Does Resilience Really Matter?

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Helen Keller, a woman whose life was a portrait of resilience. Even today, 143 years after her birth in a northern Alabama hamlet named after a Chickasaw tribal rainmaker, people share her ideas about happiness and leading a useful, productive life. Schoolchildren learn about how she overcame her disabilities and graduated from Radcliffe College, which is now Harvard University. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, her statue stands in the US Capitol building, and a movie about her young life and the teacher who was able to find a way to reach her, The Miracle Worker, won two Academy Awards.

Illness – probably meningitis – when she was less than two years old left Helen Keller deaf, blind, and without language. Since she couldn’t hear, she didn’t have a way to even know words existed. Since she was blind, she didn’t have a way to grasp the abstract concept of objects and their descriptors. The fact that someone could tap into the intellect that was locked “in a sea of dense fog,” as Helen Keller later described herself, is in itself miraculous, and is a testament to the resilience of the child and her teacher, Anne Sullivan.

According to Cambridge Online, the definition of resilience is “the ability to be happy, successful, etc. again after something difficult or bad has happened.” Looking at her early life, it’s clear to see that while Helen Keller’s resilience was impressive, her parents and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, modeled resilience for her on a daily basis. No one gave up on this little wild child. Instead, they persevered in trying to reach inside her sea of dense fog until they succeeded, and then they continued to support and encourage her growth into the remarkable change agent she became. Here are a few things about her you may not have been taught in school:

• She worked for the American Foundation for the Blind for 44 years
• She campaigned for women’s right to vote
• She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union
• She authored 14 books, her childhood home is a National Historic Landmark, and she’s in both the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame and the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.
• She was so passionate about spreading ideas that she worked with a speech pathologist and became a world-famous, sought-after speaker – one who had never even heard or seen a speech being given.

As resilient as Helen Keller was, I believe she was able to live the full, purposeful life she led because of the resilient people who surrounded and supported her. While neuroscientists differ on the exact neurological definition of resilience, in a study published in the summer 2018 issue of the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research the authors found a correlation between the ability to create a successful outcome in the face of adversity and positive interactions with supportive co-workers, family members and systems that support meaningful interpretations of even the most catastrophic events.

If you’re a team lead or aspire to be one, now you know how important creating a supportive environment is to the success of the team, which leads to the success of the business. If you want to learn more about the importance of resilience, how to engender it, and important steps on the way to becoming more resilient, here are three episodes of the Wellbeing Wisdom Tiny Bites podcast, dishing up evidence-based tools in 90 seconds or less:

• Need help reframing a loss? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that!
• Need help learning to trust your heart? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that!
• Need to give yourself permission to feel bad sometimes? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that!

While neuroscientists and social workers continue to partner to create interdisciplinary approaches to trauma, crisis, and resilience, I hope your take-away from this is an awareness of the importance of fostering fertile ground for resilience inside yourself, your co-workers, team members, friends, and family. When it comes to making the most of life, like Helen Keller did, scientists and researchers are just now codifying what Helen Keller’s parents already knew: it truly does take a village.

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