Ten rules for resilience

By  Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

Resilience is defined as being able to withstand or recover from difficulties quickly.  This is a demanding virtue because you don’t just withstand or recover from hardships but you have to recover quickly or bounce back right away.  Many could recover from difficulties, but recovering quickly is something that we can all work for.

This is a wonderful book for parents if you want your kids to become resilient.  “Ten Rules for Resilience:  Mental Toughness for Families” by Joe De Sena.  This book is needed especially nowadays that younger people are having more anxiety issues than their previous generation or the generation of their parents.  Here’s what the author says about the causes of these young people’s issues.  “The headlines about kids struggling with everything from obesity to mental illness to addictions angers me. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five American kids is obese. Fifteen percent of college students are taking antidepressants. The kids are not alright. But the kids are not the root of the problem; they’re the victims of indulgent, spoiled, mindless, soft parenting and a society that would rather spend money selling them vaping tools and video games than making PE (Physical Education) a priority in schools. And it’s the kids who suffer the consequences. Parents have been complicit with our society’s corporatized, commodified laziness (gaming chairs, baby iPad cases … it’s all BS).

We can—and must—create a tougher generation, starting with our own kids, starting with ourselves. We have to stop discussing issues, writing blogs, and joining more PTA subgroups, and we have to start taking real action. And that action begins with us—the parents. We can’t expect our children to be healthy and resilient humans if we aren’t. The incredible, important, and unrelenting job of being a parent isn’t best accomplished by following a checklist of how-tos. It’s by living and breathing the kind of human that you want your child to be, and then

parenting and leading from that same position. …”

I totally agree with the author that parenting is to lead by example because action speaks louder than words.  So here are some of his ideas from his book on how to achieve resiliency for parents and later on hand them over to their kids.

Since I can’t explain all ten in this article, I’ll just mention two of the ten and the rest you will have to refer to the book for its details. Rule 1:  You Can’t, Until You Can; Rule 2: Earned, Not Given; Rule 3: Commit to No Bullsh** Rule 4: Live Your Values; Rule 5: Fail Forward; Rule 6: Dedicate to a Daily Routine; Rule 7: Discipline Breeds Responsibility; Rule 8: Into the Wild; Rule 9: Raw Courage; Rule 10: Ready for Anything

Here’s what the author says about these ten rules.  “I know that I can weather any storm, and I’m confident that my kids can, too. Can you say the same? True resilience is built on a set of rules that I’ll outline for you in each chapter of this book. Each of these rules has served me and my family in innumerable ways, and my goal in writing this book is to remind and teach you that it’s never too late for you and your family to know true resilience.”

Creating a Daily Schedule

This is from rule number 6.  Sticking to a daily schedule of waking up on time, working on our goals, studying daily for your classes in school, doing physical exercise, etc. helps you not only achieve your dreams but most importantly overcome laziness and negative feelings.  With special emphasis on overcoming negative feelings because young people nowadays are very much driven by them.  If they don’t feel good, they will not study, but seek relief from their negative feelings with their gadgets.  They have to be taught that good feelings will not always be there but if you stick to your daily schedule, you train yourself to overcome negative feelings by doing your duties. And then positive feelings will just follow because of having done something worthwhile or what we call a sense of achievement. A feeling better than playing computer games all day.  The author says, “The best antidote I’ve found for endless worry and anxiety is a commitment to the mundane tasks of a daily routine.”

Make a Mark in the World

A hint the author gives so that we will persevere with achieving our goals, become disciplined and resilient is not just to do these things for ourselves or our family but for society.  Having a goal bigger than ourselves, enlarges your heart knowing that you are helpful and useful to many people.  One thing to keep in mind for example is that if you do well at school and graduate with honors and become an effective worker later on you help our society grow economically as well as serve society well with your work well done.  Noble intentions make us work harder and with persistence knowing that many people depend on us.

Live Your Values

This is from rule number 4: One of my slogans in life that I always try to tell others, especially to my students, is that “Values is everything.”  Values or virtues (virtue is values put into action) is everything because it is the answer to all the challenges that life would give us.  If you feel scared and hesitant with your goals in life, there is the virtue of courage in response to that.  If you feel lazy and wanting to quit, there is the virtue of discipline and persistence in answer to that.  If you are getting addicted to a certain entertainment that takes you away from your duties and goals, there is the virtue of temperance or self-moderation as its antidote.

Virtue is the sign of true maturity.  The more virtues you have the more mature you are.  Maturity is not measured by age because you can be 60 years old and still immature for having many vices (the opposite of virtue).  And you can be as young as 14 years old and be a reliable, hard-working, responsible, caring teenager in a family.  Parents can teach their kids values or virtues by practicing them first themselves because values are caught (by the eyes of children) more than taught (rather than just saying them).