preview

Resilience In Andrew Shatte's

Decent Essays

When we fall down, it takes resilience to get back up, because without resilience, what reason do we have to rise again? It was on March 14th, my 19th birthday, that I began making my way through Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté’s The Resilience Factor. As a college freshman living away from home for the first time, I can use some advice on how to respond to adversity. This is why I picked up The Resilience Factor, despite being dubious of the “self-help” genre. A beautiful day at Griffith observatory, overlooking Hollywood, made for the perfect opportunity to learn how to keep going in the face of struggle. What more apt setting, where so many dreams are chased after for lifetimes, could there be to find the elusive key to resilience? After …show more content…

The Resilience Factor is mainly targeted at working-class Western culture, whereas the research of Maggie Zraly and her colleagues focuses on the vastly different people of Rwanda, who experienced a tremendously dissimilar adversity from what most people reading The Resilience Factor have or will face. However, this sharp contrast also allows us to see the universality of resilience in all of humanity, independent of culture, geography, or values. Kwihangana, the Rwandan process of drawing strength from within oneself, bears a striking resemblance to one of the techniques of “putting it in perspective,” in which you tell yourself that you can deal with an adversity, that you do have the strength to overcome (Reivich and Shatté 208). The process of “ABC-ing” adversities also includes the essential aspect of identifying and accepting an adversity for what it is, closely related to gukomeza ubuzima, which allows Rwandans to do the same by accepting struggle and continuing to fight. Finally, the practice kwongera kubaho, which forces Rwandans to acknowledge their existential being, is closely related to part of The Resilience Factor’s conclusion, which highlights the “existential paradox” of mortality. This paradox is what “makes time precious,” as we contemplate the risk of taking action while we only have one life to live (309). This relates to our resilience in that we must balance the fear of failure and pain while taking the right risks to thrive. This balance may not lay directly in The Resilience Factor, the book can help us find

Get Access