AMHCA: How would you define resilience?
Resilience is the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and behavioral ability to face and cope with adversity, adapt to change, recover, learn and grow from setbacks that one many encounter.
AMHCA: What does resilience mean to you?
Within the Army, resilience is a key part of readiness and significant to the accomplishment of our mission. The success of the Army is based on our ability to sustain personal readiness which is defined as “an individual’s physical, psychological, social, spiritual health and family preparedness needed to achieve and sustain optimal performance in supporting the Army mission “
Personality, environment and situations shape how one reacts to life, but it also characterizes how one takes life experiences to manage adversity. Resilience is also the ability to recognize tools that enable one to come back rapidly from an adverse situation or setback. In an adverse situation such as combat or a difficult clinical case, it is one’s ability to set the current situation to accomplish the mission at that moment. We believe that Resilience can be a learned skill.
AMHCA: How and why is it important for health care providers to be resilient?
It is essential for providers to be resilient for the quality and safety of patient care. More importantly, it is essential to fully engage healthcare staff on issues of burnout and provider fatigue while conducting routine resilience training and promoting resilience throughout the healthcare setting. Within Army Medicine, our Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs) are empowered to continually reinforce resilience training in small and large group venues and promote the key tenets of the Army Program Comprehensive Soldier Family Fitness (CSF2). Providers are instructed on 14 resilience skills that have been found to promote individual resilience and well-being through trainers called Master Resiliency Trainers (MRTs).
Army resilience training, in combination with other training such as the performance triad, are proven strategies to promote resilience and readiness for Army Medicine providers. Overall, routine resilience training enhances provider well-being, productivity and the workplace environment.
AMHCA: In what ways can someone improve their resiliency?
Resiliency may be improved through a holistic approach for behavior change that promotes personal health readiness. Through a change to a lifestyle and environment of healthy behaviors, one may improve their resiliency. Three key components which influence mental, physical and emotional abilities are basics we are instilled at a relatively young age – sleep, activity, and nutrition. Maximizing or enhancing resilience requires a combination of mental, emotional, and physical skills to generate optimal performance during adverse situations, but also during healing after an injury, preventing injuries and in managing work and home life.
There are many methods that an individual can utilize that may improve their resiliency skills. The Army teaches multiple Resiliency and Performance Skills that are simply stated:
- Hunt The Good Stuff: Hunt the good stuff to counter the negativity bias, to create 1. positive emotion, and to notice and analyze what is good. Record three good things each day and write a reflection next to each positive event about why the good thing happened, what this means to you, what you can do to enable more of the good thing, and ways you can contribute to this good thing.
- Put It In Perspective: Stop catastrophic thinking, reduce anxiety, and improve 2. problem solving by capturing the worst, generating the best, and identifying the most likely outcomes of a situation and developing a plan for dealing with the most likely outcomes.
- Real-time Resilience: Shut down counterproductive thinking to enable greater
concentration and focus on the task at hand. Fight back against counterproductive thoughts by using evidence, optimism, or perspective.
- Identify Character Strengths in Self and Others: Identify your top character 4. strengths and those of others and identify ways to use your character strengths to increase your effectiveness and strengthen your relationships.
- Effective Praise and Active Constructive Responding: Praise effectively to build 5. mastery and winning streaks. Name strategies, processes, or behaviors that led to the good outcome. Respond to others with authentic, active, and constructive interest to build strong relationships. It is the only style that strengthens relationships.
- Goal Setting: Identify a personally meaningful goal and develop a concrete plan to 6. ensure achievement. Understand how personal values help form self-directed motivation. Develop commitment strategies to support goal attainment. Create techniques to regularly monitor goal progress.
- Plan and Prioritize Your Time: Time work effectively toward academic goals and managing time. Understand how your time is spent during a typical week, and conquer procrastination through an action plan.
Other simple changes include ample sleep, more activity, and better nutrition. Assessment can help to identify areas to focus on. The Army utilizes a Global Assessment Tool to provide private and individual results and recommendations.
AMHCA: Give us a brief, real life example of resilience.
Through my time in the Army, I have had the opportunity to talk with Soldiers who are Wounded Warriors, winners of best medic competitions, newly commissioned officers or those preparing to transition to civilian life after a 30 year career. Real life resilience happens through all walks of life. One example of Soldier resilience was a young officer completing airborne school, after two attempts. At the end of this three week training course, students are required to complete five successful jumps out of a perfect good airplane. A little history to this officer was the officer and her husband were a dual military couple with a young child who had been geographically dispersed for approximately 29 months out of 48. Six months prior to this Captain’s first attendance at airborne school, she had returned from an 11 month deployment to Afghanistan while her husband had returned from a 12 month deployment to Iraq.
The unit the Soldier was in had a very proud tradition of airborne qualified personnel and the leadership’s expectation was that officers do not fail at schools and set the standard. Training at every given opportunity she had, learning her new job, and attempting better integration with her family, she worked to make sure she reported to airborne school in the best physical and mental shape, but she deep down she was worried about failure. Within the first few days, she met her first failure. She became sick and unable to pass the physical fitness test. Returning to her unit, she felt like a failure and met with her commander and asked for the opportunity to retrain and go back to school. He gave her that opportunity and she retrained for a few months to earn the silver wings that are awarded upon successful completion of the school. Looking back on that experience, she realized all of the things she did differently prior to her second time – she rethought the importance of why it was important to set the standard. In order to be a leader within the unit, airborne wings symbolized that she had a shared experience with other paratroopers. She trained with her medics and not alone, learning how to push harder through mental blocks and become more mentally and physical agile. She worked a better family-work balance by planning and prioritizing her time by enjoying the emotional and mental benefits of a positive family life.
By being sustaining and developing behaviors that increased physically health and psychological strength, this officer found out what resiliency truly meant.