Resilience — The Art of Bending Without Breaking
This is the first in a series of posts on resilience — a topic far too vast for a single article. My goal is to explore it piece by piece, to make it digestible, and by the end, offer a short summary of key takeaways.
Let’s start with the basics.
There are countless definitions of resilience, but one that really resonates with me comes from Mark Manson’s Solved podcast. It goes back to the word’s origin — the Latin resilire, meaning to jump back or to rebound. In engineering, the term describes a material that bends under pressure but doesn’t break — instead, it returns to its original form.
But resilience, when we talk about people, goes a step further. It’s not just about bouncing back to where you were before something hard happened. It’s also about learning from the challenge and adapting — coming out of it stronger, wiser, and better equipped for the next storm.
In that sense, resilience isn’t just about survival — it’s about growth through adversity.
You can think of it like a muscle. A muscle is stressed under load, then it adapts, recovers, and becomes stronger so it can handle more the next time. Resilience works the same way. We all have a resilience muscle, but most of us don’t train it consciously — life trains it for us.
Think about moments when you’ve faced what felt like insurmountable challenges.
Maybe it was the loss of a loved one — one of life’s deepest pains. Or perhaps something more common but still deeply unsettling, like losing a job or your health. In those moments, we either crumble or we rise. We either give up or we learn to move forward — slowly, imperfectly, but with intention.
Viktor Frankl captured this beautifully in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, written after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
We cannot control most of what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond — how we think about what happens.
Our thoughts are narratives we tell ourselves, again and again, until they become what we believe to be reality. And those thoughts shape everything: our emotions, our behaviors, our resilience.
This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending everything is fine. It’s about seeing things as they are — not worse, not better — and then deciding what you can do to make the situation a little more manageable, a little more your own.
Let’s make this more tangible.
Imagine you’ve set a goal to get healthier. You’ve been walking 10,000 steps a day, eating well, feeling good. But on the fourth day, everything falls apart. You slept terribly, it’s raining, you’re stuck in traffic, your boss snaps at you, and suddenly you’re exhausted and craving sugar.
You skip your walk, eat whatever’s around, and end the day on the couch with chips, chocolate, and Netflix. Then comes the familiar voice: “See? You always fail. You’ll never change.”
That voice — that story — is what destroys your resilience.
Because here’s the truth: you had three good days and one bad one. That’s 75% success. If you pick it up again tomorrow, it’s 80%. But when you believe the story that “it’s all ruined,” you stop trying — and that’s when you truly lose momentum.
Resilience means not letting one bad day define you. It means seeing the bigger picture. It’s the ability to pause, take a breath, and say: “Today was rough. But it’s just one day. I’ll start again tomorrow.”
Over time, this mindset becomes your foundation. You train your mind the way you train a muscle — by noticing the stories you tell yourself and choosing more constructive ones.
Because ultimately, resilience is not about avoiding pain.
It’s about how you meet it.
It’s about choosing, again and again, to bend — but not break.
