As I grow older, I become more aware of adversity. I witness good friends dying, other friends with significant health problems, people losing spouses and significant others while some struggle with financial burdens, i.e. supporting adult children. Although we all experience adversity, it seems that some let the stress associated with adversity wear us down, while others seem to cope much better with problems.
Why? Two words: hardiness and resilience.
Hardiness is a personality style, which is effective in resisting stress. It is comprised of three major dispositions: commitment, control and challenge.
• “Commitment” refers to a tendency to involve oneself in life activities and demonstrates an interest in the surrounding world.
• “Control” refers to the belief that one can influence the events in one’s life and acts in a manner, which reveals efforts in support of that belief.
• “Challenge” refers to a belief that change, rather than stability, is the normal mode of life, thus motivating one to seek opportunities for growth rather than guard against perceived threats to one’s security.
Hardiness helps us with resiliency or the ability to bounce back from adversity. Because a personality with high hardiness style resists the extreme detrimental effects of stress, the ability for that person to recover from adversity using skills and support systems, is less compromised. Thus, we say that a hardy person is extremely resilient. Unfortunately, hardiness is a personality construct, which means it cannot be directly observed. We don’t know for sure why some people are high in hardiness while others are low, but we can speculate that bio-physiological and behavioral factors influence how much hardiness a given person may possess. The most significant question to pose is “Can we identify what high hardiness people do, naturally or instinctively, and attempt to learn those skills?”
Let’s assume that you’re not blessed with a high level of hardiness. Is it possible for you to increase your resilience through learning new skills? The answer is “yes,” and using your emotional intelligence can help. People who are high in hardiness have good cognitive appraisal skills, and can put stressful circumstances into perspective, and interpret them in a less threatening manner. Optimistic appraisals of an event reduce the stressful impact of the event and thus, are less likely to negatively impact health. The areas of emotional intelligence that can help us develop cognitive appraisal skills are emotional self-awareness, reality testing, self-actualization, stress tolerance, and optimism. Learning about these areas can increase your cognitive appraisal skill. People who are high in hardiness demonstrate a coping style known as “transformational coping,” an optimistic coping style that transforms stressful events into less stressful ones. At the level of action, those high in hardiness are believed to react to stressful events by increasing their interaction with them, trying to turn them into an advantage, and an opportunity for growth, and in that process, achieve some greater understanding. Those who are high in hardiness are good in accessing social support; they rely on friends and others to help with situations they find stressful. They do not withdraw and expect the world to come to them.
In summary, not all of us are blessed with a hardiness-type personality, thus we may experience the stress associated with painful events in more severe ways than those who are hardy. However, we can learn resiliency skills and use them to overcome adversity despite not being born “hardy.” Learning cognitive appraisal, behavioral coping, and social support building skills, can help tremendously.
