Prosilience #14: The "Six Challenges" Project
Bringing resilience down to earth / Grounding it in the specific & practical
The Little Black Dress
A colleague recently labeled resilience as the “little black dress” of today’s world. This metaphor brings to mind descriptors such as essential, ubiquitous, versatile, and timeless. All of these are certainly true. But one of the things that has become clearer to me over time is that if we’re not careful, the word resilience can lose its meaning and become a generic, abstract idea—a buzzword instead of a practical, useful set of tools.
If you’ve read my earlier articles, you’ve probably seen the Challenge Map model, which helps visualize the wide range of challenges that call on our resilience, and have heard me talk about the universal building blocks we use in different combinations to move through these challenges.
Because of the many forms resilience takes, I have found that discussions are much richer when they are grounded in exploration of the specific challenges a person or group is facing. A broken leg? An aging parent? Losing a job? Depression? Balancing work and family? Each of these has its own particular flavor and requires its own mix of ingredients, tools, and strategies.
What are the specific situations you are facing that call on your resilience? Are there other people in similar situations facing some of the same opportunities and difficulties? Can you identify common ground in your challenges and share strategies for “resiliencing” your way through them?
Six Challenges
This idea is the impetus for the Six Challenges (6C) project, which I started earlier this year. Several Personal Resilience Practitioners in my global network have chosen a specific constituency that they are interested in and familiar with, and are working to identify six common challenges that group faces. The goal is to understand and write about these challenges and their impact, and to explore specific resilience tools, strategies, and resources that can be helpful in moving through them.
So far, I have people working on articulating resilience challenges for a number of constituencies, including:
First responders
Leaders with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis
Authors
Parents of children with special needs
Entrepreneurs
And more!
Spider Plants
The spider plant (pictured above) has become a metaphor for my work—taking a core set of ideas and planting offshoots in fresh soil where they can grow and flourish. That’s what the 6C project is about. Each of these works-in-progress takes the Prosilience model and brings it down to the ground, applying it to a specific set of challenges to provide deeper insight and practical ideas.
If you’re interested in hearing more, I'm starting a series of occasional posts within this Prosilience newsletter focused on the 6C project—”challenge lists” for various topic areas, invitations to focus groups, webinar and workshop announcements, and hopefully even some book launches!
Here are a few sample “challenges” from some of my subject-matter experts to whet your appetite. Over time, each of these will become part of a larger body of work, with more information about resilience strategies and resources:
Career Development: Unexpected job loss; choosing the next move
Entrepreneurs: Living the life of a start-up; deciding if/when to stop
Authors: Isolation; dealing with rejection
More Ideas
In addition to the areas my colleagues are working on, people keep suggesting new possibilities—situations and groups that share a common set of challenges to explore. Here are some of them:
Expatriates
Aging (ourselves, our parents…)
Performing musicians
People starting college
What ideas do you have? If you could better deal with some aspect of life by understanding common challenges and potential resilience strategies, what would you want to learn about?
See you in 2 weeks for the next Prosilience update! (I’m thinking about a playlist…)
