The idea of resiliency has been bouncing around in my head a lot for the past few weeks. Well, if I'm being honest, it's probably been longer than that but only in the past few weeks have I been able to put a name to it.
As a teacher, this is one of the things we talked about frequently, in small and large groups, with specific kids and as general goals for all of our kids. How do we help them become resilient? How do we encourage resilient behavior? How do we have them recognize when they are being resilient? As an adult looking in, I could reasonably easily identify these skills or moments: when a kid's computer didn't start and so they shut it down and got a new one without asking me about it six times or melting down. When a child forgot their book at school and so couldn't complete the homework assignment and sent an email with what happened and a plan with how to fix it, or at least suggestions. (And that this was NOT followed by an email from said child's parent explaining the tears and panic that ensued beforehand, afterwards, and throughout the world-ending ordeal.) A child was being resilient when their plan for a writing assignment completely fell apart when we moved on to the second step of the assignment and they shrugged and said they would probably like their second idea better, anyway. I could go on and on and on, both big and small, moments that were recognized and moments that were so internalized neither the student nor I commented on them. SO then, as an educator, I could identify those moments and I could even, sometimes, recognize them in a way that made other students want to emulate those coping mechanisms and strategies without me having painted a target of goody-two-shoes on the originally resilient child.
Imagine my surprise, then, when upon being faced with the challenge of looking for a new job (which was my choice) and discovered that all of my resiliency had somehow disappeared. Completely.
In an interview that Kirk Nieuwenhuis (#9, a CF for the Mets) gave with reporter Michael Baron (a writer for MetsBlog) on Tuesday, February 12th, Kirk says this: "It is a game of failure but your success is going to hinge on how you bounce back from those failures." "It" here is baseball, but this idea of bouncing back from failure resonated with me because of all my recent thinking about resilience. As Nieuwenhuis points out (and I think bears repeating), baseball is, at it's heart, a game of failure. If a batter hits the ball 1/3 of the time (.333 BA) he is having a phenomenal season; hitting anything above 1/4 of the time (.250 BA) he's doing well. Anywhere else in our world those averages would be atrocious!! Think about if you went to work and were successful with your daily tasks 1/3 of the time. You'd be fired in 1/3 of the time that it took me to write this sentence. So how do MLB players get back in the batter's box day after day, knowing that they are going to strike out / foul out / ground out / etc. significantly more than they are going to get a hit? Because of RESILIENCE. Because of their ability to put that one moment behind them and focus on this next pitch, this next swing, this next slice of time. How many of us truly have the ability to do that?
I have discovered recently that I am absolutely atrocious at putting one moment of failure or mistake or self doubt behind me. That has always been reasonably clear in my every day life, but has come to the forefront even more clearly in this job search process. After reading through ten job postings that are "great fits" that have acronyms that I can't even begin to parse and/or 5-7 years of very specific experience (that wasn't teaching related) was enough to shut down the job search for the entire day. Back at it the next day, and all it took was running into three websites that threw around new phrases like "informational interviews," "personal branding," and "video resumes" to make me go running to repetitive matching games on the computer. Back in the saddle for day three and a single rejection email from a company I didn't even remember applying to was the catalyst for Bachelor watching and a day of laundering every stray towel in the apartment. Where was the resiliency I had mastered during high school and college? Where was the drive to push through until I found the perfect job description, or at least one in which they would read my cover letter and give me a shot at a phone interview before writing me off? Gone, all gone. And why? Because I was in completely uncharted territory. So how does terrifying territory become a vista in the rearview mirror of life? With resilience. Where was that going to come from? Well, the first step for me was naming it.
That sounds overly simplistic, and is not meant to sound like the end-all-be-all solution, but once I could identify with a world (RESILIENCE) what was missing, I could begin to find it. Just like my little cat, Eleanor, I had to hunt down some of those strategies and coax them out of the dust bunny riddled corners of my mind, but they were there. And then I could begin to move forward at more than a snail's pace. By the end of a few weeks I was moving at a respectable Tortoise's pace, at least in the race with the speedy Rabbit. One day I applied to three jobs, the next day one, the next two. And then I met with minor successes. And then some reasonably major ones. It didn't take much - the promise of a phone interview that a friend had set up was enough to make me smile for four days. A phone call from a temp agency was on par with chocolate cake for breakfast AND lunch. A positive comment from a stranger was enough to get me through a day. And so it went, week into week into week. The setbacks still stung and made me sulk, but not to the same degree as they had before I had some positives to counter-balance them.
Resiliency is one of the most important traits we can foster in our children, our students, ourselves. Paul Tough's new book, How Children Succeed, is on my shelf and high on my list of to-reads right now, and I know from hearing him speak that resilience is an underpinning of all he talks about: Grit / Perseverance / Etc. but all the same meaning. How do you overcome obstacles? How do you keep moving forward when things don't work out the way you wanted them to originally? And I have discovered that my method is: VERY slowly. And with lots of growing pains. For a girl who has always always always had a plan, and a backup plan, this wasn't something I ever thought much about. I was resilient because I always knew where I was going. Now that I don't, resilience seems to be a more nebulous thing for me. But I'm finding my way. And reminding myself of the ways I have been resilient in other places in my life. Transference is also something we teachers always talk about - learning a skill well enough to transfer it to a new situation. So I have named my next task, apparently: perfecting the transference of my resilience throughout my life to where I am now.
It is a challenge, but one I am open to. My task has been named, and I am moving forward. :) Lots of rambling (if you made it to the end, thanks!), and perhaps a few lessons: Teaching kids resilience is difficult but oh so important. Transferring resilience from one aspect of life to another is not as easy as one (or at least me) might think. I am never going to be a professional athlete. :)
