The 5 Practices of Highly Resilient People: Why Some Flourish When Others Fold

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#1 international resilience expert Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal provides practical tools to effectively address challenges, complexity, and change. 

Resilience is categorically misunderstood. It’s not merely about bouncing back, and it’s so much more than returning to where you began. True resilient “doing” allows us to capitalize on the inescapable challenges of life and become better than we were before. Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal began working with brain injury patients and found that most popular beliefs about human resilience are incorrect. Since then, for the last 20 years, she has conducted qualitative research on the power of resilience, studying the science behind why some people succeed while others fail. 

Here, Dr. Taryn Marie outlines the five critical behaviors that define successful resilience: Vulnerability, Productive Perseverance, Connection, Gratiosity (Gratitude and Generosity), and Possibility. Resilient People bounce forward, take an active approach to facing challenges, and most importantly, they are made, not born. Dr. Taryn Marie’s empirically proven framework shows us how to develop resilience practices in our own lives—as adults, as parents, and across organizations—in a manner that allows us to be enhanced by our experiences, not diminished. 

TARYN MARIE STEJSKAL, PHD, is the founder of the Resilience Leadership Institute (RLI). She previously served as the Head of Executive Leadership Development & Talent Strategy at Nike, and Head of Global Leadership Development at Cigna. Dr. Taryn Marie earned her doctoral degree from the University of Maryland and completed pre- and postdoctoral fellowships in neuropsychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Medical Center. She is a Marshall Goldsmith Top 100 Coach Globally (MG100), and her TEDx talk entitled “How Resilience Breaks Us Out of Our Vulnerability Cage” has already surpassed 1 million views. Her sons Samson and Sawyer are always teaching her how to be more resilient.