The importance of resilience

Difficulties strengthen the mind as labour does the body.

At first glance, the above quote attributed to Seneca is encouraging us to understand the strengths we can develop from encountering and enduring difficulties to be a form of resilience – a word that has taken on an increasingly significant value in recent years.

The capacity to demonstrate flexibility when faced with trouble has become a highly valued skill in social and professional settings. Resilience is now framed as not just desirable, but as the only acceptable response, even after great pain, loss, or tragedy.

The ongoing stressors of pandemic and post-pandemic adaptations to earlier ways of being have also contributed to environments in which being strong in the face of a challenge is the baseline. Resilience, then, is not just a highly prioritized character trait, as it once was – it’s now become the way we’re expected to be, no matter what kinds of difficulties might come our way.

However, in some therapeutic circles, there are increasing concerns about the negative implications that result from overprioritizing resilience as a preferred response. These claims suggest that building a willingness to endure difficult things can promote a too-tolerant culture of accepting negative behaviours, circumstances, or outcomes – and, can be used as an excuse for injustice or maintaining the status quo.

Research into organizational behaviour shows that ineffective and abusive leaders tend to cite a general “lack of resilience” when their direct reports express concerns about their leadership. This dismissal of valid feedback can make the person being mistreated, poorly managed, or abused feel even less capable of responding effectively or experiencing any kind of positive change.

It seems we're now living in a time that requires a sort of mandatory toughness – but also one that uses phrases like “radical honesty” to frame outright aggression in communication as a potential good.

Given this current focus on dissecting the ways we respond, externally, to both internal and external challenges, the dynamic can be frustrating. However, we’re also faced with an opportunity to embrace difficulties as we seek a path of virtue, finding the inner strength of the Stoic in the approach we take and the things we do. We can look inward, rather than focus on the perceived outward value of our response.

It is likely the better way to approach the idea of strength borne of difficulty – and to choose to see the reaction not merely as resilience, rather as something that connects the second half of Seneca’s thought – ”as labour does the body” – in even more meaningful ways. Then, we can focus not on the immediate response, but on the ongoing nature of the work as an act of growth, engagement, and practice.

Difficulty as opportunity

With this approach, difficulties become opportunities – not simply something to which we react, a circumstance, or a stimulus, but a situation in which we can choose to engage in a specific action. Just as work itself is a process and a journey, labour requires actions taken over a period of time and across a range of experiences.

The gardener doesn’t prepare one row, or plant one seed, or harvest one ripe tomato from a single plant. Labour is replicated and layered – stacking action on action – and it is used to progressively build strength and increase the likelihood of a desired outcome.

If we’re trying to strengthen the body, we don’t lift one weight, only one time. We build habits, increase our engagements, add to our struggles, and choose to do more as we grow and outgrow our own limitations. These acts require repetition and a willingness to surrender to a sequence of events. With this in mind, then, we can find our own inner strength through the decision to choose a connection to the difficulties we face and not simply seek out an act that separates us from the experience of difficulty itself.

Difficulty as decision

When we choose to partner with our difficulties and develop an interior strength with the same approach we might take to learning a new skill, or building a complex structure, we can take thoughtful, incremental steps toward our goals, and accept the pain of struggle as a necessary sign of our own development.

With this willingness to make a different kind of decision, we can learn to not just tolerate but intentionally find an opportunity to live in accordance with nature as we meet our difficulties and our challenges as an active, necessary process. We can see the labour involved as a choice – to strengthen the mind and build a different, deeper kind of capacity for ourselves than simple resilience might provide.

Andi Sciacca is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she is an Associate Professor II of Critical Studies at The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD). She is also engaged in several nonprofit leadership roles – including serving as a member of the Modern Stoicism Steering Committee.

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