The following was adapted from Rules of Resilience: 10 Ways Successful People Get Better, Wiser, and Stronger by Valorie Burton.

Resilience is most often described as the ability to bounce back and successfully navigate challenges, adversity, and change. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”1

That definition is accurate. But I invite you to see your resilience more importantly as a system you create that enables you to adapt to, withstand, and recover from stressors. A system is an organized framework or method—a set of rules, choices, or procedures that accomplish a specific goal. In this case, the goal is resilience, which is a necessary ingredient for success. The stronger your system of resilience, the more likely you are to accomplish a vision or overcome hardship and setbacks.

If resilience is a system, how do you build a strong foundation to support it? You begin by taking personal ownership of your life and work by intentionally setting yourself up to deal with challenges and grasp opportunities when they come.

In 2015, a multidisciplinary group of scientists consolidated the existing research on factors that lead to resilience in children. The resulting report helped me identify the three elements, or pillars, that are key to overcoming obstacles and seizing opportunities at any age: adaptive skills, protective resources, and preventive measures.2 As you intentionally build and cultivate each pillar, your resilience will get stronger and stronger.

First pillar: Adaptive skills

Adaptive skills are about how you think, react, and behave in response to challenges and opportunities. They determine the energy you bring to problem-solving as well as help formulate your strategy as you respond to adversity and opportunity. Adaptive skills are the inner resources that involve your mental, emotional, and spiritual states.

These skills are somewhat invisible and intangible because they are developed internally through your thoughts, motivations, and approach to life. They can be learned and honed through awareness and practice. Consider the challenges for which you most need resilience in this season as you look at the factors that make up adaptive skills:

• responsibility and personal ownership
• thought awareness
• optimistic mindset and thinking style
• goal setting and planning
• locus of control
• strength leveraging
• energy maintenance and management
• positive emotion
• self-coaching
• flexibility
• self-compassion
• faith
• hope and optimism
• authenticity and humility

If you have dealt with a fair number of challenges, you’ve likely developed adaptive skills over time through necessity. If you have been shielded from or spared adversity in life and work, you may not have had the opportunity to learn or practice these adaptive skills. And even if you’ve faced some difficulties, new challenges that require levels of resilience you’ve never had to muster may still crop up.

People’s adaptive skills are not always apparent until you observe how they process and interpret the situations they are faced with. The most resilient people think differently—but their thoughts aren’t always obvious.

Second pillar: Protective resources

Protective resources tend to be more tangible and visible than adaptive skills. Typically, you can point to, name, and see these resources, which may include positive, supportive relationships; physical security; money; or access to services. Sometimes they are yours by virtue of the family, community, or even country you were born into. Not all protective resources come to us in this way, but many of them do. This is important because it helps us see how resilience can, in part, result from circumstances that are not of your own doing. But if you don’t have them by the good fortune of happenstance, you can intentionally build these resources over time.

They are called protective resources because they can shield you from the damaging effects of stressors. When thinking of these resources, you may think of money first. But in the context of resilience, resources refer to anything tangible that protects you from the negative impacts of adversity, as well as anything that makes it easier to navigate challenges. These can include:

• financial and work resources
• education and training
• experience
• environment
• health
• access to resources
• supportive relationships

Third pillar: Preventive measures

The third pillar, preventive measures, reduces and lessens the impact of adversity. Preventive measures are about thinking ahead and taking care of your future self. It is the skill of stepping into the shoes of your future self and asking yourself, What will I wish I had done? Whatever you answer usually leads you to the best choice to make in the present.

These proactive choices, in other words, reduce your risk for adversity. This is the wisdom of foresight and discipline that often comes with experience. You carry forward new approaches to life and work that emerge as you triumph over stressors, empowering you to avoid or minimize similar challenges in the future.
Although we cannot predict or control which stressors will come our way, preventive measures can minimize and even eliminate the likelihood of certain challenges. We can be intentional about putting ourselves in the best position to overcome those challenges when they arise. The most successful people are adept at clearing their path of potential but unnecessary stressors and adversities. You can make choices and build your life and work in such a way that you set yourself up for success.

Of course, we can never entirely eliminate challenges and adversity. It’s part of the human experience. And stress, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Much like germs and bacteria build a baby’s immune system, some amount of stress strengthens your resilience system, giving you the opportunity to step out of your comfort zone, grow, build your mental muscles, and even inspire you to improve and perform better. Stress also increases alertness and memory, and helps you focus your energy to get things done. It is prolonged and overwhelming stress that is harmful. Chronic, heavy stress is what you want to avoid—negative drama in ongoing relationships, continual financial strain, unrelenting health challenges, years of struggling in a career or business, and any threats to your well-being.

This is where adaptive skills, protective resources, and preventive measures, amassed over time, can begin to create a new reality with more joy and peace, and less stress and adversity. When your resources outweigh the stressors you face, the resilience scale tips toward positive outcomes. But when stressors outweigh your adaptive skills and resources, the opposite occurs.3

If you intentionally learn adaptive skills like thought awareness, nurture protective resources such as supportive relationships, and prepare for future challenges by taking preventive measures, you will build a personal system of resilience. In fact, you may find success often finds its way to you even when you aren’t looking.

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1. American Psychological Association, “Resilience,” accessed December 30, 2024, https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience.
2. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, “Supportive Relationships and Active Skill-Building Strengthen the Foundations of Resilience,” Working Paper 13 (Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, May 28, 2015), https://developingchild.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/InBrief-The-Science-of-Resilience-1.pdf.
3. When the Harvard Center on the Developing Child explored how key life skills are passed on to children, they identified resilience as a primary driver of children’s well-being. For more, see National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, “Supportive Relationships and Active Skill-Building.”