A blog a day (#12)

RESILIENCE

Resilience: The ability to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

While browsing through a post on Quora, I came upon an incident regarding a child being taught by his mother to ride a bicycle on a road. The person goes on to say that the child fell down from the bicycle and started crying. The mother was not near the child; and the person witnessing this incident thought that now the mother would spring to the child's help; lift him up, and put him back on the bicycle. But the mother did nothing of that sort; instead she just sat there while her son bawled on the road beside his fallen bicycle. After some time, the kid stopped crying when he realized that no one was coming to his aid either to help him up or placate him. He not only stopped crying, but he also got back up on his bicycle and started cycling again. The child showed resilience. More importantly the mother intrinsically taught the child resilience.

My friend and partner always used to include a similar point during his training sessions on Six Sigma (a process improvement methodology) by telling the trainees that they shouldn't be afraid of failing in whatever improvements they were attempting to bring about in the processes they were managing. Sometimes our ideas don't work; our analysis of the root causes of problems aren't what we thought they were. Should we give up under the circumstances? Now this is what a few of us may do saying that whatever we do, we aren't likely to bring about any improvements since this process will work like this only. The analogy that my partner would say would be about a baby which is learning to walk. After taking a few steps, the kid may fall, but immediately the kid would get up and begin to walk again. The ability to balance itself will never come easily for the kid; but the kid will never give up. That is resilience.

I looked back upon my parenting days when my children were young and apt to fall and hurt themselves either while playing or just moving about inside the house. They would cry and as parents, we thought we had developed a good idea to beat up the floor and tell the kid that now the floor had been punished for hurting the child. Did the child learn resilience? Did we do the right thing by telling the child that if they fall we are there to punish anyone who made my child cry? Falling is not a problem; it is how long we take to get up and continue doing what we were doing before falling down that shows resilience.