Resilience Starts With a Story

Experienced leaders know that navigating through turbulent times is a co-creative effort. No matter how urgent the problem, how disruptive the change, or how transformative the challenge may be, we cannot go at it alone. Getting through the difficulty, and coming out stronger on the other end, requires many a helping hand.

We talk a lot in psychology about resilience as an individual trait and how the right attitude, emotional state, and view of failure as a teaching tool can determine one’s level of resilience. Consequently, specific resilience-building skills can be learned, like breaking out of negative thought cycles, pushing back against catastrophizing, and looking for upsides when faced with setbacks.

But on a group level, how do we make a team, an organization, or a community more resilient? It starts with a story.

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Storytelling’s power

When good leaders see danger on the horizon, they know that it’s time to get the right words together. Before an effective plan of attack can be constructed, let alone successfully implemented, we need to be united around a shared sense of purpose. A big ask is coming; if we don’t feel a sense of belonging, we’re not going to answer.

And so, crafting a persuasive, inspirational, and unifying narrative becomes of paramount importance. This will be a story of change, purpose, direction, and connection. It will tell folks who you are as a collective, where you stand right now, and where you need to be in the near future. And that’s the essence of resilience — being able to get from here to there.

There are two major components to telling this story of change. The first requires the storyteller to equip themselves with a very profound understanding of the plot and all its characters. To lead through change, you need to know everything about the group you are a part of, the challenge you are facing, the environment through which you need to navigate, and the resources you can realistically hope to apply in the service of solving your problem.

But from this complexity must emerge simplicity. You need to have all the quantitative and qualitative data, crunch all the numbers, and see the big picture. But the story you tell needs to be simple, clear, and compelling to all.

Be rigorous in your optimism

Great leaders are no less rigorous in their optimism as they are in their calculations. They see the good and are honest about the not-so-good. They have an air-tight rationale for working to bring about a different future, understanding the price of action and inaction.

The story they tell is designed to translate an emerging sense of shared purpose into an actionable plan, articulating a clear path forward and what the journey getting there will look like. At the same time, the story creates space for variance, preparing allies for the unpredictability that comes with executing even the best laid plan.

Research shows that this is one instance where repetition is an asset. We need to repeat these stories often, over and over again, so that more of us can internalize the message, embody the optimism, and come forward together.