What does "resilient" actually mean?

In the future, we should all be resilient. The ability to withstand crises that is meant by this is already in demand at the moment and will probably be even more so tomorrow. Even where no crises are apparent, the word is being heard more and more frequently. To start with, the original meaning of the word is being misappropriated today.

The Latin word "resilire" means "to bounce off," but if you just let things bounce off you instead of dealing with them, you'll lose out in the long run. In the past, the saying went, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you strong. At that time, masculine, warlike slogans still counted, and military structures shaped companies. Everyone had to see for themselves how the experience affected their psyche and performance.

Today, whether managers or employees, companies, organizations or project teams, resilience is in demand. This refers to the ability to overcome crises by drawing on personal, socially mediated and self-built resources. Women are generally better at this than men. In the lingo of health managers and psychologists, this competence goes hand in hand with questions about resilience ("How do I learn to resist, for example, the thousand options that present themselves?"), the coping strategy ("How do I manage to get over something, for example, defeats?") and self-preservation ("How do I survive, for example, alongside all the other ego AGs?").

So if you want to work on your resilience, you have to do so at various levels so that small and large crisis situations are not followed by total collapse. Stand-up guys could learn from stand-up smokers here, because they are usually more resilient. They don't immediately collapse in a crisis, but grow from it by converting accumulated experience into resources, while men prefer to hunt down the guilty instead.