Resilience is the capacity to cope and bounce back after setbacks and adversity. Individuals with resilience believe that they can overcome professional challenges and remain committed to a goal even after a setback or failure.
Your resilience is a combination of (1) your emotional strength (low neuroticism in Big 5 parlance) and (2) your coping responses. This exercise focuses on the latter, identifying coping responses. Coping responses are the behaviors you use when you are caught in a stressful situation. They can be either problem-focused or emotion-focused and they can be positive or negative, depending on the situation.
Problem-focused coping responses are the things you do to actively change whatever is causing the problem, directly alleviating the source of the stress. Problem-focused coping strategies can be either positive or negative.
Positive Problem-Focused Response: This coping strategy productively and proactively works to eliminates the problem. For example, a student who does not understand course material and goes to speak to a professor seeking clarity is engaged in a positive problem-focused coping behavior.
Negative Problem-Focused Response: This coping strategy eliminates the original problem but causes a bigger and more stressful problem as a result. For example, a student who does not understand course material and, instead of speaking to the professor for clarity, drops the course even though the course might have been required as a prerequisite for his or her chosen major.
Emotion-focused coping responses are the things you do to help you regulate your emotional responses to the stressor. Emotion-focused responses do not solve the problem. They are palliative and relieve, albeit temporarily, negative feelings. Like problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping strategies can be positive or negative.
Positive Emotion-Focused Response: These coping responses are helpful because they focus on creating a positive emotional state, even with the stressor present: meditating, laughing, writing in a gratitude journal, and going to the gym are examples of positive emotion-focused responses. The same student who does not understand course material and goes for a walk outside to clear her head before returning to studying is engaged in positive emotion-focused coping. Positive emotion-focused strategies are especially helpful for stressful situations which are out of your control, such as a natural disaster, death of a loved one, or a pandemic.
Negative Emotion-Focused Response: Any behavior which provides temporary relief from a stressor but is inherently bad for one’s overall well-being is a negative emotion-focused coping response. The same student who does not understand course material and either drinks too much alcohol to forget about the course or complains to her friend is engaging in negative emotion-focused coping responses. These responses compound the problem. A student who stops attending a class because it has become too difficult or binge watches a show on Netflix rather than starting a large assignment are examples of negative emotion-focused coping behaviors.
Practice:
Having a healthy repertoire of positive problem-focused or positive emotion-focused coping strategies is needed to develop resilience. Let’s see if you can identify clear examples of these strategies in yourself and others. Do the following:
Observe the responses of others. Try to find five examples of each of the following coping responses in either social media posts or from your personal experience interacting with others. Try to identify examples of someone displaying: (1) positive problem-focused, (2) negative problem-focused, (3) positive emotion-focused, and (4) negative emotion-focused coping strategies.
Identify your own responses. Now think of the top 3 stressors in your life over the past year. For each one, list all the coping behaviors you have used. Next to each coping behavior, identify whether it was a (1) positive problem-focused, (2) negative problem-focused, (3) positive emotion-focused, or (4) negative emotion-focused coping strategy.
Essay (minimum 750 words):
Without using names, describe examples did you observed of positive problem-focused, positive emotion-focused, negative problem-focused, or negative emotion-focused coping strategies that you observed in the responses of others. Again, you should not offer names. Keep it anonymous and just describe observations, irrespective of their origins (celebrities, strangers you observed, friends, acquaintances, etc.)
For the exercise in which you identified your own responses, did a pattern emerge that gives you a sense of your coping responses. How did you decide if your selected coping strategy was negative or positive (e.g., did your selected coping strategy make a problem worse)? How could you have changed your negative responses to positive responses? Did you overuse positive emotion-focused coping (without adequate problem-focused coping) when situations were well within your control?
