the path to resilience ep 17.0

I had a real life opportunity to be resilient last week. I flew out of San Francisco at 10pm on Wednesday night, and landed back in San Francisco at 6pm on Thursday evening.

20 hours, a there and back trip across the country.

It sucked. My back hurt, my dog wouldn’t sit still, and the plane wifi was spotty.

There were lots of complaints. But I got to journal on the plane, and the general theme kept on coming back to me.

Resilience is about keeping a level head when things get hard. Whether it’s something not going your way, or a bad flight.

I’ve gotten settled into a new office, and I have stacks of books everywhere.

From books on toughness, to growing businesses, to books about sociology. And through all these books I’ve developed my theory which I’ve taken to calling the resilience equation.

I’m basing this off the mathematical equation to calculate toughness of an object. That looks like this:

As the amount of stress and strain an object handles goes up, so does the amount of toughness.

I’ve taken a slightly different approach to this, here is my graph:

As you can see, there is still strain, but instead of stress, we’re looking at “calmness.”

So, ideally as strain increases so does the amount of calmness you have. This is what creates resilience. Keeping that level head amidst any type of strain.

You’ll have to forgive the rudimentary nature of the design. And the idea. Hopefully I’ll flesh it out a bit over time.

That being said, looking at strain as a way to grow in our resilience has been helpful for me, maybe it’ll help you as well.

See ya next week.