience is also used in psychology and it refers to the set of processes that an individual needs to go through in order to overcome a psychological trauma. In a classical way, resilience can be considered to be built around eight stages:

    1. Defense-protection;
    2. Balance while facing tensions;
    3. The challenge of commitment;
    4. The comeback;
    5. Evaluation;
    6. Meaning-evaluation;
    7. Self-positivity
    8. Creation.

To build this article, we looked up for information from many different sources, such as:

Image credits to for resilient business, business psychological resilience & climbing effort resilience

What is Resilience?

Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to maintain key functions and processes in the face of stresses or pressures by resisting to and then recovering or adapting to change. ref It can be applied to all ecological systems, including temperate, tropical, and polar regions, and can also be applied to social systems (e.g., human communities).

Resilience includes three components: 1) resistance; 2) recovery; and 3) transformation. Resistance refers to the ability to absorb or resist impacts and recovery refers to the ability to recover from them. Transformation refers to changes that affect the function of the socio-ecological system. The concept of transformation is at the forefront of debates about responses to climate change. It has been recognized as a key component of resilience in response to the need for humans to develop solutions to pressing environmental and social challenges, and it acknowledges the active role that humans play in shaping their future. Transformation is a complex process that involves changes at the personal, cultural, organizational, institutional, and system levels. ref

The concept of resilience has evolved from an ecological definition, emphasizing the persistence of the ecosystem structure and function in a changing world, to an emphasis on the ability of coupled social-ecological systems to adapt. Most recently, the concept of resilience includes the ability of society to transform in the face of global change.

Resilience, therefore, refers to a system’s capacity to persist in its current state of functioning while facing disturbance and change, to adapt to future challenges, and to transform in ways that enhance its functioning. ref

Intervention studies to foster resilience – A systematic review and proposal for a resilience framework in future intervention studies

Psychological resilience refers to the phenomenon that many people are able to adapt to the challenges of life and maintain mental health despite exposure to adversity. This has stimulated research on training programs to foster psychological resilience. We evaluated concepts, methods and designs of 43 randomized controlled trials published between 1979 and 2014 which assessed the efficacy of such training programs and propose standards for future intervention research based on recent developments in the field. We found that concepts, methods and designs in current resilience intervention studies are of limited use to properly assess efficacy of interventions to foster resilience. Major problems are the use of definitions of resilience as trait or a composite of resilience factors, the use of unsuited assessment instruments, and inappropriate study designs. To overcome these challenges, we propose 1) an outcome-oriented definition of resilience, 2) an outcome-oriented assessment of resilience as change in mental health in relation to stressor load, and 3) methodological standards for suitable study designs of future intervention studies. Our proposals may contribute to an improved quality of resilience intervention studies and may stimulate further progress in this growing research field.

Coping With Stress

Everyone—adults, teens, and even children, experiences stress. Stress is a reaction to a situation where a person feels threatened or anxious. Stress can be positive (e.g. preparing for a wedding) or negative (e.g. dealing with a natural disaster). Learning healthy ways to cope and getting the right care and support can help reduce stressful feelings and symptoms.

After a traumatic event, people may have strong and lingering reactions. These events may include personal or environmental disasters, or threats with an assault. The symptoms may be physical or emotional. Common reactions to a stressful event can include:

  • disbelief, shock, and numbness
  • feeling sad, frustrated, and helpless
  • difficulty concentrating and making decisions
  • headaches, back pains, and stomach problems
  • smoking or use of alcohol or drugs

Healthy Ways to Cope with Stress

Feeling emotional and nervous or having trouble sleeping and eating can all be normal reactions to stress. Here are some healthy ways you can deal with stress:

  • Take care of yourself.
    • Eat healthy, well-balanced meals
    • Exercise on a regular basis
    • Get plenty of sleep
    • Give yourself a break if you feel stressed out
  • Talk to others. Share your problems and how you are feeling and coping with a parent, friend, counselor, doctor, or pastor.
  • Avoid drugs and alcohol. These may seem to help, but they can create additional problems and increase the stress you are already feeling.
  • Take a break. If news events are causing your stress, take a break from listening or watching the news.
  • Recognize when you need more help. If problems continue or you are thinking about suicide, talk to a psychologist, social worker, or professional counselor.

Helping Youth Cope with Stress

Children and adolescents often struggle with how to cope with stress. Youth can be particularly overwhelmed when their stress is connected to a traumatic event—like a natural disaster, family loss, school shootings, or community violence. Parents and educators can take steps to provide stability and support that help young people feel better.

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