Life lessons about resilience often draw inspiration from the natural world, as we work to understand how and why humans face adversity and grow through it. During my college years, I worked at a camp where we had a Douglas fir tree we called “Big Doug”—and Big Doug had been through a lot. From a distance, the tree stood like a behemoth at the bottom of a valley. It didn’t have to compete for sunlight, but it also marked the highest point in that stretch of high plains desert. According to the story, lightning struck Big Doug about halfway up the trunk, snapping off the top 40+ foot section. Suddenly, the tree looked awkward and jagged, with no branches or needles left to generate energy through photosynthesis. While it looked like the end of the story—and the end of an era—it actually marked the beginning. Almost miraculously, just below the break, new branches shot upward and outward to form a new canopy. Standing close to Big Doug, you could see the scars left by the storm and the remarkable way the tree found a path to survival. We turned that broken-off section into a bench and placed it on the cabin porch, where it supported thousands of campers each summer.
The Nature of Resilience
The process that shapes how we respond to the challenges that life presents us is ongoing, beautiful, and occasionally quite fun. Resilience, as defined by Southwick & Charney in Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, “is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, and even significant sources of stress – such as family and relational problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stresses.” As we explore how children build resilience, we must also remember to nurture those same qualities in ourselves. Resilience, like many good things, is a gradual accumulation–a step-by-step walk of becoming an adaptable and flourishing version of ourselves. In the work we do here at Crossnore, we have the fortunate opportunity to join in that meaningful journey for children.
How Adventure Builds the Foundations of Resilience
The premise is simple and powerful: adventure programming fosters resilience by actively developing the core traits that make resilience possible. When someone is resilient, they likely show strong self-esteem, sense of self-worth, and general confidence. Much of the responsibility for facilitators in an adventure education context comes back to grounding in concepts like choice, agency and locus of control, and continually putting the participant in the driver’s seat. In fact, the source of that resilience is from the internal ability to see yourself as meaningful, capable, and worthy. This foundation is what resilience builds upon. Broadly speaking, If you see yourself in this way, it means you likely can apply it when faced with another challenging life scenario. Doing so strengthens that muscle, increasing your ability to operate similarly in the future.
The Resilience Paradox
One thing that makes resilience tricky is that we often imagine it as simply the amalgamation of strategies like positive self-esteem, mindfulness, and the presence of non-parent adults. In his book The End of Trauma, Dr. George Bonanno explains this when talking about the Resilience Paradox, referring to our ability to identify some resilient outcomes, but the inability to accurately predict who will and will not be resilient.
Dr. Bonanno takes it one step further and illustrates the concept with idealized and realistic resilience pies, showing that, despite being overlooked, resilience represents the norm for humans after they face adversity. In some situations, mindfulness can be an incredibly adaptive and resilience-building tool, while in others, it can compound the impacts of adversity. The difference comes in the application of these tools from one context to another, and what Bonanno calls a flexibility mindset.
Flexibility in Action
Starting to see the parallels? We’ve got a person with some existing level of resilience–they’ve faced some challenges, and they’ve learned from those experiences. In an adventure context, the facilitator presents a challenge, and the participant (hopefully) draws on their ability to adapt. Adventure programming intentionally aligns with these resilience-building benefits. Giving someone a controlled-environment challenge like walking on suspended plastic lily pads, or camping in the woods during a rainstorm, trains the flexibility mindset and muscle of resilience. It gives people evidence to support the idea that they can do difficult and novel things and come out better for it. By purposefully engaging with a challenge, you’re able to better prepare yourself when a challenge engages with you, while reaping other benefits of positive self-image, too.
Choice and Autonomy Matter
Engaging in the process of resilience building is not just beneficial to children; it’s necessary. During a time in life when adults must control many aspects for them, kids need meaningful opportunities to explore and practice their own autonomy. Letting children make the active choice to do something difficult for them has a potent ability to be a lifelong learning experience. It’s a classic high-dive at the pool scenario: A kid who gets pushed off unwillingly learns far less about themselves than one who chooses to jump, or decides to climb back down.. That choice is important! It means that the experiences that children can make for themselves are on their terms, both the challenge itself and the outcome.
