'Resilience' has been turned into a productivity word — bouncing back, pushing through, staying high-performing while life burns. Most lived resilience is quieter and slower: making it through a week, calling someone, eating, sleeping, trying again on Tuesday. This prompt asks you to define resilience in your own terms.
What you actually mean by it is the only definition you can use.
Writing your personal definition of resilience frees you from chasing a culturally-prescribed version that may not fit your life. It also surfaces the small practices that have actually carried you through hard times — which is often very different from the things you'd recommend to someone else.
Useful after a long stretch of difficulty, when you've been criticising yourself for not 'bouncing back' fast enough, or in caregiving roles where resilience is being asked of you in a non-stop way. Also good before entering something you anticipate will require endurance.
•
Draft a definition in plain words, not slogans.
•
List three small things you actually do when life is hard.
•
Identify what resilience is not, for you.
•
Note who or what reliably helps you stay upright.
•
Choose one of those to honour this week.
Other ways to ask the same thing
“What is resilience, in your own working definition?”
“How do you actually get through hard things?”
“What does staying-with-it look like for you?”
Don't borrow the corporate definition. Resilience isn't 'high performance through adversity'. For most of us it's continuing to be a person at all on a difficult Tuesday. Write the smaller, truer thing. Pretending it's tougher than it is leads to faster burnout.
Definition: resilience, for me, is staying recognisable to myself when things are hard. Not strong. Not fast. Recognisable. Three things I actually do: short walks alone; one call with a person who knows me; eating real meals at roughly real times. What it is not: pretending I'm fine, picking up extra work to prove I'm fine, or performing recovery on a timeline. Reliable helper: my sister, who never asks me to explain how I'm doing — she just shows up. To honour: I'll call her tomorrow without a reason.