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Resilience 135

unchecked. You can see this behavior happening all the time with
children in the supermarket. Any adult who has tried to get fit in a
gym or learn a musical instrument they have never played before
knows that if you gave up after the first bead of perspiration appeared
on your brow, you would never get anywhere. Or, it may be that you,
your child, or, indeed, your boss, has developed skillful techniques for
evading the discomfort associated with learning, from tantrums to
sulking. These are displacement activities that allow you to pretend
that something else is more important than being resilient.
Thirdly, we don’t teach resilience in schools or, for that mat-
ter, at work, because we put too much emphasis on knowledge, not
enough on certain skills, and almost nothing on key attitudes such
as resilience. We fail to learn how to be resilient. When children
learn to walk, they tend to progress naturally from crawling to walk-
ing by holding on to items of furniture and then reaching for
parental hands. In so doing, they learn a certain amount of
resilience. But if you give a child a “baby walker,” they can easily
become overdependent on it, only walking in a limited sense of the
word. It is similar for learning.
The reward systems of many organizations do not value
resilience. Consequently, they engender a culture of short-term
thinking and discourage employees from seeing things through.
The kinds of techniques required to be resilient include:

Persisting with new learning methods until they become easier.
Pondering the different feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, triggered
by different learning experiences.
Deliberately choosing challenging learning options.
Experimenting on a trial-and-error basis with different ways of learning.
Pondering your original motives for learning and the ones that keep
you going.
Getting in touch with the feelings and emotions that suffuse learning.
Answering the question: “How can I improve the way I learn?”
Accepting accidental, unplanned experiences and working out how
they contribute to your learning.
Undertaking activities to strengthen learning skills and/or overcome
weaknesses.