Resilience Part 3: Cognitive Flexibility
If a disaster hit, which would survive -- the ostrich who stays planted where he is, with his head thrust into the sand, or a leopard retreated to a cave?
Avoidance is not the same as resilience.
Pretending an outcome didn’t exist because you don’t agree with it or find it inconvenient doesn’t “undo” the result. Retreating to safety or adapting to a new world to live and fight another day is just plain good instinct.
Sitting on your porch instead of evacuating because you don’t “believe” in hurricanes won’t save you when it inevitably sweeps you up. Peanut allergies will stop a person from breathing if they are allergic to peanuts, no matter how much they happen to love the taste of them. You don’t win the Superbowl by merely claiming that you did.
This is just denial. There is nothing heroic in it; there is no winning in it. Because wishes are not facts. Death and taxes await us all. You can cheat, lie, and steal all you want...but even these pretenses do not mean that you “won.” It merely means you cheated, lied, and stole.
Avoidance is the anti-resilience. It belongs to the person so restricted in their own methods and requirements that there is no room to pivot. They may be strong as steel, but what does that matter to the outside devastation? Even structures of steel must bend with the wind and quakes if they are going to survive. So skyscrapers adapt, flex, and remain standing to greet another day.
Unwillingness to adapt, change directions, or try something new, are the enemies of what is possibly resiliency’s greatest gift. Cognitive flexibility. Therein lies creative potential: the thing that sets you apart from the other business, artisan, and co-worker. The guy that refuses to learn the new CRM because he fought to stay with the old one won’t win his point out; he’ll win a place on the unemployment line. But the guy that adapts and studies the system could render himself in even higher demand by becoming the new “expert.” Change comes with many possibilities -- turning sealed rooms into open doors, where adaptability will help find new paths to follow and new options to explore.
There are opportunities open all around us and always have been. It allowed us to leave past partners who weren’t a good fit, thus eventually finding the one who does. They allow us to leave abusive jobs to find our new careers. They allow us to screw up, pay the toll, learn from it and move on. Without a sense of humility, wonder, hope, or curiosity, we stand as idiotically as an ostrich on the open sand as a storm rolls in.
Storms will come. Storms will go. But the hubris of thinking you will somehow “win” them by pretending they don’t exist or screaming into the wind. Well...that’s just pride and ignorance. Far more likely to be laughed at than cheered and destroyed than spared.