If personal resilience gives us a competitive advantage and is a skill that we can develop, why do we resist learning how to build this expertise?

In my experience as an executive coach and trainer, I find some people are excited to learn about how they can become more resilient. Entrepreneurs, in fact, tend to be like this — but then entrepreneurs are often enthusiastic about most things.

Frequently, however, I encounter reluctance from leaders who express the mindset of “I don’t have time to learn how to be resilient.” Sometimes I also hear, “I wouldn’t have to figure out how to be more resilient if only my boss (or co-worker, employer, etc.) would change.” When people believe that others need to change (and often they do), they resent the idea that they should learn to better cope with such stressors.

Fundamentally, I understand these complaints. When I was a graduate student in psychology, a classmate wanted to practice progressive muscle relaxation with me — an important technique for budding psychologists to master. One reason this classmate asked me to help her was that she knew me at that time to be a tense, stressed-out human, a veritable knot of worry and tension — i.e., a perfect candidate. Of course, I told her, “I don’t have time to learn relaxation.” You see, learning this relaxation technique involved not only a few sessions with her, but it also required homework; I had to practice on my own.

I also understand as someone who has been a member of dysfunctional work teams and in unhealthy organizations. I remember bristling that I should have to cope better when so many others needed to change first or, in my opinion, more. When employees must do more with less, cope with inefficiencies or inequities in the workplace or work for leaders who “don’t get it,” they understandably want to see sweeping changes in the team, the organization or the industry. While we should, of course, work toward institutional change, I believe we must also develop our resilience. Resilience increases well-being, happiness, productivity and success in both our professional and personal lives. It is, as I said at the beginning of the article, the best competitive advantage.

Yes, skill building is hard and requires setting aside time and making an effort to practice. Like learning a new musical instrument or sport, it is easy simply to say, “I’m not good at this.” But resilience is like a muscle that gets stronger with repeated practice. We learn by doing, not by watching or reading a blog post on the topic. Of course, we don’t want to just cope with the status quo — we want to change the system and to make it better. But, in the meantime, there is no benefit to digging in our heels and becoming ill from stress. There is no benefit to being a martyr.

So, if we come to accept that we should develop this psychological muscle called resilience, how do we go about it? Fortunately, we are not born with a pre-determined amount of this trait. Although evolution has given us all fundamentally the same stress-response system, the most resilient individuals are those who believe that they, and not their circumstances, determine their success.