Unpacking Resilience

[00:00:00] Christine: Are you resilient? Most of us would probably say yes, and truth be told, as a military spouse, you probably are pretty resilient. But sometimes resilience is a buzzword that gets tossed around a little too often, especially in military circles. So in this episode, we’re going to unpack what resilience.

[00:00:24] Actually is some of the misconceptions about resilience, why it might not be as easy as you think and what you can actually do to build resilience. Plus, I’ll share a deep dive into my own travel experience, gone horribly wrong this summer, and how I actually responded in the moment and what I learned from the experience that can help us all. Ready for all the juicy goodness? Then let’s dive into the show.

Defining Resilience: What Does It Really Mean?

Okay, let’s dig into the topic of resilience. We’ve talked about it before. On the show, but I figured it was a good time to do a revisit of this topic for two real reasons. Number one, it is a bit of a buzzword.

[00:03:25] I actually had a conversation with my dad about that. This summer, he was talking about that term resilience. Isn’t that just a term the military likes to throw around? Well, yes, it does get used quite a bit in military circles, but there’s a reason behind it. It. Truly does matter, but we don’t always understand exactly what resilience is and why it is so important.

[00:03:54] So let’s just start with the most common working definition of resilience. It’s probably this, the ability to balance back or recover after a difficult situation or a setback. But in practical terms, what does that actually mean and why does it matter? Sometimes we have this hope that life is gonna go smoothly, that things are gonna be.

[00:04:22] Easy that we aren’t going to have difficulties, but the longer we’re alive, we know that’s probably not going to happen. That all of us at one point or another are going to face challenges. And part of that is just being human. Um, both good things and bad things are going to happen to people. But part of that is also military life.

[00:04:48] When you adopt a military lifestyle, you’re going to have additional challenges. There are going to be things that the average person might not have to deal with. Moving every two to three years, dealing with deployments and separations and trying to rebuild a community from scratch, and all of the things that we experience in this military life.

[00:05:13] So, The real question is always not if we are going to face challenges. But what we are going to do and how we will respond when we do face challenges, and the question that follows is, are there things that we can do to better prepare us to navigate these difficult situations and bounce back to recover from these situations?

[00:05:43] And the answer to that question is yes. Absolutely. This is why building resilience matters. But the second reason I wanted us to have this conversation today is because of some really important research being done. Last week on the show, you got to hear from Dr. Sharita Knobloch about Mission Milspouse and her journey to finding purpose as a military spouse.

[00:06:13] But what we didn’t have time to get into last week was the work that she has done that has given her that doctor title in front of her name. Her doctoral dissertation was actually a deep dive into military spouse mental health and resilience, and what she found through her research was that while male spouses perceive themselves to be resilient, They actually perceive themselves to be more resilient than they actually are.

[00:06:47] In other words, we think we’re resilient, but when it comes to measures of actual resilience, military spouses didn’t score as high. In fact, she found that the high rate of milspouse mental health issues actually supported the gap in actual resilience. I think these results point to a broader conversation that we need to have about knowing what resilience actually is, how we know if we are actually resilient, and then lastly what we can do about it.

The How of Resilience: Choosing Your Response

[00:07:30] What resilience really gets to is the how. The how we respond to a situation or a circumstance. And my personal passion for this subject is driven partly by a book I read several years ago now, but that continues to impact the way I view the World. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel and. Early on in the podcast, I referenced his work a lot.

[00:08:02] I haven’t talked about him in a while, so I feel like this is a great time to bring up this conversation. But Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist that was taken as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps in World War ii. And he looked at those that were in the concentration camps that had a will to live that tried to do their best to stay alive, and those that completely withered and just gave up and looking at the motivations and the factors for why some people just gave up and some people had a will to keep going, a will to live, and a hope for the future.

[00:08:45] And underneath all of that was this idea that we all have a choice. That we don’t necessarily get to control what happens to us, what circumstance or event occurs in our life, but we can all choose how we will respond. To that event, to that circumstance, we are the ones that assign meaning and significance to an event or a circumstance.

[00:09:16] We are the ones that have a physical or emotional response to the event that happens. And the response that we have ultimately begins with a thought in our mind. Now, resilience is not just about trying to be more positive, trying to look at the bright side. It’s not about ignoring all of these feelings and emotions that we might experience.

[00:09:42] Resilience is about developing tools and skills and strategies to navigate tough situations, to be able to actively choose how we will respond and ultimately come out stronger. In the end when we face a challenging situation, we can. Just try and be more positive, or we can get all caught up in our emotions and become overwhelmed.

[00:10:15] We can just focus on how horrible the situation is. Or we can choose to accept what is and to view it as an opportunity to learn and to grow, and to know that we will be able to overcome that. We will come out stronger on the other side. That is what resilience teaches us to do. It. I hear so often that people say, I am resilient, or that our kids are so resilient, and yes, sometimes we just naturally learn these skills through facing challenging situations and hard times, but, To say that you are automatically resilient because you have faced a difficult situation is a little misguided because resilience is a choice.

Resilience as a Skill: It Must Be Learned and Practiced

[00:11:12] It’s a practice. It’s something that we must cultivate in our lives. It doesn’t just happen if we do not cultivate. If we do not build resilience, we can face a difficult situation and not come out stronger. On the other side, we can choose to get caught up and get stuck in our feelings, in our emotions, to grow more bitter, to become more rev resentful of our life and our circumstances.

[00:11:45] So resilience is something that must be learned, that must be practiced because we are going to have situations. That come outta the blue that we don’t expect and we’re going to have to respond in that moment. And that’s what shows us if we are actually resilient, if we are actually able. To navigate those situations well, and we’re all going to have times where we fail that test, where we get caught up in our emotions and our feelings, where we have hard times, where we struggle to get the right perspective.

[00:12:27] But that’s why we practiced this over time and over time we began to see the fruits of all of that. Effort. And that’s what I was noticing in my own life this summer. And so I guess the third piece, number one, I shared that, hey, let’s have a conversation about resilience because there are a lot of misconceptions about it.

[00:12:53] Number two, let’s have a conversation about resilience because the research shows that we think we’re more resilient than we actually are. And number three, this. Effort. This work to build resilience was actually put to the test in my own life this summer. So let me share what this looks like on a practical level, because I think sometimes when we talk about resilience, it stays at that theoretical level, and sometimes it’s really helpful to hear a practical application of why building resilience matters.

Testing Resilience in Real Life

[00:13:30] So here’s what happened. For me and my family this summer, so we are on our second consecutive overseas assignment, and the military has a policy called COT leave, which is okay. I had to go look up the official. Definition cut stands for consecutive overseas tour leave, and it’s the idea that they will pay for your family to take a trip back to the service member’s home of record in between two consecutive overseas tours.

[00:14:07] However, if you are not able or have a reason that you’re not traveling in between those, Two tours you can elect to delay your cott leave and use it sometime during your second consecutive tour. So we were gonna use that. We did not use it in our P C Ss last summer. Because of where we were moving and the timing of it all.

[00:14:34] And so we decided, let’s use it this summer. It turned out my husband was not gonna be able to travel with us because of his job, and I was going to take all three kids by myself. And so we were trying to make this cot leave, get funded, get. Assigned and I was having lots and lots of issues and I won’t get into all of those issues, but if you have been a military spouse for a while, you know that when you’re trying to get the military to move quickly on something, there are often obstacles in the way and challenges to making something happen.

[00:15:12] And so we were kind of waiting all summer to find out what would happen if our leave got funded. So on and so forth. So we end up taking a very last minute trip at the end of the summer, right before school is supposed to begin. We only have a week to go see my parents. For my kids to get to meet their cousins for the first time.

[00:15:38] So we take this trip, it’s a whirlwind trip, and then we have a hard deadline to try to be back because my kids have meet the teacher, and I want them to have that experience of getting to meet their teacher and getting adjusted. My youngest was starting at a new school for the first time, and so. We have our travel plans.

[00:16:01] This was the first time that I had felt comfortable. We’ve been overseas for three years, but I’ve never traveled alone with all three kids. And I was really nervous as they were younger, but I was like, Hey, they are getting to the age where they are much better travelers. And I see story after story in my social media feeds about other military spouses who.

[00:16:27] Take their kids on long overseas flights by themselves. I give myself a pep talk about people do this all the time. Military spouses do this all the time. I don’t need to freak out about traveling around the world with three kids by myself. The flight back to the mainland was a red eye, which I was nervous about, but the kids did great sleeping on the flight.

[00:16:53] Um, and obviously it was an adjustment trying to get them to adjust several time zones, but we were there for only a week and then we had to get the flight back and the first leg of our journey back went. Pretty smoothly. And then we land in the Denver airport and I get the notification on my phone that our flight, our next flight is delayed.

[00:17:21] And so I was like, okay, we can do this. Um, I will go find the U S O, which is an amazing resource for military families that are in airports. And I will say they were absolutely great. It was so nice to go to a place that had. Uh, kids area. They had a chalkboard wall that the kids got to color on. They got to play with other kids, get free snacks, and I was like, this is a great way to spend some time while we’re waiting for this delayed flight.

[00:17:51] Well, as the afternoon is wearing on, I am getting more and more notifications on my phone. Your flight has been delayed an another hour and then another hour, and then another hour. And at this point we’ve been in the airport for several hours and then eventually the U S O closed for the night. So we went and we found a place where the kids could kind of lay out.

[00:18:19] They had some like, Couch areas that we found, um, because they were getting pretty tired by this time. They got up early to get to the airport and start our journey home. And at this point it’s going to be another red eye on the way back, but I’m like, they’re tired. They will sleep on the flight and we will still get there in time.

[00:18:39] Um, and it was just one of those times where you feel exhausted, but. Finally the airline said, Hey, we are about to start boarding. So I wake up the kids from their rest areas, we pack up everything, we walk down to the gate and we are waiting for the call to start boarding. And that is when the airline canceled the flight and said, good luck.

[00:19:10] You’re on your own for the night. And let me just tell you, I was not very happy at that moment because I had three exhausted children who had spent almost all day in the airport at this point, and were falling on the floor. Trying to sleep and a couple hundred passengers were all being funneled to talk to customer service at once.

[00:19:39] And so I did my best to get us all over to the customer service area. I could not get to an agent, but I was able to get to a kiosk where they said, go to rebook your flight. And that’s when I realized. There were no flights. ABA available for a couple of days, and at that point I started to freak out a little bit.

[00:20:04] I was like, what in the world? What do I do? I am trying to call my husband at this point, and it is well past 10:00 PM At this point, the kids are all exhausted and I am trying to figure out what our next moves are. If we had had two adults with us in the airport, one of us could have stayed with the kids and one of us could have stood in the long line to talk to an actual agent.

[00:20:34] But because I had all my kids with me, that wasn’t an option for me. I. Talked to a agent that was supposedly handing out vouchers, which I later realized were not actually vouchers at all, but discounts for hotel rooms that were not even available. So I spent the next hour. Trying to figure out what my options were, what hotels were even available, and that’s when I quickly realized there were not even rooms at any of the hotels available near the airport, nor were there shuttles running that late at night for many of the hotels to even get us to a hotel.

[00:21:17] And it was that realization that, I’m going to have to spend a night in the airport with all three of my children, and that moment of having to take some really, really deep breaths because. In all of my thinking about all of the military spouses that have gone before me and that have taken all of these overseas trips with their kids by their self, never had I heard someone’s story about getting stuck in an airport and having to spend the night with all of their kids in the airport.

[00:21:55] But that was going to be my reality. And so it was one of those situations where I did not anticipate this situation. I did not prepare for plan for hope for any of this, but that was the situation that was handed to me and the only thing that I could choose. In that moment was how I was going to respond, and I did have my moments of not wanting to say very kind things about the airline.

[00:22:30] I. It quickly moved to, okay, what do I need to do now? How do we navigate the situation that we are currently in? Because by this point, I am mentally and physically exhausted and I want to protect my kids. I want to protect our staff. I, I’m trying to figure out, okay, where’s the best place for us to go to spend the night in this airport?

[00:22:55] And thankfully, Because we had spent so many hours there. I remember there was a rest area near where we had taken the elevator to get to the U ss O. So we went to this area and I am truly grateful for some people that gave up their seats on a couch so my children could all have a place to spend the night.

[00:23:21] I. We’ll always be truly grateful for those people that saw a mom with three young kids, and were like, Hey, you can have our spot on the couch and try to get some rest. So my kids were all able to get a few hours of sleep, which made a huge difference until the next morning. When the U ss O opened up again and we were able to get back in there, I spent hours on the phone.

[00:23:51] Long story short, um, I did have a couple of moments where I felt like I’m going to lose it, especially when the agent was telling me that there was nothing that they could do, that I just needed to spend a couple more days in the airport with my kids before they could get us on a flight home. But I was.

[00:24:10] Eventually able to get us on a flight to one of the neighboring islands and said, if you can at least get me close to home, I will figure out a way to get home. But I distinctly remember sitting there. The next morning after we’ve all gotten at least a couple hours of sleep, I can actually function. My brain is actually making somewhat rational decisions, even though I’m like, it is not functioning on all cylinders at this moment.

[00:24:46] But I’m sitting there trying to get my kids some breakfast and just having this realization that this is a situation that I did not ask for, that I did not want to be in, that I am not happy about. But reminding myself that this is not going to last forever. Eventually, we are going to get home eventually.

[00:25:10] This is going to be a story that we can look back on. And the question for me is, how am I responding in this moment? Am I making the best of a bad? Situation. And it was also in that moment that, yes, I did have my moments where I had some unkind thoughts. I struggled, um, with the responses that I was getting from the airline and that I, I just did struggle.

[00:25:40] But I also reflected on the fact that there is something that I can learn from this situation. There is a way that we can grow through this and. Although this is adding a lot of stress on me, I am able to take those deep breaths to be able to have a little bit of space to look objectively at the situ situation and to say, Look at how far I’ve come.

[00:26:07] If the situation had happened to me, you know, a few years ago, I probably would not have navigated it as well as I am in this moment. And that is not to say I handled it perfectly, but that it was progress that I have grown and that we were able to ultimately get through that. Situation and we eventually made it back home.

[00:26:33] And so as I was navigating that, that situation, as I was stuck in the airport, I was thinking about you and I was thinking about what we could talk about, about the situation, what we could all learn from this.

Building Your Resilience Toolkit

And this is the big takeaway that. Resilience doesn’t just happen. Resilience is built. It is a set of skills that we develop, a set of tools that we practice so that when we are in that situation that we don’t wanna be in, that we’re unhappy about.

[00:27:11] We have more resources available to us that help us respond better to navigate through that situation and to come out stronger on the other side. And the more that we practice those tools, the more that we build our resilience. The easier it will be for us to navigate those difficult situations and the quicker that we will bounce back.

[00:27:35] So the first question that I want you to ask yourself is, how resilient are you? Do you just think that you are resilient or have you actually taken the time to build skills to have a toolkit that you can go to? When you are in a challenging situation. And then the second question that I want all of us to ask is how do we build our resilient toolkit?

[00:28:06] And then perhaps a third question that. Would be beneficial for us all as well is how often are you practicing those tools? So we may be all across that spectrum. You might realize that you have not taken the time to really build resilience that you need to. Begin to build that toolkit. Or you may be in a situation where you, you’re like, I have been able to understand the importance of resilience.

[00:28:38] I know what those skills, those tools that I need, but I haven’t been practicing it, and I need to make that a part of my regular rhythm of life. Because I will tell you when you are in a intensely. Stressful situation, you will fall back on the responses that come most easily if your default response is to get mad and to shut down.

[00:29:13] That is what is going to happen when you are facing a crisis situation. If you have been practicing developing skills to know how to regulate your emotions, to calm your body down, to be able to step back and look at a situation a little more objectively, then that is what you are going to do when you get in that crisis situation.

[00:29:41] So part of this is knowing how to build our toolkit. And then part of this is putting that toolkit into practice on a regular basis. So where do we go from here? Here’s where I want you to begin. If you have not started building your toolkit in two weeks, I am going to be sharing. Exactly where I suggest you begin when it comes to building your resilience toolkit.

Living a Resilient Life

[00:30:12] We have talked about this before, but I think a refresher never hurts, so that is coming in two weeks. I will also link a couple of other helpful episodes in the show notes below. Now, I would love to hear your feedback about today’s. Episode, what questions did that spark for you? Are you currently navigating a difficult season?

[00:30:39] Are you currently having trouble figuring out how to practice those resilience skills? Are you struggling with your mental health? Whatever it is, please come share with me. I would love to give you more resources. You can email me, you can DM me, you can come share inside of our free milspouse community, at milspouse mastermind.com/community.

[00:31:09] I will have all of those links in the show notes as well. We have a very special episode coming next week. If you have not yet PCs this year, or you are trying to get more organized in your home, you are going to want to tune in for next week’s episode. I can’t wait to be back with you again. Until then, may you live filled, fueled, and full of joy.